The Trump administration has retreated in its attack on The New York Times reporters thanks to its own incompetence.
The Justice Department withdrew its subpoenas on Thursday against three Times journalists who reported on President Donald Trump’s Qatari-gifted luxury jet after a federal judge criticized them for shoddy legal work, according to the Associated Press.
The subpoenas sought to compel the reporters to testify about their sources who provided them with information regarding security concerns with the president’s new Air Force One, and even sought to acquire phone records from the journalists and their relatives.
“The government is prepared to unilaterally withdraw the subpoenas at this time,” Sean Buckley, a top-ranking official in Manhattan’s U.S. attorney’s office, said at a U.S. District Court hearing, according to the Times.
Judge Arun Subramanian, who was appointed by Joe Biden, blasted the DOJ’s lawyers over their handling of the subpoenas, saying that the government’s behavior turned the law “on its head.”
“Subpoenas are the last step—not the first step, but the last step,” Subramanian said. “When you see something like this, if this were a civil proceeding, what I would normally do is ask the parties to show causes why sanctions should not be issued.”
The DOJ attorneys admitted to making “inadvertent errors” in their filings to the magistrate judge, according to Lawfare senior editor Anna Bower.
The judge, however, said that the DOJ could pursue subpoenas again if the proper procedures were adhered to.
The newspaper had condemned the government’s actions as an intimidation effort by the federal government to “punish the Times for its coverage,” its deputy general counsel, David McCraw, said in a statement on July 15.
“We are going to court to defend our journalists’ rights to report freely on the administration and to provide the public with stories that matter,” he said.
In a statement shared with the Daily Beast on Thursday, McCraw celebrated Thursday’s decision as “an important affirmation of our country’s commitment to a free press.”
“We are pleased that the government finally conceded that the subpoenas violated the law, but they should never have been issued in the first place,” McCraw said. “The Times and our journalists will continue to report and seek the truth without fear or favor. We will not be deterred in the face of tactics like these.”
