New York court sees Justice Department drop Times subpoenas | JQJO

NEW YORK — The U.S. Department of Justice has withdrawn grand jury subpoenas that sought testimony and phone records from New York Times journalists over their reporting on President Donald Trump’s use of an older presidential aircraft after a NATO summit. The subpoenas stemmed from articles detailing that Trump chose not to use a Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet because it lacked key anti-missile and defensive security features, prompting prosecutors to pursue the identities of confidential government sources. The Times challenged the subpoenas, arguing that the effort was a bad-faith attempt to intimidate reporters and sidestep First Amendment protections for newsgathering and source confidentiality. Media organizations and civil liberties groups framed the dispute as a test of how far the government could go in leak investigations involving national security–related reporting.

NEW YORK — During a heated hearing in federal court in Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian sharply criticized Justice Department lawyers for what he described as sloppy legal work, failure to follow internal regulations and severe overreach in targeting journalists. He questioned why prosecutors treated subpoenas to reporters as an initial step rather than a last resort and highlighted that their requests swept up the phone records of reporters’ spouses and family members. Under intense scrutiny and facing explicit warnings of possible judicial sanctions over errors and omissions in their filings, government attorneys agreed in open court to declare the subpoenas null and void. The Justice Department said the underlying leak investigation remains active, but press freedom advocates welcomed the withdrawal as a significant affirmation of limits on government efforts to compel information from the media.