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The Justice Department withdrew its subpoenas targeting New York Times reporters who wrote about security flaws in Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet after a federal judge ripped into the government’s handling of the case.
Some shit you should know before you dig in: About a week ago, the DOJ moved to subpoena several Times reporters, demanding they testify before a grand jury and hand over their phone records as part of a leak investigation tied to that reporting. That reporting, published earlier this month, revealed that the $400 million Boeing 747-8 donated by Qatar and retrofitted into Air Force One at taxpayer expense lacked major security features standard on the older presidential planes, including antimissile systems. The gaps were serious enough that the Secret Service advised Trump to fly home from the NATO summit in Turkey on the older jet. The DOJ responded fast, sending the first subpoenas on July 10, two days after the initial article ran, with FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly running the investigation from the White House that day. Federal agents served some of the reporters at their homes, and the Times went to court to block the demands, calling them a blatant attempt to scare its newsroom and burn its sources.
What’s going on now: At a hearing in Manhattan federal court, US District Judge Arun Subramanian spent nearly an hour grilling Justice Department lawyers before giving them two ways out and no third option. “Either we can quash the subpoenas, or you could withdraw the subpoenas,” the judge told Deputy US Attorney Sean Buckley, who argued for the government.
“Subpoenas are the last step, not the first step,” Subramanian said, citing both court precedent and the DOJ’s own rules for going after the press. He repeatedly pressed prosecutors on how that standard could have been met when the demands went out within 48 hours of publication. Prosecutors then asked for a recess, huddled with the Times, and came back to say they were dropping the subpoenas.
Some of the phone numbers the government went after did not belong to reporters at all. They belonged to one journalist’s mother and to the spouses of two others. Buckley owned the mistake in open court, calling it “a consequence of trying to move too quickly.”
Subramanian was troubled enough that he ordered the government to turn over its internal messages about how that request came together, and floated the possibility of sanctions. “The inadvertent errors and the ‘in hindsight we should have done things differently,’ these things are piling up,” he said.
Reactions: The Times declared victory but did not let the government off the hook. “We are pleased that the government finally conceded that the subpoenas violated the law, but they should never have been issued in the first place,” said David McCraw, the paper’s top newsroom lawyer, adding that its journalists “will not be deterred in the face of tactics like these.”
The Justice Department struck a defiant tone afterward, rebuking the judge. It said Subramanian’s “conduct overrides clear longstanding principles and common sense” by blocking the grand jury from core evidence, and warned that “this investigation remains ongoing.” Buckley told the court the government may seek new subpoenas later if it follows proper procedures.
