But the plane is also a gift from a foreign government, rebuilt with public money. Some of its secrets belong to the government; some of its questions belong to us.
The Justice Department calls the reporters “material witnesses,” not targets. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was quite direct when senators asked what prosecutors wanted: They wanted to know who gave the journalists the classified information.² That may be a meaningful legal distinction. It probably doesn’t feel like much of one when agents are standing outside your house.
We don’t know exactly what was disclosed, whether everything involved was properly classified or whether anyone was endangered. There is also no public evidence that Trump personally ordered the subpoenas, and career prosecutors may honestly believe they are investigating a serious crime. That deserves acknowledgment.
So does the setting in which the investigation took shape. FBI and Justice Department officials spent most of a day at the White House discussing newspaper articles before agents appeared at reporters’ homes. We don’t know what was said in the room. We know what happened afterward.
The Times has now asked a federal judge to throw out the subpoenas. Its filing remains sealed, although the newspaper wants it released publicly. Times lawyer David McCraw says the subpoenas were issued “in bad faith to punish The Times for its coverage.”³ Jay Clayton, the Manhattan federal prosecutor who authorized them, says they are part of an “ongoing national security investigation” developed in consultation with career prosecutors. He also says he respects the First Amendment.⁴
Perhaps both men believe exactly what they are saying. That is often how conflicts like this begin—not with one side twirling a mustache, but with two institutions insisting they are defending the country. The difficulty is that these subpoenas didn’t arrive alone.
Trump has spent years calling major news organizations the “enemy of the American people.” His White House excluded the Associated Press from events because it wouldn’t use his preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico, and the administration took more control over which reporters could follow the president into small events. At the Pentagon, major news organizations rejected new access rules they believed would prevent them from doing ordinary reporting. Attorney General Pam Bondi also reversed a Justice Department policy that had broadly restricted subpoenas, warrants and searches intended to uncover reporters’ sources.⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸
Any one of those disputes can be explained away. A president controls access to crowded rooms. The Pentagon has real security problems. Prosecutors are supposed to investigate classified leaks. But add the pieces together and the effect becomes hard to ignore: Reporters have less access, news organizations face more pressure and government employees have more reason to keep quiet.
We’ve seen what that can do.
In the late 1960s, Times reporter Earl Caldwell covered the Black Panther Party from inside its world. He had earned access because the Panthers believed he was fair, and the FBI wanted to know what he knew.
“What I know about this, I put it in the paper,” Caldwell told the agents.