Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Photo (cc) 2023 by BruceSchaff.
Donald Trump and his acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, are targeting The Wall Street Journal in an effort to learn the identity of sources who leaked information to its journalists about internal dissent over the war in Iran, according to CNN reporters Hannah Rabinowitz and Kaitlan Collins. Trump himself has reportedly told Blanche that reporters for the Journal and other news organizations committed “treason.” More about that below, but first: How did we get here?
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In October 2022, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland issued guidelines that severely restricted the conditions under which the Justice Department could seek to force journalists to identify anonymous sources or turn over confidential documents.
Garland’s action was intended as a response to the discovery that Justice had secretly obtained phone records of three Washington Post reporters during Trump’s first term. In fact, though, presidents had been pursuing reporters over leaks for years. Journalists were threatened with jail under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and Garland’s order reversed actions taken during the early months of Joe Biden’s administration as well.
Despite the Trump regime’s ongoing attempts to dismantle the First Amendment, there are important checks that remain in place. Libel protections against frivolous lawsuits remain strong — as long as news organizations use them rather than caving in to Donald Trump’s threats. Prior restraint is almost unheard of.
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One aspect of press freedom that has been left outside the walls of the First Amendment, though, is a recognition that journalists need to protect their anonymous sources and confidential documents. Forty-nine states, including Massachusetts, provide some protection. But the federal government does not. And one of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first actions after Trump returned to the White House was to weaken Justice Department guidelines put in place by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, to make it easier for the government to demand access to that information.
Portrait of Jeff Bezos (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
By honoring The Washington Post with its most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize Board appeared intent on sending a message to two people: Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos.
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On Monday, the Post received the Public Service Award for its reporting on the chaos unleashed by Elon Musk and his DOGE assault on the federal government. One of the lead reporters in that effort was Hannah Natanson, the target of an extraordinary raid by the FBI last January.
Every semester, I introduce my media ethics students to the World Press Freedom Index, an annual compilation by Reporters Without Borders that tracks 180 countries.
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The United States does not do well, and the just-released 2026 update is no exception. We are now 64th, coming in just behind Botswana and just ahead of Panama. As RSF (the French acronym for Reporters Without Borders) puts it, “After a century of gradual expansion of press rights in the United States, the country is experiencing a significant and prolonged decline in press freedom, with Donald Trump’s return to the presidency greatly exacerbating the situation.”
FBI Director Kash Patel’s $250 million libel suit against The Atlantic may prove to be nothing more than bluster. Nevertheless, it’s already raised some interesting issues about ethics and defamation law, and I thought it would be useful to walk through some of them here.
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Patel sued after Sarah Fitzpatrick reported Friday that Patel’s tenure at the FBI has been marred by excessive drinking, lapses in judgment and a shocking lack of discipline. The story, she writes, was based on “more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.” There are no named sources who say they’ve had first-hand knowledge of Patel’s alleged misbehavior. Still, that’s a lot of sources.
Eleven months ago, I handed a New England Muzzle Award to Donald Trump’s thuggish immigration czar, Stephen Miller, for the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk. The Tufts University Ph.D. student’s only offense was to help write an op-ed piece in The Tufts Daily that was critical of Israel and sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian cause.
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Now Roopal Patel, the Boston immigration judge who ended deportation proceedings against Öztürk, has been fired. And thus I’m awarding another New England Muzzle, this one to Teresa Riley, the chief immigration judge who was appointed to her position by the Trump regime. I don’t know whether she was involved in Patel’s firing. What I do know is that Riley has neither resigned in protest nor raised her voice in outrage since Patel was dismissed on Friday.
Patel was actually one of two immigration judges fired Friday who had been involved in high-profile immigration cases. The other, Nina Froes, had ruled similarly that Trump officials had no right to detain Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder who’d been involved in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. There’s another New England angle as well — Froes’ court is based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. The New York Times reports:
Ms. Patel, like many immigration judges interviewed by The Times, said the Trump administration had made it clear that it wanted more immigrants ordered deported.
“It was a pressure I at least tried to actively resist,” she said in an interview. “All people in the United States are entitled to due process, and everyone deserves to have their cases adjudicated fully and fairly.”
According to The Boston Globe (sub. req.), Patel “was nearing the end of her two-year probationary period” when she was fired. “Even though I was expecting it, it was still sort of shocking,” Patel told the Globe. “The consequences are immediate.”
The Globe reports that 113 immigration judges out of more than 700 have been fired since January 2025. The paper quoted Patel as saying:
It’s creating this climate of fear where judges are worried that if they misstep and do something that’s out of line with what the administration wants, they’re more subject to firing. That can erode judicial independence, it can erode due process, and it can make people more likely to be ordered removed from this country.
Unlike most judges, who are part of the independent judiciary, immigration judges are considered members of the executive branch and are appointed by the attorney general. “The judges there need more judicial independence,” Patel told the Times in speaking about her former colleagues.
This is the way repression works. Just as international students learned from the Öztürk and Mahdawi cases that the price of avoiding arrest and detention is to refrain from their First Amendment-protected rights to write and to protest, immigration judges have learned from Patel and Froes that they should place Trump’s agenda above the law if they want to hold onto their jobs.
Like Hillary and Bernie in 2016, or Grady Little’s decision to send Pedro Martinez back out for the eighth, the media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s decline in 2024 is going to be litigated forever.
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The latest example came Friday night on the “PBS NewsHour,” when Geoff Bennett asked Jonathan Capehart why coverage of Donald Trump’s mental state hasn’t matched similar coverage of Biden’s decline two years ago. Here’s how it went down:
If you’ve canceled your subscription to The Washington Post because of the rightward lurch of its opinion section, the decimation of the newsroom or both, I have news that might surprise you: The paper is involved in a vitally important First Amendment battle over its right to report on the Pentagon.
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Erik Wemple, himself a Post alumnus, reports in The New York Times that the Trump regime’s objection to a tip box the Post has been publishing has emerged as an issue in a lawsuit brought by the Times over the Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists.
Public domain Illustration of Jeffrey Epstein, left, and Donald Trump by Michael Gode.
The Jeffrey Epstein story is getting weirder, more disturbing and is moving ever closer to Donald Trump. The latest details come from Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who has done more to expose Epstein’s depravity than any other journalist.
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Brown’s latest comes in the form of two articles. The first, published on Friday, advances earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and NPR that the Justice Department had withheld some of the Epstein files regarding a woman who told the FBI that Trump sexually assaulted her around 1983, when she was about 13 years old. Those files have now been produced. Brown writes that in one of the interviews:
She said he unzipped his pants and forced her head to his penis. She said she immediately bit him and Trump struck her, the report said. She told the FBI agents that she bit him because he “disgusted” her.
In a follow-up interview, she said that after she rebuffed him, he “pulled her hair and punched her on the side of the head.”
On the brand-new edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we analyze media coverage of the war against Iran.
In other topics, we examine the implications of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will put CNN in the hands of Trump-friendly executives Larry and David Ellison, and the failure of Bari Weiss — who may soon be running CNN in addition to CBS News — to hang on to a Jeffrey Epstein associate. We also give the hairy eyeball to AI’s ongoing encroachment into journalism and weigh in with our Rants and Raves.
Now Roopal Patel, the Boston immigration judge who ended deportation proceedings against Öztürk, has been fired. And thus I’m awarding another New England Muzzle, this one to 
