The Justice Department told a judge Thursday it will withdraw its subpoenas for grand jury testimony and phone records from New York Times reporters over an article on security systems in the new Air Force One jet.
During a heated court hearing, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian grilled federal prosecutors working for the Justice Department on why it had issued subpoenas before taking further investigative steps, and questioned whether he should issue sanctions over alleged perjury in an application to a judge to secure the subpoenas.
In a brief order following the hearing, Subramanian reiterated that the “government has voluntarily withdrawn the challenged subpoenas, including the subpoenas issued to the journalists as well as the third-party subpoenas. Those subpoenas are null and void.”
The New York Times said earlier this month that several of its reporters received grand jury subpoenas soon after it published reporting on President Trump’s use of an old presidential aircraft to depart from the NATO summit in Turkey in early July and security limitations on a new plane donated by the Qatari government. The paper said the subpoenas were issued by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York who was tapped by Mr. Trump for director of national intelligence.
The news outlet moved to block the subpoenas, calling them “abusive and improper.” The newspaper said in a court filing Saturday that prosecutors attempted to gain access to phone records of Times journalists and their family members as part of a Justice Department effort to identity sources who spoke to the reporters about security systems on the new Qatari-donated Air Force One plane.
In one batch of subpoenas, the Justice Department sought grand-jury testimony from several reporters “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.” But subpoenas were also sent to third-party service providers for toll records and data for accounts associated with Times’ journalists. Among the information sought by the Trump administration were phone records for the spouses of two reporters and one journalist’s mother.
Two of the subpoenas sought phone records dating back to Jan. 1, well before the Times started reporting on the security concerns with the Qatari-donated airplane.
“That timeframe 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 Times’ lawyers said.
They added that the timing of the Justice Department’s actions “are deeply troubling” and “raise pressing questions about the conduct of this purported national security investigation.”
Ahead of Thursday’s hearing, Subramanian halted enforcement of the subpoenas while he considered the Times’ request to quash the demands.
