In the last weeks of the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, the Justice Department fought a secret legal battle to obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters in a hunt for their sources, a top lawyer for the newspaper said Friday night.
While the Trump administration never informed The Times about the effort, the Biden administration continued waging the fight this year, telling a handful of top Times executives about it but imposing a gag order to shield it from public view, said the lawyer, David McCraw, who called the move unprecedented.
The gag order prevented the executives from disclosing the governments efforts to seize the records even to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, and other newsroom leaders.
Mr. McCraw said Friday that a federal court had lifted the order, which had been in effect since March 3, freeing him to reveal what had happened. The battle was over an ultimately unsuccessful effort by the Justice Department to seize email logs from Google, which operates The Timess email system, and which had resisted the effort to obtain the information.
The disclosure came two days after the Biden Justice Department notified the four reporters that the Trump administration, hunting for their sources, had in 2020 secretly seized months of their phone records from early 2017. That notification followed similar disclosures in recent weeks about seizing communications records of reporters at The Washington Post and CNN.
Mr. Baquet condemned both the Trump and Biden administrations for their actions, portraying the effort as an assault on the First Amendment.
Clearly, Google did the right thing, but it should never have come to this, Mr. Baquet said. The Justice Department relentlessly pursued the identity of sources for coverage that was clearly in the public interest in the final 15 days of the Trump administration. And the Biden administration continued to pursue it. As I said before, it profoundly undermines press freedom.
There was no precedent, Mr. McCraw said, for the government to impose a gag order on New York Times personnel as part of a leak investigation. He also said the government had never before seized The Timess phone records without advance notification of the effort.
A Google spokeswoman said that while it does not comment on specific cases, the company was firmly committed to protecting our customers data and we have a long history of pushing to notify our customers about any legal requests.
Anthony Coley, a Justice Department spokesman, 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. ... Last month, Mr. Biden said he would not permit the Justice Department during his administration to seize communications logs that could reveal reporters sources, calling the practice simply, simply wrong. (Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department had gone after such data in several leak investigations.)
The letter this week disclosing the seizure of phone records involving the Times reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt had hinted at the existence of the separate fight over data that would show whom they had been in contact with over email.
The letters said the government had also acquired a court order to seize logs of their emails, but no records were obtained, providing no further details. But with the lifting of the gag order, Mr. McCraw said he had been freed to explain what had happened.
Prosecutors in the office of the United States attorney in Washington had obtained a sealed court order from a magistrate judge on Jan. 5 requiring Google to secretly turn over the information. But Google resisted, apparently demanding that The Times be told, as its contract with the company requires.
The Justice Department continued to press the request after the Biden administration took over, but in early March prosecutors relented and asked a judge to permit telling Mr. McCraw. But the disclosure to him came with a nondisclosure order preventing him from talking about it to other people.
Mr. McCraw said it was stunning to receive an email from Google telling him what was going on. At first, he said, he did not know who the prosecutor was, and because the matter was sealed, there were no court documents he could access about it.