The Justice Department said Saturday that it would end the practice of seizing reporters’ records to figure out who leaked information, The Associated Press first reported.
The reversal of a policy heavily criticized by press freedom advocates came after several news organizations were notified that certain reporters’ phone records had been secretly obtained under the last administration in 2019 and 2020.
The New York Times had also disclosed hours before the reversal that both the Trump and Biden administrations worked to pursue its reporters’ email records.
Earlier in the week, the Times reported that the Justice Department under President Donald Trump had seized phone records of four reporters spanning around four months in 2017, adding to earlier reports that it had obtained records from reporters with CNN and The Washington Post the same year. The Biden administration disclosed the information to the outlets privately.
A Justice Department spokesman said the institution “strongly values a free press, protecting First Amendment values, and is committed to taking all appropriate steps to ensure the independence of journalists.”
“Going forward, consistent with the President’s direction, this Department of Justice — in a change to its longstanding practice — will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs,” spokesman Anthony Coley told the AP.
Last month, President Joe Biden decried the practice of secretly going after reporters’ records, which has been used under both Democratic and Republican leadership.
“Absolutely, positively, it’s wrong,” Biden said. “It’s simply, simply wrong.”
On Friday, the Times disclosed that its top executives had been placed under a gag order barring them from discussing the government’s legal battle to obtain the four reporters’ email records. While the fight to obtain the emails began under the Trump administration, the paper said, it continued under the Biden administration until recently. Google, which operates the Times’ email system, had resisted the government’s efforts to overturn its clients’ records.
New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet condemned the actions of both the Trump administration and the Biden administration, saying that “it profoundly undermines press freedom.”
“Clearly, Google did the right thing, but it should never have come to this,” Baquet said. “The Justice Department relentlessly pursued the identity of sources for coverage that was clearly in the public interest in the final 15 days of the Trump administration. And the Biden administration continued to pursue it.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement that “no one at the White House was aware of the gag order until Friday night” and called it inconsistent with Biden’s policy directives.