Trump opened an investigation into reporters. Then his own "leak" probe leaked.
Try as he might, Donald Trump's unprecedented attacks on the First Amendment are being met with unprecedented pushback.
Late Friday, the White House summoned the FBI director and apparently ordered him to open a leak investigation into reporters who wrote about problems with Trump’s foreign-gifted Air Force One. The only problem? The investigation itself leaked.
Here’s how the bizarre sequence played out.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported something the White House desperately didn’t want Americans to know. The president’s shiny new jet (the $400 million palace-in-the-sky “donated” by Qatar) isn’t actually safe. According to the paper’s sources, the plane lacks the defensive countermeasures custom-built for Air Force One, including the advanced antimissile systems that accompany the original plane. The leaks about the jet validate worries of national security commentators, myself included, who’ve warned that Trump’s scandal-plagued acceptance of a foreign jet would be riddled with security concerns.
The revelation about the security weaknesses explained why Trump quietly abandoned the new jet on his way home from the NATO summit in Turkey, reportedly at the urging of the Secret Service. He lied about it to the public, saying he was sending it to military bases so the troops could see the new plane. Officials described him as “livid,” humiliated that the world had learned his prized gift is a flying vulnerability rather than a flying fortress.
So the president did what wannabe strongmen do. On Friday night, FBI Director Kash Patel was on the tarmac and about to depart for Chicago (himself using an official government jet to go to his girlfriend’s concert), when he was abruptly summoned to the White House. There, presumably at Trump’s direction, he oversaw the opening rounds of a leak probe into the New York Times journalists and whoever their sources were. Patel spent eight hours directing the probe from the White House, not FBI headquarters, a staggering departure from decades of practice meant to keep the bureau’s investigative machinery out of a president’s personal reach. Patel briefed senior administration officials on the probe. He spoke with Trump by phone. Then he posted a taunt on social media: “the fake news will find out why soon.”
That night, federal agents fanned out across the New York and Washington areas to serve subpoenas on four New York Times journalists — Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt — in some cases showing up at the doors of their homes after dark. The subpoenas, issued by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, demand the reporters testify before a grand jury this Wednesday. (In a detail almost too on-the-nose to believe, that’s the same day Clayton is scheduled to sit for his Senate confirmation hearing to become Trump’s director of national intelligence.)
And then came the twist.
Within 24 hours, the newspaper that was the target of the FBI’s probe and Trump’s ire, The New York Times, published a detailed account of the entire operation. Sources were sharing details with them about Trump’s rage, Patel’s summons, the White House’s hands-on direction of the investigation, and the unusual nature of all of it. The details were attributed to “people with knowledge of the situation,” which we can surmise are administration officials and/or people inside or close to the FBI.
The leak probe leaked.
A lot of what’s going on here is “unprecedented.” First, there’s the president of the United States personally overseeing an FBI probe of reporters because of a story that “embarrassed” him. Second, and more surprisingly, there’s the fact that folks inside Trump’s own government were apparently unwilling to go along with that kind of corruption, or at least unwilling to stay quiet about it. They picked up the phone and called the very newspaper he was targeting to expose a president who is actively trying to censor the news. Third, there’s the stark reality that the censorship campaign itself is escalating to a dramatic new phase.
Donald Trump’s personal involvement in these inquiries is an ominous sign for our democracy. And recent actions show that his media crackdown is more extensive than previously understood.
Just last month, we learned that Trump’s Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal in other leak investigations, in a bid to force them to burn their sources. Those efforts collapsed in the face of resistance from a federal judge, and prosecutors withdrew the subpoenas. Friday night, the administration tried again and went shopping for a friendlier jurisdiction in its probe against the Times.
Remember as well that in January, FBI agents raided the Virginia home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, a journalist so effective at covering the administration’s gutting of the federal workforce that colleagues called her “the federal government whisperer.” For that, agents seized her phone, her laptops, and even her smartwatch. Days later, federal agents arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon and Minnesota journalist Georgia Fort for the crime of covering a protest. The arrests were so baseless that a federal magistrate initially found no probable cause, and an appeals judge later wrote there was no evidence of any criminal behavior in Lemon’s reporting. Fort was taken from her home at dawn, in front of her daughters.
These cases barely skim the surface of the Trump administration’s harassment, threats, and misuse of government resources to suppress free speech. Just this weekend, the president told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “we’re trying to have CNN go on a normal path…and we will do that.” The “we” is Donald Trump and the owners of Paramount, who he’s helped in their bid to take over and make over a news network that Trump has criticized extensively through the years for its coverage of him. The White House has reportedly shared the names of anchors it wants off the air.
It goes without saying that a president dictating the ownership and personnel of a major news network is the kind of thing that used to happen in Budapest, not Washington. And running through it all, Trump’s vile public attacks on individual reporters have become the mood music for the machinery of repression.
But here’s what the White House keeps failing to account for. At every step, Americans are refusing to surrender in the censorship war. I’ve got to imagine that Trump is furious that his thuggery isn’t working, which is why he’s become more, well, thuggish.
Let’s go back to the story from this weekend because it’s the perfect example of how the strong-arm tactics are no longer working. Before the Times published its story about Trump’s luxury jet, a top FBI official reportedly called the paper and demanded that they drop the story and expose their sources. The Times was unmoved; it went ahead with publication. After the Trump DOJ retaliated with subpoenas against its reporters, the paper punched back and signaled plans to fight in court.
“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” said David McCraw, The Times’s top newsroom lawyer. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”
On top of it all, Trump’s own insiders leaked to the press about the leak probe! Only hours after the Times published a shocking story — that its journalists had been served subpoenas in the dark of night, the paper published an even more stunning scoop about how it all happened. In a sense it was poetic. For a journalist, there must be no greater satisfaction than writing a well-sourced story about your repressor’s sloppy attempt to repress you.
Even Trump’s pocket takeover of CNN is meeting resistance. A coalition of state attorneys general is finalizing a multistate antitrust lawsuit to block the merger, expected imminently, after months of investigating Paramount’s cozy lobbying of the administration that approved its deal. (Imagine Trump’s face, any day now, when he’s watching breaking news on CNN about his stymied efforts to hijack CNN.)
None of this is to make light of the fact that the president is waging an ominous war against the First Amendment. We should be clear-eyed. There are likely dimensions of this campaign we cannot yet see, including the quiet use of investigative and intelligence powers against reporters, sources, and critics in ways the Constitution expressly forbids. If you see a few ants on the table, there are hundreds underneath it or in the walls. The administration’s public actions against the media are a signal that there’s a flurry of activity behind the scenes.
But this weekend proved something important. The journalists won’t put up with it. The news organizations won’t give in. The judges won’t roll over. The states won’t submit. And remarkably, even people inside Trump’s own administration, officials and agents who still believe their oath is to the Constitution and not to a man, won’t tolerate it. And neither will we.
I cannot promise the next two years will be easy. But when this is all over, I can assure you we will investigate every last piece of it. Thoroughly. Every retaliatory subpoena, every raid, and every abuse of the FBI’s powers to protect one man’s corruption will be probed and exposed. Those investigations won’t be kept secret. We’ll leak the truth ourselves.
Your friend, in defiance,
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