Breaking WaPo: The Trump Justice Department secretly obtained Washington Post journalists' phone records and tried to obtain their email records over reporting they did in the early months of the Trump admin on Russia's role in the 2016 election. https://t.co/sDxy93etgK
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 7, 2021
… In three separate letters dated May 3 and addressed to Post reporters Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, and former Post reporter Adam Entous, the Justice Department wrote they were “hereby notified that pursuant to legal process the United States Department of Justice received toll records associated with the following telephone numbers for the period from April 15, 2017 to July 31, 2017.” The letters listed work, home or cellphone numbers covering that three-and-a-half-month period…
News organizations and First Amendment advocates have long decried the government practice of seizing journalists’ records in an effort to identify the sources of leaks, saying it unjustly chills critical newsgathering. The last such high-profile seizure of reporters’ communications records came several years ago as part of an investigation into the source of stories by a reporter who worked at BuzzFeed, Politico and the New York Times. The stories at issue there also centered around 2017 reporting on the investigation into Russian election interference.
It is rare for the Justice Department to use subpoenas to get records of reporters in leak investigations, and such moves must be approved by the attorney general. The letters do not say when Justice Department leadership approved the decision to seek the reporters’ records, but a department spokesman said it happened in 2020, during the Trump administration. William P. Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general for nearly all of that year, before departing Dec. 23, declined to comment…
The letter does not state the purpose of the phone records seizure, but toward the end of the time period mentioned in the letters, those reporters wrote a story about classified U.S. intelligence intercepts indicating that in 2016, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) had discussed the Trump campaign with Sergey Kislyak, who was Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Justice Department officials would not say if that reporting was the reason for the search of journalists’ phone records. Sessions subsequently became President Donald Trump’s first attorney general and was at the Justice Department when the article appeared…
In early August 2017 — days after the time period covered by the search of The Post reporters’ phone records — Sessions held a news conference to announce an intensified effort to hunt and prosecute leakers in government.
“This culture of leaking must stop,” Sessions said, noting that the number of leak investigations had tripled since the end of the prior administration. That announcement seemed aimed at appeasing Trump, who had publicly complained about leaks that made him look bad, and branded Sessions “weak” on hunting leakers…
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