As last week came to an end, Attorney General Pam Bondi raised eyebrows with some highly provocative rhetoric on Fox News, where the Republican appeared to threaten judges with prosecutions.
But that’s not all she did on Friday afternoon. NBC News reported:
Attorney General Pam Bondi has revoked protections issued by former Attorney General Merrick Garland that offered procedural protections for members of the media from having their records seized or being forced to testify in the course of leak investigations, according to the memo seen by NBC News.
As a New York Times report added, the attorney general’s internal Justice Department memo “said that the change was necessary to safeguard ‘classified, privileged and other sensitive information’ — a far broader set of government secrets than is protected by the criminal code, which focuses primarily on making it illegal to share classified information.”
It’s striking to see just how far the pendulum has swung in a short period of time on this issue.
Around this time four years ago, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland created a policy that prohibited federal prosecutors from going after reporters’ private information or forcing them to testify about their confidential sources.
Even at the time, this wasn’t especially controversial. In fact, there was bipartisan legislation in the last Congress — called the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (also known as the PRESS Act) — that would’ve codified Garland’s policy into federal law. In early 2024, House Republicans agreed to bring the bill to the floor, it passed without objection.
Any one member from the left, right or center could’ve balked, but no one did. Even in a sharply divided House, this was seen as a consensus issue. Though there was a companion bill in the Senate, which was co-authored by two conservative Republicans and which enjoyed the backing of far-right media figures such as Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump told GOP senators to reject the legislation, and it died soon after. Now, instead of having a bipartisan measure in place to protect journalists, Bondi has decided to turn back the clock and undo the Biden-era policy — adding new dimensions to the Trump administration’s broader offensive against the free press. It’s worth emphasizing that Bondi’s memo added that there will be procedures in place before members of the media are compelled to testify or their records are seized, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Justice Department is prepared to compel journalists to testify, and their records will be subject to seizure.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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