Trump regime ups Obama's war on the press

Washington Post - The Justice Department took a significant step this week toward advancing its long-promised crackdown on leaks, charging a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer with lying to the FBI about his contacts with reporters, and seizing the phone and email records of a journalist to help make its case.

As the man charged in the brewing controversy made his first court appearance, free-press advocates warned that federal prosecutors' heavy-handed tactics might send a further chill through the government, where officials already are reluctant to share information.

To support the charges against James Wolfe, prosecutors obtained years of phone records from New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, who had been in a romantic relationship with Wolfe and previously covered the congressional committee where he worked as security director.

"Seizing a journalist's records sends a terrible message to the public and should never be considered except as the last resort in a truly essential investigation," said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "We call on the Justice Department to explain how its actions adhered to its own guidelines for protecting newsgathering from exactly these kinds of damaging intrusions."

... Prosecutors in the Obama era brought nine leak cases, more than during all previous administrations combined. They called a reporter a criminal "co-conspirator" and secretly went after journalists' phone records in a bid to identify reporters' sources. Prosecutors also sought to compel a reporter to testify and identify a source, though they ultimately backed down from that effort.

Facing heavy criticism, then-Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. issued updates in 2015 to the department's policy on obtaining information from members of the media. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a more aggressive posture.

In August, he revealed that the department had more than tripled the number of leak investigations compared with the number ongoing at the end of the last administration.