Sessions should back off of crackdown on reporters
Everyone who supports journalism’s constitutional check on the government should push back against U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ threat to make it easier to subpoena reporters.
After being excoriated by President Trump for being “very weak” on executive branch leaks, Sessions has pledged to rein in unauthorized disclosures of information by government officials.
That’s fine. Sessions should clean up his own house — or, rather, President Trump’s. But what he shouldn’t do is trample on press freedoms in the process.
Sessions said he was reconsidering Justice Department policies put in place during the Obama administration to make it harder for the government to subpoena reporters about their sources. He would not rule out the possibility of prosecuting a reporter.
But the rules he is reviewing were set by then-Attorney General Eric Holder only after the Obama administration had gone way overboard in its pursuit of government leakers and journalists. Under President Obama, prosecutors had subpoenaed records, secretly obtained journalists’ telephone logs and threatened jail to pressure reporters to reveal their sources.
It subpoenaed phone records from the Associated Press and named Fox News reporter James Rosen a “criminal co-conspirator” under the Espionage Act of 1917 to gain access to his personal emails and phone records.
Those actions were an outrage and a direct affront to freedom of the press. We, and nearly every other newspaper in the land, said so then. The heat on this issue was so intense that Holder was forced to provide “guidance” to his employees.
Holder’s 2015 guidelines tell federal prosecutors that subpoenas of news media should be “extraordinary measures, not standard investigatory practices,” and that they should subpoena news organizations only after exhausting all reasonable efforts to get the information from other sources. Those are reasonable guidelines.
We get that this administration, like others, struggles to keep a lid on its own employees and is embarrassed by leaks that turn into published reports. That problem isn’t new. For example, former President Richard Nixon created an entire unit within his administration that he called the “plumbers.” They were tasked stopping unauthorized leaks, history vividly tells the story of how well that worked.
The Founding Fathers established a free press so that it could hold the people’s government accountable — revealing, at times, what the government is up to but doesn’t want the people to know about. Threatening journalists with subpoenas, search warrants and even jail diminishes their ability to inform the people about their government’s activities.
That constitutional check on the government is much more important than any administration’s anger at seeing internal information get out. Attorney General Sessions should go ahead and please the boss by cleaning his house, but he should not dial back the Justice Department’s guidelines on subpoenas of reporters.
— San Jose Mercury News,
Digital First Media