Trump attacks the free press with leak

Little would be known about national intelligence programs – important and current information that the public can know without reporters being able to protect the identity of their sources. But three presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, made great efforts to force reporters to reveal their sources.

Three years after Millers' prison, another reporter who worked closely with me was James Risen, involved in a leak examination that continued for six years after he was charged and ordered to reveal his confidential source for a story about Iran. The source, a CIA employee, went to prison because of the leak. Risk was only spared because of the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. Although he was not endangered, I saw the long, strongly under pressure were pulled against ascent. It is difficult to report messages and to write messages with the opportunity to hang over them.

Bush and Obama have initiated more criminal investigations than all their predecessors. After I have been a journalist in Washington, DC for 20 years, I saw first -hand how these probes from the Ministry of Justice are the ability of journalists to speak to government officials who feared being imprisoned. I remember that one of the Times Pentagon reporters told me that his sources left the building at any time when they received his calls. In 2010, James Rosen, correspondent James Rosen, had the government taken over. During his first term, Trump tributed the number of criminal leak examinations, although there were only a few law enforcement measures.

Merrick Garland, Attorney General in the Biden Administration, newly set up reporter as long as the persecution or received part of the normal news. “He set up a bright line,” said Gabe Rottman, Vice President of Politics at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Freedom of the Press and added: “This was very important.”

When he returned to the White House, Trump, who is hostile to the traditional news media and calls reporters as “enemies of people” and providers of “fake news”, the girand rules that came into force in 2022. Last month, the Attorney General Pam Bondi excluded a memorandum that the garland literally demolished, and the government, who tried to end the government a lot to end the government to prevent gaps to end leaks to end leaks. Project 2025, the conservative document, which was published during the 2024 presidential campaign and has proven to be a street map for many Trump guidelines, expressly demands that the Girland rules are canceled. Investigators can again use preloads, court commands and search commands to receive reporter data and to end the ban on Garland for these intrusive methods.

What is really invasive and worrying is Bondis vow that “the Ministry of Justice will not tolerate authorized disclosures that undermine the policy of President Trump, government authorities cause victims of government agencies and damage to the American people”. This language is so wide that it may give the Ministry of Justice the authorization to criminalize journalism that criticizes Trump. It also raised further protection that prohibited the government from confiscating newsroom records, as in the Fox case.

These changes, which are certainly in the growing bunch of constitutional challenges for many new politics of Trump, clearly make the intention of the first change that guarantees press freedom. A reporter who covered the changes in Garland told me:

“For Reporters, the Ministry of Justice's Ministry is clear: You now consider the ordinary aspects of the new area collection, such as the protection of anonymous sources, as possibly criminal. Out -of -life stories that are of crucial importance for the public, such as Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate reporting, would be without anonymous sources.”

When Leck's investigations during the Bush administration had proliferated and I was the head of the Washington Bureau of Times, Max Frankel, a former executive editor of the Times, gave me a copy of the famous affidavit that he had submitted to the Pentagon Papers case, which led to a 6: 3 decision in 1971, which prevented the government from Preventing the publication of the publication of a news story. Frankel's affidavit emphasized that Leck's part of the everyday discourse between reporters and government officials. In fact, President Johnson, who stood in a swimming pool in hip -high water, discussed classified information about the Vietnam War with his guest, none other than Max Frankel.

Of course, some leaks have harmful or embarrassing for the federal government. A decade after the decision of the Pentagon newspapers, the Attorney General, who argued, admitted the case that leaving the secret history had not violated national security.

If you give the government the strong hand to stop leaks again, only one thing is achieved: it refuses public knowledge about the inner work of the government, including situations that are illegal, such as signal gates. If we believe that a good government requires the ruling of the governed, the public does not have to know what officials do in their name?