Quash Him! Press fights & takes Trump To Court to stop subpoena 'abuse' of power vs NYT

What do you do with autocracy? Do you cave or do you fight? Sounds like kind of a basic question and yet we've seen law firms, corporations, and all kinds of groups just pack up and cave, at least in the beginning of Trump's second term. Tonight we turn to how some are fighting, especially on the First Amendment. The New York Times is punching back, filing a motion, basically taking the government, Trump, DOJ, to court to try to get these subpoenas of journalists quashed. Trump was going furious, reportedly, over security problems with his jet gift. The Times lawyer says these new DOJ subpoenas against journalists are abusive, improper, bad faith, the theme we've reported on, and that some judges in different cases have already found to be a problem for the Trump DOJ. The Times executive editor saying this. I've been a foreign correspondent in China and I've seen the way an authoritarian government can keep journalists from reporting on a huge amount of news and information that's very clearly in the public interest. It's really essential to American democracy that that kind of erosion of press freedoms not happen here. The Times, of course, has its own news section where it tries to cover these issues fairly, objectively, including even when the government's going after them. And then through their leadership, their lawyers, what you just saw there, just like Jack Smith has been speaking out, they seem to understand that in today's world and media political environment, they also have to go beyond the courtroom and tell the public the value of what they say they do and why they're fighting. Trump is also trying to hunt leakers. He's talking to people who traveled on the jet. He wants some people potentially to have to turn over their phones and figure out who might have talked to the Times. Notice how that fact or reporting hurts Trump and helps the Times. It suggests that they have accurate sources, people who were on the plane telling them true things, eyewitness accounts about what happened. And that undercuts the government argument that they would be able to subpoena these reporters, for example, if there were illegal leaks that would go to the leakers, people who work for Trump, not whether the journalists have accurate sources. Meanwhile, Trump's nominee for intelligence was very cagey in discussing these controversial subpoenas. I wanted to ask you, Mr. Clayton, about the subpoenas of the New York Times reporters. I can't get into the specifics of an investigation, an ongoing matter. Did you or anybody at the Southern District of New York have conversations with anybody at the White House or the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. before you issued those subpoenas? I can say it this way without getting into the investigation. The protocols require consultation. Did anybody in Washington, D.C. suggest to you or anybody on your team that you should issue subpoenas in this case? I'm not going to get into the details. What I can tell you is that we followed those procedures. So you can see the Senate bearing down on multiple nominees about this. It's broader than this recent story. In fact, we hear about the normalizing and sort of way that people get accustomed to this. The fact that Trump's doing it repeatedly doesn't make it any more okay constitutionally. Indeed, they have lost a bunch of rounds in the court. And the Times jet story is one of several. There have been subpoenas attempted for journalists there in the Post, the Murdoch-Owen Wall Street Journal. They've indicted journalists like Don Levin in Georgia Fort. And they have tried to abuse government power to retaliate or silence comedians. I want to bring in Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, reporter, MSNOW analyst who was with the Post for a long time. Welcome, Gene. I mentioned that they're trying to normalize this even as some of the cases have floundered. Do you see it as important that the Times is not only fighting this in court, but also vocalizing why this is, in their view, harassment of their First Amendment rights? It's important and necessary that the Times fighting these subpoenas, because as the Times editor Joe Conn said in that video, these are being issued in bad faith. And this is not contrary to what was said in the hearing. These are not the procedures that historically have been followed. This is not the first administration to ever subpoena a reporter. It has happened before. There has not been, at least in my career as a journalist, I would say there has not been since Richard Nixon, perhaps, this sort of all out assault on the press and on the media and on its ability, its right to tell the public things that the government doesn't want it to know. And that's one of our core functions, right? And that's why we're enshrined in the First Amendment, because the government is not going to tell you everything and everything that you need to know. What's very different about these cases, especially this case, the subpoenas to the New York Times reporters, is these subpoenas were issued something like within 48 hours of when the story appeared. That doesn't happen in the very rare cases in the past in which Nixon administrations have subpoenaed reporters. It has been after months and years of other investigation. The procedures are to do everything else you possibly can do to get the information you're seeking before you move towards subpoenaing reporters. And that was clearly not done in this case. Right. And that rush, which shows how pliant the Justice Department has become under Trump, may ultimately doom the subpoenas, because although it's a fairly low bar, people have heard about this, people know at trial, beyond a reasonable doubt, high bar. Low bar, probable cause that a crime occurred, not necessarily by the New York Times. And yet your point is getting it out the door within 48 hours after the story really strains the credibility of whether there is a known national security crime that they've taken any care to investigate at all, Gene. Absolutely. They haven't had time to do any sort of investigation, much less a proper investigation. So what exactly is the crime? What secrets do they think were disclosed that were not stuff that was not already known? I don't think it was a secret that there were measures on Air Force One that would protect the president in potential hostile situations. That's what most Americans, I think, would expect. And so if it's not revealing that fact, which, again, was already known, then what was the crime they're supposedly investigating? The answer, I think, is that they're not. What they're trying to do is they're trying to chill the atmosphere, to freeze it, really. They're trying to make potential sources, whistleblowers, less likely to tell their stories. And they're trying to intimidate the media from reporting, again, things that the government doesn't want you to know.