They want to jail journalists to coerce them to reveal their sources. We will not let them. Defiance News.

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https://www.defiance.news/p/they-want-to-jail-journalists-we

They want to jail journalists. We will not let them.
Trump's Justice Department tried to drag reporters in front of a grand jury, apparently to coerce them to reveal their sources. It's an ominous sign of what's to come.
Miles Taylor
Jun 23, 2026

The Trump administration appears to have attempted (and quietly abandoned) an attempt to force journalists to reveal their sources. Don’t expect them to give up the effort. It’s about to get worse.

This week, The Washington Post revealed that federal prosecutors subpoenaed its veteran national security correspondent Ellen Nakashima, along with three reporters at The Wall Street Journal, to compel their testimony under oath about their newsgathering on sensitive national-security-related stories. The papers fought back in sealed proceedings in a Virginia federal court. Faced with a judge who might rule against it, the government blinked and quietly withdrew the subpoenas, preventing the reporters from having to testify.

But do not mistake the retreat for restraint. This was the first publicly known attempt by Trump’s DOJ to force American journalists into the proverbial witness box, where prosecutors could demand they name their sources — or be jailed for contempt if they refused. If that sounds familiar, it should. In 2005, New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent eighty-five days in a federal cell rather than burn a source. That was supposed to be the cautionary tale of a generation. But to the Trump administration, I suspect it looks more like an interesting experiment worth continuing.

I have a personal stake in how we arrived here. Let me explain.

After Trump opened his federal “treason” probe into me, the Justice Department quietly used the investigation as a reason to strip journalists of special protections. In April of last year, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo making it far easier for federal agents to seize journalists’ communications and unmask their sources. And she cited my supposed disloyalty, and that of other officials who spoke honestly to reporters, as the justification.

Those protections had been strengthened during the Biden administration, after earlier revelations that Trump’s first-term investigators at the Justice Department secretly obtained communications data from members of Congress, their staff, and multiple reporters. Now they’re gone. And legal experts have warned that rolling back those rules is making it easier for Trump’s henchmen to treat journalists less as observers and more as investigative targets.

Much more at link.