U.S. Waged Secret Legal Battle to Obtain Emails of 4 Times Reporters
Source: New York Times
U.S. Waged Secret Legal Battle to Obtain Emails of 4 Times Reporters
The push began in the Trump administration and continued under President Biden, and the Justice Department obtained a gag order to keep it from public view.
By Charlie Savage and Katie Benner
June 4, 2021
WASHINGTON -- In the last weeks of the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, the Justice Department fought a secret legal battle to obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters in a hunt for their sources, a top lawyer for the newspaper said Friday night.
While the Trump administration never informed The Times about the effort, the Biden administration continued waging the fight this year, telling a handful of top Times executives about it but imposing a gag order to shield it from public view, said the lawyer, David McCraw, who called the move unprecedented.
The gag order prevented the executives from disclosing the government's efforts to seize the records even to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, and other newsroom leaders.
Mr. McCraw said Friday that a federal court had lifted the order, which had been in effect since March 3, freeing him to reveal what had happened. The battle was over an ultimately unsuccessful effort by the Justice Department to seize email logs from Google, which operates The Times's email system, and which had resisted the effort to obtain the information.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/us/politics/times-reporter-emails-gag-order-trump-google.html
The gag order is a new development.
Also, it didn't stop just because Trump went on a break pending his reinstatement.
Hat tip, Reuters
US Justice Dept got gag order on NY Times execs in fight over email logs - NYT http://reut.rs/3gc1dkX
Link to tweet
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The New York Times Retweeted
https://twitter.com/nytimes
Breaking: The Justice Department obtained a gag order on top NYT executives in a secret fight over an attempt to seize reporters' email logs from Google -- a fight that began under Trump but continued under Biden. w/
@ktbenner
Link to tweet
= new reply since forum marked as read
... that's no reason to punish the journalists.
Bizarre!
