There would be little known about national intelligence programs — important and newsworthy information for the public to know — without reporters being able to protect the identities of their sources. But three presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, went to great lengths to try to force reporters to reveal their sources. Three years after Miller’s jailing, another reporter who worked closely with me, James Risen, was embroiled in a leak investigation that dragged on for six years after he was subpoenaed and ordered to reveal his confidential source for a story about Iran. The source, a CIA employee, went to prison for the leak. Risen was spared prison only because the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. Although he was out of legal jeopardy, I saw the toll the long, highly pressured court battle took on Risen. It’s hard to report and write news stories with the possibility of jail time hanging over you. Bush and Obama initiated more criminal leak investigations than all their predecessors combined. Having been a journalist in Washington, D.C., for 20 years, I saw firsthand how these Justice Department probes curbed the ability of journalists to talk to government officials who feared being jailed. I remember one of the Times’ Pentagon reporters telling me that his sources left the building any time they took his calls. In 2010, Fox News correspondent James Rosen had his phone records seized by the government. During his first term, Trump tripled the number of criminal leak investigations, though there were few prosecutions. Merrick Garland, attorney general in the Biden administration, put in new protections for reporters , as long as pursuing or receiving leaks was part of normal news gathering. “He established a bright line,” said Gabe Rottman, vice president for policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, adding, “This was very important.” When he returned to the White House, Trump, who is hostile to the traditional news media and calls reporters “enemies of the people” and purveyors of “fake news,” junked the Garland rules, which went into effect in 2022. Last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memorandum that formally abolished the Garland changes and gives the government much wider power to try to stop leaks. Project 2025, the conservative document that was published during the 2024 presidential campaign and has proven to be a road map for many Trump policies, expressly calls for the Garland rules to be nullified. Investigators can once again use subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants to obtain reporters’ records, ending Garland’s ban on those intrusive methods. What is truly invasive and worrisome is Bondi’s vow that “The Justice Department will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.” That language is so broad that it potentially gives the Justice Department the power to criminalize journalism that is critical of Trump. She also rescinded another protection that banned the government from seizing newsroom records, as happened in the Fox case. “For reporters, the message coming from the Trump Justice Department is clear: They now regard ordinary aspects of news gathering, such as the protection of anonymous sources, as potentially criminal. Hugely important stories vital to the public, such as Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting, would have been impossible without anonymous sources. But these changes threaten to make that kind of reporting much more difficult and risky. It may help those in power, but it’s going to hurt everyone else.” When leak investigations began proliferating during the Bush administration and I was the Times’s Washington bureau chief, Max Frankel, a former executive editor of the Times, gave me a copy of the famous affidavit he filed in the Pentagon Papers case, which, in 1971, resulted in a 6-3 decision that banned the government from preventing publication of any news story. Frankel’s affidavit emphasized that leaks were part of everyday discourse between reporters and government officials. In fact, President Johnson, standing in waist-high water in a swimming pool, had discussed classified information about the Vietnam War with his guest, none other than Max Frankel. Of course, some leaks have been damaging or embarrassing to the federal government. But a decade after the Pentagon Papers ruling, the solicitor general who argued the case admitted that leaking the secret history had not harmed national security. Giving the government the strong hand in stopping leaks once again only accomplishes one thing: It denies the public knowledge of the government’s inner workings, including situations that might be illegal, like Signalgate . If we believe that good government requires the consent of the governed, doesn’t the public need to know what officials are doing in their name?
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