Team Trump’s Latest Plan to Go After the Media

Donald Trump hates leakers. He isn’t a fan of journalists, either. He wants to punish them both in response to reporting that early Pentagon intelligence found the administration’s recent strikes against Iran weren’t as effective as the president has been claiming. 

“They should be prosecuted,” Trump said when Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business asked him about his contention that Democrats leaked the intelligence, adding that the administration could attempt to force reporters to reveal their sourcing by saying: “National Security.”

One of the ways Trump has discussed cracking down on leakers and the press is by wielding the Espionage Act, a 1917 law criminalizing the dissemination of sensitive information that could harm U.S. national security or aid a foreign nation. In the months leading up to his second presidency, Trump and several of his advisers and close allies talked about novel ways the Espionage Act could be unleashed not just against government leakers and whistleblowers, but against media outlets that received classified or highly sensitive information, according to two sources involved with such conversations with Trump.

“Why not the press?” Trump has said, one of the sources relays, when commenting on how, in his mind, it makes absolutely no sense that the law has traditionally been used to prosecute leakers but not journalists who publish confidential national security disclosures.

Trump’s desire to weaponize the Espionage Act hasn’t abated six months into his second term. If anything, it’s intensified.

In recent days, amid a prolonged meltdown over the intel leak about the strikes against Iran to outlets like CNN and The New York Times, the president has privately brought up using the Espionage Act on reporters again, according to one of the sources and also a senior Trump administration official.

The president’s lieutenants are listening, and — per the administration official — looking for the right case to launch their “maiden voyage” of an unprecedented type of Espionage Act prosecution — one which would also serve to broadly intimidate news organizations when it comes to publishing classified government information or protecting the identities of their confidential sources. 

Trump himself is keen on doing this especially if the administration can’t convince a journalist to set aside their First Amendment protections and voluntarily give up a source who can’t otherwise be conclusively identified by an internal leak hunt. 

The sources say they don’t know if the federal investigation into the Iran bombing intelligence leak — which is being carried out in coordination with Trump loyalist Kash Patel’s FBI — will ultimately yield that opportunity. However, government officials and other Republicans close to Trump stress that administration brass at the Justice Department, White House, and elsewhere are actively on the lookout for a test case of a leak that could be used to file criminal charges against American reporters and their publications as supposed “co-conspirators.”

“All we’d really need is one text or email from a reporter telling a source: ‘Can you pull something for me?’ or something very direct of that nature,” the senior Trump official says. “If somebody in the media wasn’t careful even for a split second, that could make the difference between a reporter, and a criminal.”

When asked for comment on the administration potentially using the Espionage Act against leakers and journalists, Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the White House, provided a statement to Rolling Stone: “Leaking classified information is a crime, and anyone who threatens American national security in this manner should be held accountable.”

Barack Obama oversaw a steep incline in the Justice Department using the Espionage Act to imprison journalistic sources, cracking open a door that Trump was more than happy to blow open during his first term.

“Obama’s Justice Department indicted eight journalistic sources under the Espionage Act, more than all U.S. presidents before him combined,” The Intercept reported in 2019. “Donald Trump is now surpassing Obama’s eight-year record in just over two years in office.”

Any Espionage Act prosecution of a journalist or media outlet — simply for publishing information that made Trump mad enough — would be a dark, significant escalation that would invariably face numerous First Amendment challenges. Still, Trump and some of his lieutenants felt they could have cracked down harder during his first four years in office, and they’re now hoping to make up for lost time.

“Oh, it’ll be brutal,” a conservative lawyer close to Trump said in December, of his coming blitz against the press, whistleblowers, and anonymous leakers. “We’ve learned our lessons from the first time and one lesson is you have got to be even more aggressive.”

Indeed, when it comes to Trump’s crackdowns and intimidation campaigns against not just the media but freedom of speech, in general, the current administration is already making good on its promises to dial up the authoritarian threats and, ultimately, actions. 

Trump has a personal history with the Espionage Act, beyond musing about weaponizing it to go after leakers and journalists. The Justice Department charged him with over 30 violations of the law related after he hoarded a trove of highly sensitive government documents at his Florida beach club. Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed district judge who oversaw the case, dropped the charges last summer.