In the waning days of the last Congress in December 2024, a Republican senator killed efforts to pass a federal shield law that would have protected journalists from being forced to identify their anonymous sources or turn over confidential documents.
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The so-called PRESS Act, which had passed the House unanimously, died when Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas — acting at the behest of Donald Trump, who’d just been re-elected — objected to an attempt to pass it by unanimous consent. Cotton said that passage would turn senators “into the active accomplice of deep-state leakers, traitors and criminals, along with the America-hating and fame-hungry journalists who help them out.”
Now we see the consequences of Cotton’s recklessness. Michael M. Grynbaum reports in The New York Times that three of the five Times journalists who exposed security problems on the new Air Force One — a corrupt gift to Trump from the Qatari government — received subpoenas ordering them to reveal their sources.