Add reporters from The New York Times to the list of journalists who had their phone records secretly seized by Donald Trump’s Department of Justice.
On Wednesday, the DOJ notified the Times that they had previously obtained the phone records of reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt. The records in question pertain to a three and a half month period in 2017 and were procured in the final year of the Trump presidency. They were part of a ” criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” according to DOJ spokesman Anthony Coley, who clarified that the journalists themselves were never in legal trouble.
Trump’s DOJ also received a court order to obtain the reporters’ “non-content email records,” but no such records were ever taken, according to Coley. The telephone logs in question might reveal who the reporters were speaking with on the phone and for how long.
Wednesday’s announcement is part of a series of disclosures from Biden’s DOJ that reflect poorly on his predecessor’s relationship with the media. Last month, similar revelations were made regarding records seized from reporters at CNN and The Washington Post.
“Seizing the phone records of journalists profoundly undermines press freedom,” Dean Banquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement. “It threatens to silence the sources we depend on to provide the public with essential information about what the government is doing.”
The New York Times speculates on why their journalists were targeted:
The Justice Department did not say which article was being investigated. But the lineup of reporters and the timing suggested that the leak investigation related to classified information reported in an April 22, 2017, article the four reporters wrote about how James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, handled politically charged investigations during the 2016 presidential election.
Discussing Mr. Comey’s unorthodox decision to announce in July 2016 that the F.B.I. was recommending against charging Hillary Clinton in relation to her use of a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state, the April 2017 article mentioned a document obtained from Russia by hackers working for Dutch intelligence officials. The document, whose existence was classified, was said to have played a key role in Mr. Comey’s thinking about the Clinton case.
The Biden administration has vowed to end the practice of secretly seizing journalists’ records. The president said it’s “simply wrong” and told reporters “I will not let that happen.”
Coley, the DOJ spokesman, said a forthcoming public report will reveal that “members of the news media have now been notified in every instance in this period in which their records were sought or obtained in such circumstances.”
