Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of The New York Times, teaches journalism at Northeastern University and is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.
When the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter this week, the Trump administration’s war against the press entered a new, far more dangerous phase. Aggression has become repression. The FBI confiscated reporter Hannah Natanson’s computers, phone, and digital watch, the essential tools of a journalist’s trade. When the agents left her apartment, they left the First Amendment in tatters.
This is not America, as the David Bowie song says.
The Founders wrote the First Amendment to protect a young country from a tyrannical ruler. They envisioned a free press as a bulwark to prevent an authoritarian ruler like King George III from becoming all-powerful. But now we have King Donald, who is determined to see the bulwark — except for a fawning right-wing press — destroyed.
Natanson, a member of the Post’s Pulitzer-winning Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection reporting team, has recently been writing exemplary articles about the drastic cutting of the federal workforce. It’s been widely reported that the FBI targeted her reporting because it suspects she may have received classified information from a federal contractor who was recently arrested for possession of top-secret materials dealing, reportedly, with Venezuela.
During the Biden administration, the Justice Department put strict new limits on how intrusive the government can be in forcing journalists to reveal their sources. Immediately after taking office, Attorney General Pam Bondi threw those rules into the trash.
When reporters vow to not reveal their sources, it’s supposed to be an iron-clad promise. Many government officials who talk to reporters take a big risk and are owed some measure of protection by journalists. It’s typically their sources who face prosecution, not the journalists. The Justice Department has said neither the Post nor Natanson are the targets of its investigation. But given the unpredictability of Bondi’s Justice Department, I wouldn’t bank on this.
The Pentagon has already tried and failed to enforce a misbegotten rule that reporters cannot, without express Defense Department approval, disclose classified information they receive. Journalists were asked to sign agreements submitting to this censorship, but almost no one from the mainstream media agreed.
Previous administrations, including those of presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, subpoenaed reporters’ notes and phone records and launched criminal leak investigations. During my tenure as a senior editor at The New York Times, I was involved in efforts to quash these intrusions. In one case, Judith Miller, a Times reporter, was jailed for 85 days for refusing to identify her confidential source. Criminal leak investigations proliferated, but none went as far as President Trump’s most recent crackdown on the Post.
Many confidential sources are whistleblowers who believe that revealing the top-secret information they possess is vital to the public interest. During the so-called war on terror following the 9/11 attacks, Robert Kaiser, the then-Washington Post editor, wrote, “If a war is being waged in America’s name, shouldn’t Americans understand how it is being waged?”
The public certainly should know as much as possible about the Pentagon’s attack on Venezuela, involving the killing of civilians and the seizure of its president and its oil. Perhaps this was the motivation of the arrested contractor who may have talked to the Post.
One of the reasons I feel so strongly about the government’s transgression against Natanson is that she was a student in a journalism class I taught at Harvard. She was also the managing editor of the Harvard Crimson. As a college student, she was well-schooled in First Amendment law and the professional rules of journalism. We have stayed in touch over time, and I know how careful and professional a journalist she is.
Like many of her colleagues in the press, she must consider any grant of anonymity to a source as a sacred promise that cannot be broken. According to Gabe Rottman of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Justice Department has “never executed a search warrant at the home of a reporter in a national security leak case” before.
One encouraging action to come out of the FBI’s trampling of press freedom is that many major news media organizations spoke out quickly against the FBI’s transgression.
David McCraw, the Times’s lawyer and a leading First Amendment warrior, told the Post, “The reports of F.B.I. agents raiding the home of a journalist and seizing her electronic devices are deeply concerning and portray a stark threat to free press rights in this country. … Actions like this inevitably impede reporters’ ability to gather news in the public interest and as a result make the government less accountable.”
Unfortunately, Trump’s war against traditional press freedom is almost certain to escalate.
Journalists are taking extra security measures, like using encrypted communications and cheap burner phones that can be purchased anonymously with cash and thrown away. Notes and transcripts of interviews are being destroyed.
These are the tools of spycraft. Now they are also the necessary precautions of journalism.