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On the latest episode of Channels, host Peter Kafka asked New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn if he has any “regrets” about the paper’s 2024 election coverage “given what’s happened” in Donald Trump’s second term, including “a lot of the concerns about press freedom” having “been borne out.” Kahn said he believes the Times was “ahead of everybody else in giving people a preview of what was going to happen” in a new administration, from Trump’s skepticism of NATO to his immigration agenda to taking “retribution against enemies.”
Days later, Kahn found himself on front lines of a press freedom battle. In a Saturday memo to staff, Kahn condemned the Trump administration’s “naked attempt to intimidate” five journalists by issuing them subpoenas in response to their reporting on Secret Service concerns over the president’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One. It’s also an attempt, he wrote, to “prevent the Times and other independent news media from doing important reporting protected by the First Amendment.” The Times will “mount a full defense of our staff,” he added, and “fight to ensure that this blatant effort to suppress coverage of a matter clearly in the public interest in no way impedes accountability reporting of this or any other administration.”
Five Times reporters — Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt, Eric Lipton, Julian Barnes, and Adam Goldman — received subpoenas on Friday to testify this Wednesday before a federal grand jury in Manhattan. The subpoenas were issued by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan (and also Trump’s nominee to become director of national intelligence.) Some of the subpoenas, noted the Times, “were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.” A DOJ spokesperson told the paper that “reporters are not the targets, those leaking classified information are.”
Last year, the Justice Department rolled back Biden-era guidelines for compelling journalists to testify when probing leaks, and in January, federal agents searched the home of a Washington Post reporter in a leak investigation — a shocking move that, like Friday’s action, has alarmed press advocates. “The subpoenas it issued to journalists at the New York Times break from longstanding Justice Department practice to protect the public interest and press independence by requiring prosecutors to only seek information from reporters as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted,” said Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
At the Times, deputy general counsel David McCraw said that “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” and “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.”
A running theme of Trump’s second term — as explored deeply in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan’s Swan Regime Change — is how the president exercises power in new ways to target his perceived foes, whether in politics, academia, law, and the media. “What they’ve learned is that if there is any exposure that your company has to the government, if there’s any lever the government can pull to pressure and coerce you, they will use it,” the Times Jonathan Swan told me last month, noting that he and Haberman are “fortunate” they have “an owner who is resolute.”
While corporations like Paramount and Disney settled Trump defamation suits since the 2024 election over CBS News and ABC News coverage, respectively, rather than fighting in court on First Amendment grounds, the Times has not only defended itself in court when Trump has personally sued the paper, but also successfully sued the Pentagon over press restrictions.
Kahn said Saturday that he expects the Times “to prevail” in court. “The law protects news gatherers from this sort of retaliatory abuse of prosecutorial power,” he wrote. “It is essential that the courts reaffirm that protection and quash this overreach. We are confident they will in this case.” Still, the reporters involved with face a “period of scrutiny and legal uncertainty,” he noted, and they should know “their colleagues, and the full resources of the Times, are behind them and that we will fight this legal abuse together.”
Meanwhile, the newsroom chugs along. On Saturday evening, the Times reported that the White House “directed” FBI director Kash Patel “to oversee a leak investigation into reporting by The New York Times about security issues with the new Air Force One.” FBI spokesman Ben Williamson told the paper that “Director Patel and White House officials agreed to meet on Friday at the White House to brief an ongoing matter,” while adding that some “speculative reporting regarding the nature of the meeting is absolutely false.”
In the article Times reporters Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush, and Haberman also provided a glimpse into the administration’s pushback before publication. “A senior official at the FBI contacted a reporter and a senior editor to ask that the article be held, calling it an issue of national security,” they write. “The FBI official declined to explain the security issue. The official also asked the Times to disclose its sources for the article. The newspaper refused to do so.”