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.

President-elect Trump picked Miami-Dade County Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera to serve as ambassador to Panama.

Calling the Miami-Dade County Commissioner a “fierce fighter,” Trump said that he would advance the “MAGA agenda” to the Central American country.

“Kevin is a fierce fighter for America First principles. As a Miami-Dade County Commissioner, and Vice Chairman of the International Trade Consortium, he has been instrumental in driving Economic growth, and fostering International partnerships,” Trump wrote in the Wednesday announcement. “In 2020, Kevin did an incredible job as my Florida State Director and, this year, advanced our MAGA Agenda as a Member of the RNC Platform Committee.”

“Few understand Latin American politics as well as Kevin – He will do a FANTASTIC job representing our Nation’s interests in Panama!” he said.

GET TO KNOW DONALD TRUMP’S CABINET: WHO HAS THE PRESIDENT-ELECT PICKED SO FAR?

The announcement came after Trump said that Panama was “a Country that is ripping us off on the Panama Canal, far beyond their wildest dreams.”

In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump also accused Chinese soldiers of illegally operating the canal and “always making certain that the United States puts in Billions of Dollars in ‘repair’ money but will have absolutely nothing to say about ‘anything.’”

President-elect Trump on Wednesday nominated Miami-Dade County Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera to serve as ambassador to Panama. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

In a statement on X, Cabrera thanked Trump for the nomination.

HOW PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP COULD PULL OFF ‘THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY’ AS HE ENTERS OFFICE

“I’m humbled and honored by your nomination to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to Panama,” he wrote. “Let’s get to work!”

President-elect Trump was honored on Tuesday with a street renamed after him in Miami-Dade County, Florida. (X/@KMCabreraFL)

Cabrera won his county election two years ago following an endorsement by Trump. 

He also served as the Florida state director for Trump’s 2020 campaign and was a member of the RNC Platform Committee.

Is Donald Trump a NIMBY or a YIMBY? Given that the housing crisis is a front-and-center issue throughout the country, whether or not the president-elect reflexively favors housing development is an important question.

But Trump is all over the place on the housing issue, as he is on so many others. It’s hard to know where he really stands.

The idea of undoing zoning restrictions to produce more housing has enjoyed support in both parties at the federal level for decades. In a 1991 report titled “Not in My Backyard: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing,” a bipartisan commission appointed by then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp noted that “across the country, local governments employ zoning and subdivision ordinances, building codes, and permitting procedures to prevent development of affordable housing.” But the feds don’t control local zoning, so their influence is limited.

As a former real estate developer — and an advocate of deregulation in general — Trump ought to be a YIMBY, the yes-in-my-backyard, pro-housing opposite of a NIMBY. In fact, in an interview last summer with Bloomberg, he railed against zoning, calling it a “killer” and promising to bring housing costs down.

Except, apparently, when doing so threatens suburban neighborhoods with single-family zoning, the most sweeping restraint on development in California and beyond. Trump has consistently said that the idea of high-density housing in the suburbs threatens the American way of life. “The suburb destruction will end with us,” he vowed during his first term.

NIMBYism crosses traditional political lines, suppressing housing in some of California’s most ostensibly liberal enclaves, but it also overlaps plenty with Trump’s coalition. MAGA activists who like their suburban homes and neighborhoods are increasingly at war with the YIMBY movement, as the staunch resistance to more housing in places such as Huntington Beach has shown.

Lately Trump and company have taken to blaming the housing crisis on illegal immigration, suggesting the real estate market will be just fine once they deport 10 million or so immigrants. But unauthorized immigrants tend to occupy the low end of the housing stock, often in crowded conditions. So even if mass deportation occurs, it’s not likely to help millions of native-born Americans locked out of the market suddenly realize the dream of suburban homeownership.

One of the few specific ideas Trump has proposed for increasing the housing supply is opening up federal land for residential development. Last year, he floated the idea of using federal land to build “freedom cities,” a kind of unregulated enterprise zone for housing, business and flying cars.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Trump’s choice for Interior secretary, could be crucial to any administration housing strategy. Burgum would control the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, which have vast land holdings in California, nearly half of which is federally owned, and throughout the West. (The U.S. Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, also claims much of the state and region.) While much of the news coverage of Burgum’s appointment has concerned the prospect of more fossil fuel extraction from federal land, Burgum could also be key to plans to build housing on U.S. property.

But developing federal land is legally difficult, as is transferring such land to local governments that may want to build on it. The Bureau of Land Management, for instance, does constant battle with Clark County, Nev., over whether more land should be made available for development in the Las Vegas area. Moreover, much of the federal government’s land is mountainous, remote or both.

Burgum has been a strong advocate not only of zoning reform and housing development in general but also of building more high-density housing in cities and suburbs, which seems to be at odds with the MAGA agenda in some respects. A wealthy tech entrepreneur, Burgum has poured millions of dollars of his own money into revitalizing the downtown area in his hometown, Fargo.

Of course, the federal government also owns lots of land in urban and suburban locations. But that land would be beyond Burgum’s control, and federal agencies with other missions have proven extremely resistant to yielding their property for housing, as the recent battle over the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A. revealed.

During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt also promoted the idea of building a lot of housing on federal land, in both suburban and rural locations. Although the effort generated some innovative ideas, only a few subdivisions were ultimately built.

Trump’s freedom cities are likely to meet the same fate. It’s just hard for the federal government to bring about local zoning reform and housing development. It’s even harder when the president can’t decide where he stands on the issue.

William Fulton is the editor and publisher of “California Planning & Development Report.” He is a former mayor of Ventura and a former San Diego planning director.