The Trump administration sought the phone records of several New York Times journalists and their relatives — including one reporter’s mother — in its effort to unmask the confidential sources who had provided information for articles about the security capabilities of President Trump’s new Air Force One jet.
The Justice Department told The Times late last week that it had issued subpoenas to third-party phone service providers seeking several journalists’ phone and text messaging records. That effort was in addition to the subpoenas issued on July 10 that sought to compel reporters to testify before a federal grand jury.
The government’s actions amount to an extraordinarily aggressive and unorthodox attempt by the Trump administration to unearth the confidential sources of independent journalists whose reporting had angered the president.
The additional subpoenas — which also sought information about calls and messages on the phones of two of the reporters’ spouses — were described in a motion filed on Saturday by lawyers for The Times, which is seeking to quash the requests. The motion was unsealed on Monday morning by Judge Arun Subramanian of U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The White House referred inquiries to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for The Times declined to comment beyond the motion filed by its lawyers.
The government began a leak investigation into The Times’s coverage days after the news outlet reported earlier this month that federal officials harbored significant concerns about the security capabilities of Mr. Trump’s new, Qatari-donated Air Force One jet. Mr. Trump was enraged by that reporting, and the White House directed the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, to oversee the investigation.
The president had flown on the Qatari-built jet to Turkey, touting its gilded interior to reporters, but then departed on the older Air Force One at the urging of the Secret Service. (Asked on Sunday about the security issues, Mr. Trump said that the new jet would be “maxed out” in “about a month or so.”)
All the subpoenas have been paused until Judge Subramanian rules on The Times’s motion to quash. A hearing is scheduled on the matter for Thursday in Manhattan.
In its motion on Saturday, The Times said that the Justice Department had violated its own guidelines for media subpoenas when it waited a week to notify The Times about the phone record requests, calling the delay “deeply concerning.”
The news outlet also laid out a series of events that it said amounted to a “bad-faith effort to intimidate the journalists and chill their ability to report on the administration.”
The Times said that two of the government’s subpoenas sought phone records dating back to Jan. 1, many months before The Times reported on the Air Force One security concerns. “That time frame strongly suggests that the department is using this investigation not to focus on any purported concerns arising from the July 8 and 9 articles, but instead to forage for information about the journalists’ source relationships more broadly,” the newspaper wrote.
The Times also raised concerns about the government’s attempt to extract the phone records of its journalists’ relatives. The news outlet said that one reporter’s mother was a mental health professional, and another reporter’s spouse was employed in a senior role at a major law firm.
The Times also wrote that, in one instance, the Justice Department served a subpoena for phone records after the newspaper had already filed a motion to quash the subpoenas that sought reporters’ grand jury testimony. The matter of the grand jury subpoenas had already been assigned to Judge Subramanian. But in that instance, the Justice Department asked a different federal judge to formally prevent one phone company from informing The Times about the record request.
“This sequence of events and the timing of the government’s disclosures are deeply troubling for obvious reasons,” The Times wrote in its motion. “They raise pressing questions about the conduct of this purported national security investigation and confirm the absence of any regularity in the department’s use of the grand jury in this case. They also highlight why this court’s intervention is urgently required.”
