Politics
Opinion: How press freedoms could fare under the second Trump administration
With Donald Trump set to return to the White House next year, there’s much speculation on how his second administration will affect press freedom. The short answer is that we don’t know, but prognosticators do have the benefit of an important dataset: his first term.
And, if that record is any indication, national security “leaks” to the press may be an area of tension between journalists and the new leadership at the Justice Department. If there is a chilling effect on sources coming forward with newsworthy information in the public interest, Americans will be less informed and the American government will be held less accountable.
Things have been quiet on that front for the last four years, but the first Trump administration inherited and expanded the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of sources who disclosed government secrets to the press.
And President-elect Trump has often decried national security leaks and called for aggressively investigating and prosecuting them.
It would be foolish for press advocates to discount the possibility of a repeat of his first term, and perhaps an escalation.
There are several federal laws that can be read to criminalize the public disclosure of national security secrets. The most prominent is the Espionage Act of 1917, a World War I-era law that was initially used against domestic opponents of the war but applies to the act of communicating, delivering or transmitting “information relating to the national defense,” a broad term, to anyone not entitled to receive it.
In other words, if someone were to anonymously slip a manila envelope under a reporter’s door with government secrets — even secrets that the public has a clear interest in knowing, such as the warrantless domestic wiretapping by the George W. Bush administration — the Justice Department has consistently claimed the authority to investigate and prosecute the source, as well as the journalist, under the Espionage Act. There is no “public interest” defense.
Historically, it hasn’t been used that way. For about 90 years, the Espionage Act was deployed against actual spies, not journalists’ sources. There are a few exceptions — most prominently the Pentagon Papers case, in which the government launched a failed prosecution against Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo — but source cases are in the single digits. And, while there were investigations involving journalists, no reporter or news outlet was ultimately prosecuted under the Espionage Act in that period.
The reason is simple. When the reporting is in the public interest, taking the leaker or journalist to court would be a “political firestorm,” as a federal appeals court judge put it in one of those few exceptions, a 1980s case involving a leak of classified photographs.
But the Bush and Obama administrations marked a shift in practice.
Under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department brought the first Espionage Act case other than Russo against individuals outside government, who had not sworn to protect government secrets. The Bush administration also featured the Valerie Plame case, which started as a leak investigation, in which Judith Miller of the New York Times spent 85 days in jail for refusing to identify a confidential source from her reporting about the run-up to the Iraq war. And the Bush Justice Department issued a subpoena in 2008 to force the New York Times’ James Risen to identify his source in another leak case, which the Obama administration pursued until 2015.
Then the Obama administration started to bring Espionage Act prosecutions against journalists’ sources in earnest. Depending on how you count, his administration brought 10 such cases. That is more than all other presidents combined.
Trump’s first term followed that trend. The Justice Department brought eight cases against journalist sources, including two under bank secrecy laws, as well as the Julian Assange case. The Assange case is complicated, but he was charged in part under the novel and dangerous legal theory that publishing secrets is a crime.
These cases can involve secret government demands for reporters’ notes; phone, email and text records; and correspondence with sources. That kind of snooping can reveal the constellation of a journalist’s sources beyond just the investigation in question and can give the government visibility into other stories the newsroom is investigating, including stories about the government. As Miller said when facing jail time: “If journalists cannot be trusted to keep confidences, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press.”
The Justice Department during Trump’s first term turbocharged Obama-era approaches. In addition to seizing years of records from reporter Ali Watkins’ phone and email providers, a Customs and Border Protection agent threatened to reveal private information unless she identified her sources. Watkins was a reporter at Politico at the time of the questioning and was at the New York Times when she learned of the records seizure.
Then, in the early days of the Biden administration, we learned that the Justice Department in the last days of the Trump administration had authorized demands for phone and email records for eight reporters at CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post in three separate leak investigations. It did so without notifying those outlets in advance — to give them a chance to negotiate or challenge the demands — and the CNN and New York Times demands came with a gag order preventing newsroom lawyers from even alerting the reporters that they had been targeted.
The history of leak investigations under Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump shows that the threat to the free flow of information is bipartisan and spans administrations. President Biden’s term has been a notable exception, but a reprise may be coming.
Gabe Rottman is the policy director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Politics
Federal judge blocks Trump from cutting childcare funds to Democratic states over fraud concerns
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A federal judge Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from stopping subsidies on childcare programs in five states, including Minnesota, amid allegations of fraud.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, a Biden appointee, didn’t rule on the legality of the funding freeze, but said the states had met the legal threshold to maintain the “status quo” on funding for at least two weeks while arguments continue.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns.
