The American newspaper ‘The New York Times’ has denounced that the last two administrations of the USA have tried to appropriate the content of the emails of four of their journalists to find out their sources, in the continuation of similar efforts with the ‘Washington Post’ and the CNN chain.
The Justice Department has not explained what it was investigating , but the identity of the four reporters suggests that it refers to classified information in an April 2017 article in relation to the investigations carried out by the now former FBI Director James Comey during the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations imposed a gag order on the media’s top executives, finally lifted on Friday, according to attorney David McCraw. The gag order prevented executives from revealing the government’s efforts to confiscate the records even to executive editor Dean Baquet and other newsroom officials.
The initiative came to light after a final, ultimately unsuccessful effort by the Justice Department to seize email records from Google , which operates the Times’ email system, and which had resisted the effort to obtain the information.
The disclosure came two days after Biden’s Justice Department notified the four journalists that the Trump administration, in search of their sources, had secretly confiscated months of their phone records , as it already did with the ‘Post’ and CNN.
Baquet has repudiated the behavior of the Trump and Biden administrations for their actions, and described the operation as an assault on the First Amendment. “Google has done the right thing, but we should not have reached this point,” he lamented.
The Biden administration tried “to delay the execution of the order” on multiple occasions in recent months “and then voluntarily acted to withdraw it before it was recorded in court records,” Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley explained in a statement. statement to the newspaper in which it reiterates the White House’s commitment to press freedom.
Shortly thereafter, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has indicated that absolutely no member of the Biden Administration was aware of the gag order and has indicated that the practice of investigating journalists’ emails is contrary to the principles that President Biden upholds. “Although the White House does not interfere in criminal investigations, the issuance of subpoenas to find out information about journalists who work on leaks is not a practice consistent with presidential policy,” he said.
Psaki has finally reiterated that “the Department of Justice has already confirmed repeatedly that it will not resort to this practice in the investigation of the case.”
