That wasn’t enough. The government subpoenaed him.⁹
Caldwell understood something the lawyers didn’t. The Panthers wouldn’t be allowed inside the secret grand-jury room to watch him refuse to answer, so they would have no way of knowing whether he had protected them, betrayed them or been forced to talk. Merely walking into the courthouse could make him look like an FBI informant. It could destroy his work and possibly put his life in danger.
So Caldwell and his colleagues gathered his tapes, notes and unpublished reporting. They pulled the recordings apart, shredded the files and filled two garbage cans. The government hadn’t forced him to reveal a source, but it had already destroyed years of journalism.⁹
Caldwell fought the subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1972, the Court ruled that reporters don’t have a blanket First Amendment right to refuse relevant questions from a federal grand jury.¹⁰ The government won and then never called him.
Perhaps it didn’t need to. The warning had already been delivered.
Richard Nixon also called the Times an enemy. During the Pentagon Papers fight, he said “somebody’s got to go to jail,” and his fury over leaks eventually produced a White House investigative unit known as the Plumbers.¹¹ There is no evidence that today’s officials are planning another Watergate. That isn’t the point. The useful historical lesson is much simpler: A president’s grievance becomes more dangerous when it is given a staff, a budget and government authority.
Three days after the Times subpoenas were delivered, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a joint Pentagon–Justice Department task force to investigate leaks to the news media.¹² Bondi had already reopened the legal door to subpoenas and searches involving reporters. Trump provided the plain-English version in April: “National security, give it up or go to jail.”¹³
The grievance now has a memo, a chain of command and a place on the organizational chart.
This is how censorship often works in a modern democracy. No one padlocks the newspaper office, and no official stands beside the editor deleting paragraphs. The pressure is applied earlier, to the mechanic who sees that an expensive government aircraft has a dangerous problem, the intelligence analyst who realizes that the public is being told something untrue or the contracting officer who discovers that taxpayers are being cheated.
That person considers calling a reporter, remembers the agents at the front door and decides against it. The call is never made, the article is never written and the rest of us never learn what happened.
A federal judge will decide whether these particular subpoenas can stand. The government says the reporters aren’t the targets.
They were still the ones who answered the door.
Reporting current through July 16, 2026.