Justice Department says it will resume practice of obtaining reporters' records in leak inquiries

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is cracking down on leaks of information to the news media, with Attorney General Pam Bondi saying prosecutors will once again have authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make ''unauthorized disclosures'' to journalists.

New regulations announced by Bondi in a memo to the staff obtained by The Associated Press on Friday rescind a Biden administration policy that protected journalists from having their phone records secretly seized during leak investigations — a practice long decried by news organizations and press freedom groups.

The new regulations assert that news organizations must respond to subpoenas ''when authorized at the appropriate level of the Department of Justice'' and also allow for prosecutors to use court orders and search warrants to ''compel production of information and testimony by and relating to the news media.''

The memo says members of the press are ''presumptively entitled to advance notice of such investigative activities,'' and subpoenas are to be ''narrowly drawn.'' Warrants must also include "protocols designed to limit the scope of intrusion into potentially protected materials or newsgathering activities,'' the memo states.

''The Justice Department will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump's policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people,'' Bondi wrote.

Under the new policy, before deciding whether to use intrusive tactics against the news media, the attorney general is to evaluate whether there's a reasonable basis to believe that a crime has been committed and that the information the government is seeking is needed for prosecution. Also, deciding whether prosecutors have first made reasonable attempts to ''obtain the information from alternative sources'' and whether the government has first ''pursued negotiations with the affected member of the news media.''

The regulations come as the Trump administration has complained about a series of news stories that have pulled back the curtain on internal decision-making, intelligence assessments and the activities of prominent officials such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said this week that she was making a trio of ''criminal'' referrals to the Justice Department over intelligence community leaks to the media.

The policy shift also comes amid continued scrutiny of the highest levels of the Trump administration over their own lapses in safeguarding sensitive information. National security adviser Michael Waltz was revealed last month to have inadvertently added a journalist to a group text using the Signal encrypted messaging service, where top officials were discussing plans to attack the Houthis. Hegseth has faced his own drumbeat of revelations over his use of Signal, including a chat that included his wife and brother, among others.

In a statement, Bruce Brown, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement that ''strong protections for journalists serve the American public by safeguarding the free flow of information.''

''Some of the most consequential reporting in U.S. history — from Watergate to warrantless wiretapping after 9/11 — was and continues to be made possible because reporters have been able to protect the identities of confidential sources and uncover and report stories that matter to people across the political spectrum,'' he said.

The policy that Bondi is rescinding was created in by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in the wake of revelations that the Justice Department officials alerted reporters at three news organizations — The Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times — that their phone records had been obtained in the final year of the Trump administration.

The new regulations from Garland marked a startling reversal of a practice of phone records' seizures that had persisted across multiple presidential administrations. The Obama Justice Department, under then-Attorney General Eric Holder, alerted The Associated Press in 2013 that it had secretly obtained two months of phone records of reporters and editors in what the news cooperative's top executive called a ''massive and unprecedented intrusion'' into newsgathering activities.

After blowback, Holder announced a revised set of guidelines for leak investigations, including requiring the authorization of the highest levels of the department before subpoenas for news media records could be issued.

But the department preserved its prerogative to seize journalists' records, and the recent disclosures to the news media organizations show that the practice continued in the Trump Justice Department as part of multiple investigations.

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