zeuxis
Exceptional Member
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- 127
Not sure if this is the right thread, because it isn't a SCOTUS case, but it's clearly a first amendment under attack issue. Parallel to that, this is an issue of the Trump administration deliberately going after anyone who spills the beans to the press. My question as a layman: Since the AG lawyer admitted that this was a directive from above, can the judge call in, rebuke, or seek to punish Pam Bondi in any way?
www.nytimes.com
Some key passages:
A magistrate judge on Friday sharply admonished the Justice Department for failing to tell him about a rarely invoked law that restricts searches for reporting material when it applied last month for a warrant to search a Washington Post reporter’s home.
“Why didn’t you raise it?” Judge William B. Porter of the Eastern District of Virginia asked during a heated stretch of a hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va. “It’s a threshold question in this case.”
The assistant U.S. attorney who submitted the warrant application, Gordon D. Kromberg, later conceded that he had known about the law, but also said he had been following department policy in not bringing it to the judge’s attention.
....
First Amendment scholars say the search of the home of the Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, was unprecedented. It was part of a broader investigation into a government contractor’s handling of classified material.
The Privacy Protection Act of 1980 says that a search for reporting materials “shall be unlawful” unless there is probable cause the reporter committed certain crimes to which the materials relate.
...
Mr. Dibblee told the judge he understood his “frustration,” and said the decision had been made by higher-level officials in the Justice Department. Judge Porter replied, “That’s minimizing it!”
...
The judge had scheduled the hearing several weeks ago to consider a request by The Post and Ms. Natanson to return various electronic devices that the government seized in the search.
The seizure of those devices has raised questions about whether the Trump administration would review her data to determine sources unrelated to any leak of classified information. Ms. Natanson, who covers the federal bureaucracy, wrote last December that 1,169 officials across the executive branch had contacted her during the first year of President Trump’s second term.
...
But the hearing diverted into tense exchanges over the Privacy Protection Act. The Trump administration apparently decided that the 1980 law did not bar the search, because it concluded for itself that Ms. Natanson had probably violated the Espionage Act, which bars the unauthorized retention and dissemination of national security secrets.
That theory also raises an untested First Amendment issue: whether it is constitutional to criminalize ordinary news-gathering activity. The government has never charged a traditional reporter under the Espionage Act.
...
The one previous known instance in which the Justice Department sought a search warrant for reporting material as part of a classified leak investigation involved reading a Fox News reporter’s emails in his Google account in 2010. The department’s application materials in that case alerted the judge to the Privacy Protection Act.
When the search came to light in 2013, it was treated as a scandal across party lines. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. issued a rule barring investigators from portraying reporters as criminals to circumvent the Privacy Protection Act’s ban, unless they intended to bring charges. Last year, Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded it.
Judge Rebukes U.S. Over Application to Search Washington Post Reporter’s Home
A prosecutor apologized for failing to alert the magistrate to a 1980 law that restricts searches for reporting materials.
Some key passages:
A magistrate judge on Friday sharply admonished the Justice Department for failing to tell him about a rarely invoked law that restricts searches for reporting material when it applied last month for a warrant to search a Washington Post reporter’s home.
“Why didn’t you raise it?” Judge William B. Porter of the Eastern District of Virginia asked during a heated stretch of a hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va. “It’s a threshold question in this case.”
The assistant U.S. attorney who submitted the warrant application, Gordon D. Kromberg, later conceded that he had known about the law, but also said he had been following department policy in not bringing it to the judge’s attention.
....
First Amendment scholars say the search of the home of the Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, was unprecedented. It was part of a broader investigation into a government contractor’s handling of classified material.
The Privacy Protection Act of 1980 says that a search for reporting materials “shall be unlawful” unless there is probable cause the reporter committed certain crimes to which the materials relate.
...
Mr. Dibblee told the judge he understood his “frustration,” and said the decision had been made by higher-level officials in the Justice Department. Judge Porter replied, “That’s minimizing it!”
...
The judge had scheduled the hearing several weeks ago to consider a request by The Post and Ms. Natanson to return various electronic devices that the government seized in the search.
The seizure of those devices has raised questions about whether the Trump administration would review her data to determine sources unrelated to any leak of classified information. Ms. Natanson, who covers the federal bureaucracy, wrote last December that 1,169 officials across the executive branch had contacted her during the first year of President Trump’s second term.
...
But the hearing diverted into tense exchanges over the Privacy Protection Act. The Trump administration apparently decided that the 1980 law did not bar the search, because it concluded for itself that Ms. Natanson had probably violated the Espionage Act, which bars the unauthorized retention and dissemination of national security secrets.
That theory also raises an untested First Amendment issue: whether it is constitutional to criminalize ordinary news-gathering activity. The government has never charged a traditional reporter under the Espionage Act.
...
The one previous known instance in which the Justice Department sought a search warrant for reporting material as part of a classified leak investigation involved reading a Fox News reporter’s emails in his Google account in 2010. The department’s application materials in that case alerted the judge to the Privacy Protection Act.
When the search came to light in 2013, it was treated as a scandal across party lines. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. issued a rule barring investigators from portraying reporters as criminals to circumvent the Privacy Protection Act’s ban, unless they intended to bring charges. Last year, Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded it.
