Executives from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post met Monday with Attorney General Merrick Garland to protest the Trump-era Justice Department’s efforts to seize phone and email records of journalists. reports The Associated Press.
After the hourlong meeting in Washington, Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the journalists explained how this represented an “existential crisis” for the organizations.
None of the media executives would answer questions, with Brown saying they had agreed the meeting was off the record. The meeting included the publishers of the Times and Post, A.G. Sulzberger and Fred Ryan, respectively, as well as Post executive editor Sally Buzbee and Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief.
The Justice Department said the group had a “productive conversation about the need for new rules” governing the ability of prosecutors to seek this material.
Records were sought for eight journalists at the news organizations, all of whom had worked on stories in 2017 involving investigations into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In the cases of CNN and the Times, a gag order temporarily put in place prevented lawyers at the news organizations from even telling their journalists what was happening.
News organizations are concerned that efforts to seek records that could reveal whom the journalists had used as sources would prevent such officials from revealing sensitive government information in the future.
Democratic and Republican administrations alike have used subpoenas and court orders to obtain journalists’ records in an effort to identify sources who have revealed classified information. But the practice had received renewed scrutiny over the past few weeks as Justice Department officials alerted reporters at the three organizations their phone records had been obtained in the final year of the Trump administration.
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