Tonight in Your Rights: 'Families are off limits'
Press freedom groups cry foul as NYT reveals that Trump DOJ subpoenaed reporters and their relatives.
From raiding Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home to prosecuting Don Lemon, the Trump Justice Department keeps obliterating new red lines for press freedom.
On Monday, the New York Times revealed the Justice Department’s new low: issuing subpoenas to reporters’ relatives.
“Even the Mafia says families are off limits,” Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation wrote in a statement. “It’s gross that the administration — in its never-ending effort to harass and intimidate reporters who reveal its incompetence — is going after the communications of journalists’ relatives.”
The Trump Justice Department issued its subpoenas in the wake of The New York Times reporting that Trump’s use of a Qatari-gifted Boeing 747-8 sparked security concerns that affected his air travel from Turkey earlier this month.
The Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who is Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, subpoenaed the reporters’ text messages and sought to compel their testimony before a grand jury. But the full scope of the Trump DOJ’s search only became apparent on Monday.
“The identifiers for which the Government seeks information include phone numbers used by one journalist's mother and two journalists' spouses,” Times attorney David A. O'Neil, from the firm Debevoise & Plimpton, disclosed in a letter. “The mother is a mental health professional with confidential client relationships. One of the two spouses is the general counsel of a major law firm.”
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian paused the Justice Department’s subpoenas, pending a ruling on the Times motion to quash.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation noted the irony of the national security investigation.
“The Times’ reporting actually bolstered national security by ensuring that Trump and those who travel with him, including journalists, aren’t flying on an unsafe plane to serve the president’s personal vanity,” Stern wrote. “Trump’s hangers-on should be sending the Times thank-you cards, not subpoenas.”
“The circumstances exude the Department's bad-faith effort to intimidate the journalists and chill their ability to report on the Administration. Like the testimonial subpoenas, several of the phone provider subpoenas were issued immediately after the two articles were published, at the apparent behest of an enraged President and without first conducting any serious investigation; all of them issued within about a week of the publication of the articles.”
The judge scheduled a hearing on the matter to take place on Thursday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time.
All Rise News will cover the proceedings live from Manhattan Federal Court.
Read the letter from the Times here.
Paramount-Warner Bros. merger blocked
A federal judge in California issued a temporary restraining order on Monday blocking Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros, halting the $110 billion deal pending antitrust litigation.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of a dozen state AGs that filed the lawsuit, hailed the “important victory.”
“This lawsuit is about a simple fact: when one company controls a massive share of our film and television industries, workers, artists, businesses, and consumers suffer,” James wrote in a statement. “Paramount’s unlawful merger with Warner Bros. would mean more expensive theater tickets, higher cable bills, fewer opportunities for workers, and fewer original stories shared with audiences across the country.”
In temporarily blocking the deal, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martînez-Olguín found that the attorneys general were likely to succeed on the merits, finding the states presented “compelling evidence that the combined firm resulting from the transaction will possess substantial market share in the wide-release theatrical distribution market.”
Shortly after the ruling, Lisa Graves and I discussed the development during a live-stream for Legal AF. You can watch our conversation on that and other topics below:
Nationwide ICE protests planned
The 50501 Movement announced that more than 125 communities across the United States will hold vigils, protests, and demonstrations denouncing the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Johan Sebastian Guerrero and others shot to death by immigration agents.
Find listings of the events here.
“Over the top” would be a damning description of the tactics of any other administration but doesn’t even scratch the surface of Trumplandia. And as Wynn (above) points out, he is such a whiney cry-baby. Hissy fits included! Thanks for stomaching his harangues in your daily reports!
"...at the apparent behest of an enraged President..."
I'm so SICK of his non-stop hissy fits.
Thank you Adam for, again, better and more detailed reporting on this nauseating topic than I've seen elsewhere.
Unreal that it's gotten this bad in less than 2 years. But as in so many other cases, Trump's US Attorney filing does not mean Trump's US Attorney is getting. :) Hopefully this will lead to yet another quashed subpoena.