Biden White House Disavows Knowledge of Gag Order in Leak Case - The New York Times - 0 views
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President Biden had declared last month that he would not let prosecutors go after reporters’ communications data, after disclosures that the Trump Justice Department had secretly seized phone data of Washington Post reporters and phone and email data of a CNN reporter.
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But Mr. Biden’s comment — which came before the Justice Department notified the same four Times reporters this week that it had secretly seized their phone records in 2020 — was seemingly off the cuff, and contradicted existing department regulations that dated to the Obama administration.
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Mr. Biden’s seemingly unequivocal vow never to let the Justice Department go after reporters’ records in leak investigations has made some veteran national security officials, including from Democratic administrations, uncomfortable.
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Mary McCord, who led the Justice Department’s national security division late in the Obama administration and into the first part of the Trump administration, argued that there should be flexibility to do so under certain circumstances, if all other methods of gathering information had been exhausted.
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Separately, the Justice Department informed USA Today on Saturday that it was withdrawing a disputed subpoena seeking information about who had read an online article about a February shootout in Florida in which two F.B.I. agents were killed. U
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That meeting occurred about three weeks after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland took office, and about two months before the Justice Department asked a judge to quash the order to Google.Mr. Coley has noted that “on multiple occasions in recent months,” the Biden-era department had moved to delay enforcement of the order and it then “voluntarily moved to withdraw the order before any records were produced.”
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The regulations make an exception to that requirement of advance notification only if “the attorney general determines that, for compelling reasons, such negotiations or notice would pose a clear and substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation, risk grave harm to national security or present an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm.”
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On Saturday, civil liberties and press freedom advocates condemned the sequence of events. Patrick Toomey, a senior staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, called the Justice Department’s actions “a disgrace.”