Federal agents knocked on the doors of four journalists this week. Not sources. Not leakers. Reporters, at home, on a Friday, holding grand jury subpoenas.
Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times have been ordered to testify in Manhattan on Wednesday. The paperwork does not explain itself. It says only that the testimony concerns an alleged violation of federal criminal law and leaves the rest to your imagination. Nobody needs much imagination. The Trump Qatar jet story ran this week, and now the people who wrote it are being hauled in front of a grand jury.
Here is what they actually reported. Trump left the NATO summit in Turkey on the old Air Force One instead of the new one, and the Secret Service is the reason why. The new plane, a Boeing 747-8 handed over as a gift by the government of Qatar and retrofitted for something like $400 million, does not have the same advanced security systems the older aircraft has. That includes antimissile capability.
Sit with the timing. A ceasefire with Iran had just collapsed. The United States was launching strikes. Iran was hitting Gulf states. Iran borders Turkey. And the man who insists he is target number one in the world was sitting on the tarmac with a free airplane that reportedly cannot shoot down what comes at it.
He flew home on the old one.
Trump said none of that was true. He said the stop in England was so the troops could take a look at the shiny new jet. Asked about credible threats from Iran, he shrugged it off and said he has threats all the time and that he is number one on their list. The White House said the plane has no security problems.
And then the doors started getting knocked on.
The Times’ top newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, said the sight of federal law enforcement standing on a reporter’s doorstep should shock the conscience of anyone who believes in the Constitution. He called it a brazen act, said the point of it is to keep the public in the dark by scaring journalists out of doing their jobs, and made clear the paper is not folding.
The machinery behind the Trump Qatar jet subpoenas is worth knowing. They came from Jay Clayton, the US attorney in Manhattan, who has been nominated to run national intelligence. FBI Director Kash Patel spent Friday at the White House talking about the leak investigation and, per CNN, got on the phone with Trump that same day. And before the first story even published, a senior FBI official called the Times and asked them to hold it for national security reasons, then refused to say what the security reason was when a reporter and an editor asked him directly.
They asked the paper to kill it. The paper ran it. Now here we are.
None of this is a one off. The Justice Department went after reporters at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal earlier this year and backed down both times when the papers fought. In January, agents searched the home of Post reporter Hannah Natanson and walked out with her phones and her laptops. The Times is already defending a defamation suit from Trump, filed a countersuit against the EEOC on Friday alleging retaliation for its reporting, and is fighting Pentagon press restrictions that a federal judge has already said appear unconstitutional.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation said the quiet part cleanly. When the government claims it has to investigate reporters to protect national security, what it is usually protecting is its own reputation. The National Press Club is demanding the subpoenas be withdrawn.
So strip it all the way down. Nobody hacked anything. Nobody stole anything. A newspaper told the American public that a $400 million plane, given to our government by a foreign one, may not be safe enough to fly the president during a war, and that our own Secret Service apparently agreed. That is not a crime. That is the job.
