The Justice Department issued subpoenas seeking phone records of three New York Times journalists, and even their family members, after the paper published details about security features on the president's new Air Force One, a move the Times calls intimidation.
U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in Manhattan issued the subpoenas to third-party phone service providers, targeting records tied to reporters who wrote about the security capabilities of the presidential aircraft. The subpoenas also swept in the phone records of one reporter's mother and another reporter's spouse, Newsmax reported. The reporters have been ordered to appear before a federal grand jury in Manhattan.
The records request does not start with the Air Force One articles, which the Times published on July 8 and July 9. It reaches back to January 1, months before the stories ran, raising questions about how wide the government is casting its net.
Clayton issued the subpoenas on a Friday, shortly after the Times published its reporting on the jet's security features. By the following Monday morning, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian had unsealed a motion the Times filed to quash the subpoenas. The paper made its fight public the same day.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche addressed the matter before a U.S. Senate panel earlier that week. He told lawmakers the reporters were not themselves targets of the investigation. The subpoenas, Blanche said, were aimed at identifying the people who leaked sensitive national security information about the presidential aircraft.
That distinction, targeting leakers, not journalists, is the legal ground the DOJ is standing on. But the breadth of the records request, and the inclusion of reporters' relatives, makes the Times' counterargument straightforward: this is not a narrow hunt for a specific leak. It looks like a fishing expedition through journalists' source relationships.
The Times did not hold back in its motion to quash. The paper told the court the government's approach had nothing to do with protecting national security and everything to do with chilling aggressive reporting on the administration.
The motion stated that the subpoenas represent a:
"bad-faith effort to intimidate the journalists and chill their ability to report on the administration."
The paper went further, arguing the scope of the records request exposed the DOJ's real purpose. The Times' filing contended that the investigation's reach beyond the July articles:
"strongly suggests that the department is using this investigation not to focus on any purported concerns arising from the July 8 and 9 articles, but instead to forage for information about the journalists' source relationships more broadly."
The Times also flagged the timeline as a problem for the government's credibility, writing that the sequence of events and the timing of disclosures "are deeply troubling for obvious reasons." The motion pressed the court for immediate intervention, arguing the subpoenas "confirm the absence of any regularity in the department's use of the grand jury in this case."
Both the National Press Club and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press criticized the subpoenas. The DOJ's decision to subpoena Times reporters over the Air Force One story drew sharp reaction from press-freedom organizations that view any government seizure of journalists' records as a threat to source confidentiality.
The Trump administration has previously obtained records from reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, according to the Times' filing. Those earlier actions involved subpoenas or search warrants, though the filing does not specify whether they were connected to the same investigation or separate matters.
The pattern predates the current administration. During the first Trump term, the DOJ secretly obtained phone records from reporters at The Washington Post, CNN, and The New York Times during leak investigations. A secret gag order even barred the Times from revealing a court fight over efforts to obtain email records of four of its reporters, a fight that began under Trump and continued under Biden, AP News reported.
In one notable earlier case, the DOJ seized the phone and email records of Times reporter Ali Watkins as part of a leak probe involving James Wolfe, a former Senate Intelligence Committee security director. Wolfe was indicted for lying to the FBI about contacts with journalists and allegedly used encrypted messaging apps to pass committee information to four reporters. A top Justice Department official at the time said prosecuting unauthorized disclosures was "a priority," while National Review noted Watkins' own lawyer called the seizure of a journalist's phone records "always disconcerting."
That case illustrated a point that applies here: leak investigations inevitably collide with press freedom, and the collision gets uglier when the government's net stretches beyond the specific leak in question. The Biden DOJ eventually announced it would no longer use compulsory legal process to obtain source information from journalists, a policy the current administration has plainly set aside.
Whatever the legal merits of pursuing leakers who disclose classified details about presidential security, the decision to subpoena a reporter's mother and another reporter's spouse changes the character of the investigation in the public eye. It signals a willingness to apply pressure not just on journalists but on their families, a tactic that will make sources across government think twice before talking to any reporter, on any subject.
That may be exactly the point. Leaks of genuinely sensitive national security information, details about the defensive systems on the aircraft that carries the president, are not trivial. If someone inside the government handed classified specifications to reporters, that person broke the law. The DOJ has a legitimate interest in finding out who did it.
But legitimate interest and proportional response are not the same thing. A records dragnet stretching back to January 1, months before the articles appeared, looks less like a focused investigation and more like an effort to map every confidential source relationship these reporters have built. Trump's own sharp public response to the Times' Air Force One reporting underscored how seriously the administration views the disclosure.
Judge Subramanian has unsealed the motion. The court has not yet ruled on whether to quash the subpoenas. That ruling will determine whether the reporters must appear before the grand jury and whether their phone records, and those of their family members, remain in the government's hands.
The administration's broader posture toward leak investigations has extended well beyond the press. Grand jury subpoenas have also targeted other networks in New York, and the DOJ has faced accusations of politically motivated probes from figures across the political spectrum. Meanwhile, the problem of classified material reaching newsrooms has not slowed, confidential Supreme Court memos surfaced in the Times not long ago, a reminder that Washington's leak culture runs far deeper than any single investigation can reach.
Protecting the president's security is serious business, and the people who leaked details about Air Force One's defenses deserve to be found. But a government that subpoenas a reporter's mother to get there had better be prepared to explain why nothing less intrusive would do.
