Trump justice department secretly seized CNN journalist’s phone records

The US Department of Justice under the Trump administration secretly obtained the phone and email records of a CNN reporter who covers the Pentagon, the network reported on Thursday.

Related: Trump DoJ seized Washington Post reporters’ phone records, paper says

In a 13 May letter, the justice department informed CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr, that the department had seized two months’ worth of phone and email records, between 1 June and 31 July 2017. The letter confirmed that the justice department had pursued records related to Starr’s Pentagon extension number, the CNN Pentagon booth number, and her home and cellphone number. Officials also obtained records from Starr’s work and personal email addresses.

“CNN strongly condemns the secret collection of any aspect of a journalist’s correspondence, which is clearly protected by the first amendment,” said CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, a published statement. “We are asking for an immediate meeting with the justice department for an explanation.”

The move highlighted the aggressive trend of federal investigators under the Trump administration targeting journalists involved in leak investigations, hoping to identify sources of disclosures of classified information.

Two weeks ago, the Washington Post revealed that Trump’s justice department had similarly obtained the call records of three Washington Post journalists who worked on a July 2017 story about the FBI’s investigation of Russia. In 2018, the New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, who covered the federal leak investigation of aide James A Wolfe, was notified by government officials that her email and phone records had also been seized. In all cases, content of the phone calls and emails made was not obtained.

“This is a big story that just got bigger,” said Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, in a statement. “That a journalist from another news organization had communications records seized by the Trump justice department suggests that the last administration’s efforts to intrude into reporter-source relationships and chill newsgathering is more sweeping than we originally thought.”

During Trump’s tenure, the justice department notoriously attempted to come down hard on supposed leaks. Jeff Sessions, the first attorney general to serve under Trump, announced robust efforts to prosecute government employees who were disclosing sensitive information to journalists, publicly confirming that the justice department had more than tripled the number of leak investigations compared to the Obama administration.

Almost a dozen leak-related prosecutions were undertaken during the Obama administration, more than all previous presidents combined.

US president Joe Biden responded by saying he would not allow his justice department to seize the phone or email records of reporters, saying any such move would be “wrong”.

“It’s simply, simply wrong. I will not let that happen,” Biden told reporters on Friday.

Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the justice department intended to use the “Holder model” in regard to its practices, a reference to former attorney general Eric Holder, who served under Barack Obama.

Holder revised justice department rules in 2013 to restrict the government’s ability to subpoena the records of reporters without express consent from the top of the department, although he later faced criticism for approving the seizing of call records from Associated Press and Fox News reporters.