The programs include the Child Care and Development Fund, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, and the Social Services Block Grant, all of which help needy families.
USDA IMMEDIATELY SUSPENDS ALL FEDERAL FUNDING TO MINNESOTA AMID FRAUD INVESTIGATION
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
“Families who rely on childcare and family assistance programs deserve confidence that these resources are used lawfully and for their intended purpose,” HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said in a statement on Tuesday.
The states, which include California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, argued in court filings that the federal government didn’t have the legal right to end the funds and that the new policy is creating “operational chaos” in the states.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian at his nomination hearing in 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
In total, the states said they receive more than $10 billion in federal funding for the programs.
HHS said it had “reason to believe” that the programs were offering funds to people in the country illegally.
‘TIP OF THE ICEBERG’: SENATE REPUBLICANS PRESS GOV WALZ OVER MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
The table above shows the five states and their social safety net funding for various programs which are being withheld by the Trump administration over allegations of fraud. (AP Digital Embed)
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.” (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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Fox News Digital has reached out to HHS for comment.
In what might be the most decisive critique yet of President Trump’s remake of the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera’s board approved a resolution on Friday to leave the venue it has occupied since 1971.
“Today, the Washington National Opera announced its decision to seek an amicable early termination of its affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center and resume operations as a fully independent nonprofit entity,” the company said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Roma Daravi, Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, described the relationship with Washington National Opera as “financially challenging.”
“After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with the WNO due to a financially challenging relationship,” Daravi said in a statement. “We believe this represents the best path forward for both organizations and enables us to make responsible choices that support the financial stability and long-term future of the Trump Kennedy Center.”
Kennedy Center President Ambassador Richard Grenell tweeted that the call was made by the Kennedy Center, writing that its leadership had “approached the Opera leadership last year with this idea and they began to be open to it.”
“Having an exclusive relationship has been extremely expensive and limiting in choice and variety,” Grenell wrote. “We have spent millions of dollars to support the Washington Opera’s exclusivity and yet they were still millions of dollars in the hole – and getting worse.”
WNO’s decision to vacate the Kennedy Center’s 2,364-seat Opera House comes amid a wave of artist cancellations that came after the venue’s board voted to rename the center the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. New signage featuring Trump’s name went up on the building’s exterior just days after the vote while debate raged over whether an official name change could be made without congressional approval.
That same day, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) — an ex officio member of the board — wrote on social media that the vote was not unanimous and that she and others who might have voiced their dissent were muted on the call.
Grenell countered that ex officio members don’t get a vote.
Cancellations soon began to mount — as did Kennedy Center‘s rebukes against the artists who chose not to appear. Jazz drummer Chuck Redd pulled out of his annual Christmas Eve concert; jazz supergroup the Cookers nixed New Year’s Eve shows; New York-based Doug Varone and Dancers dropped out of April performances; and Grammy Award-winning banjo player Béla Fleck wrote on social media that he would no longer play at the venue in February.
WNO’s departure, however, represents a new level of artist defection. The company’s name is synonymous with the Kennedy Center and it has served as an artistic center of gravity for the complex since the building first opened.
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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leveling a stunning accusation at Vice President JD Vance amid the national furor over this week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota involving an ICE agent.
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” the four-term federal lawmaker from New York and progressive champion argued as she answered questions on Friday on Capitol Hill from Fox News and other news organizations.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good after she confronted ICE agents from inside her car in Minneapolis.
RENEE NICOLE GOOD PART OF ‘ICE WATCH’ GROUP, DHS SOURCES SAY
Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Video of the incident instantly went viral, and while Democrats have heavily criticized the shooting, the Trump administration is vocally defending the actions of the ICE agent.
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Vance, at a White House briefing on Thursday, charged that “this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order.”
“That woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation,” the vice president added. “The president stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers.”
And Vance claimed Good was “brainwashed” and suggested she was connected to a “broader, left-wing network.”
Federal sources told Fox News on Friday that Good, who was a mother of three, worked as a Minneapolis-based immigration activist serving as a member of “ICE Watch.”
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Ocasio-Cortez, in responding to Vance’s comments, said, “That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
But a spokesperson for the vice president, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation, told Fox News Digital, “On National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, AOC made it clear she thinks that radical leftists should be able to mow down ICE officials in broad daylight. She should be ashamed of herself. The Vice President stands with ICE and the brave men and women of law enforcement, and so do the American people.”
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