PAM Bondi goes back the protections for journalists in the new Memo of the Department of Justice

Washington (AP) – The Department of Justice is taking energetic measures against information leaks to the media, with Attorney General Pam Bondi saying that prosecutors will once again have the authority to use citations, judicial orders and search orders to seek government officials who make “unauthorized revelations” to journalists.

New regulations announced by Bondi in a memorandum to the personnel obtained by News on Friday rescind a Biden administration policy that protected journalists that their telephone records were seized in secret during leakage investigations, a practice denounced for a long time by news organizations and press freedom groups.

The new regulations claim that news organizations must respond to the citations “when they are authorized at the appropriate level of the Department of Justice” and also allow prosecutors to use judicial orders and search guarantees to “force the production of information and testimony and relate to the media.”

The memorandum says that the members of the press have “allegedly the right to advance in the warning of such research activities”, and the citations must be “extracted.” Arrest orders must also include “protocols designed to limit the scope of intrusion into potentially protected materials or news collection activities,” says the Memo.

“The Department of Justice will not tolerate unauthorized disseminations that undermine the policies of President Trump, vicen government agencies and cause harm to the US people,” Bondi wrote.

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

According to the new policy, before deciding whether to use intrusive tactics against the media, the Attorney General is to assess whether there is a reasonable basis to believe that a crime has been committed and that the information that the Government seeks is necessary for prosecution. In addition, decide if prosecutors have first made reasonable attempts to “obtain information from alternative sources” and if the government has “followed negotiations with the affected member of the media.”

The regulations occur when the Trump administration has complained about a series of news that have removed the curtain from internal decision -making, intelligence evaluations and activities of prominent officials such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Tulsi Gabbard, director of National Intelligence, said this week that she was making a trio of “criminal” references to the Department of Justice for leaks of the intelligence community to the media.

Policy change also occurs in the midst of continuous scrutiny of the highest levels of the Trump administration over its own failures in the protection of confidential information. National Security Advisor Michael Waltz was revealed last month how to have inadvertently added a journalist to a group text using the signal encrypted messaging service, where the senior officials were discussing plans to attack the hutis. Hegesh has faced his own revelation drum for his signal use, including a conversation that included his wife and brother, among others.

In a statement, Bruce Brown, the Reporteros Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said in a statement that “strong protections for journalists serve the American public by safeguarding the free flow of information.”

“Some of the most consistent reports in the history of the United States, from Watergate to Wiretapping without a court order after September 11, were and continue to be possible because reporters have been able to protect the identities of confidential sources and discover and inform stories that matter people throughout the political spectrum,” he said.

The policy that Bondi is terminating was created by the then Agrisor General Merrick Garland following the revelations that the officials of the Department of Justice alerted journalists in three news organizations: the Washington Post, CNN and the New York Times, which their telephone records had been obtained in the last year of the Trump administration.

Garland’s new regulations marked a surprising reversal of a practice of the seizures of the telephone records that had persisted in multiple presidential administrations. The Obama Department of Justice, under the then General Agrisor Eric Holder, alerted News in 2013 that he had secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors in what the main executive of the News cooperative called a “massive and unprecedented” intrusion “in news collection activities.

After the recoil, Holder announced a revised set of guidelines for leakage investigations, including the authorization of the highest levels of the department before citations could be issued for media records.

But the department retained its prerogative to confiscate journalists’ records, and recent revelations to media organizations show that the practice continued in Trump’s department of justice as part of multiple investigations.

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