Trump DOJ got reporter records

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department under President Donald Trump secretly obtained the phone records for three reporters at the Washington Post from the early months of the Trump administration, the newspaper disclosed Friday.

Prosecutors sought records for the reporters’ work, home and cellphone numbers from April to July 2017 in an attempt to figure out who had talked to them.

“We are deeply troubled by this use of government power to seek access to the communications of journalists,” Cameron Barr, the Post’s acting executive editor, said in a statement. “The Department of Justice should immediately make clear its reasons for this intrusion into the activities of reporters doing their jobs, an activity protected under the First Amendment.”

The department’s decision to seek a court order for the records, which came in 2020, would have required the approval of Attorney General William Barr, a department official said.

The Justice Department under the Trump administration had also prosecuted a former Senate aide over his contacts with three reporters in a case where prosecutors also secretly seized years’ worth of a New York Times reporter’s phone and email records.

Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman, said Friday in a statement about the seized Post records, “While rare, the department follows the established procedures within its media guidelines policy when seeking legal process to obtain telephone toll records and noncontent email records from media members as part of a criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”