Trump can’t stop White House leaks, so he’s coming for journalists
Despite his best efforts to govern like a tin-pot dictator, Donald Trump cannot control his own government. Now he is panicking. In the last week, his administration confirmed with its own actions that its problem with press leaks is not going away — no matter how many federal agents it sends to reporters’ front doors.
To be clear, Trump is not fighting leaks so much as trying to criminalize causing embarrassment. In a desperate, heavy-handed bid to plug the dam, on Friday night federal agents descended on the homes of several New York Times journalists. Their crime? Reporting about the president’s new, $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 “gifted” to him by the Qatari royal family.
From the moment the gift became public, national security experts immediately warned that the luxury liner used by a foreign royal family posed massive security risks and would require extensive, highly complex retrofitting — a process experts estimated would take at least two years. But Trump, impatient to show off his new “palace in the sky,” demanded the process be rushed, and when he flew the plane to a NATO summit in Turkey, the reality of his rush job caught up with him. The Secret Service intervened on the return trip because the Qatari plane lacked basic defensive countermeasures needed to protect the president amid escalating hostilities with Iran. So Trump boarded the old Air Force One for the flight home, leaving his $400 million foreign gift behind.
Now Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt find themselves facing the very real threat of being held in contempt of court and thrown behind bars if they refuse to hand over their sources for the information, a rare and consequential step that press-freedom advocates warn could have significant implications for investigative journalism.
Whenever the press exposes information that makes the administration look reckless, the response is increasingly subpoenas.
Whenever the press exposes information that makes the administration look reckless, the response is increasingly subpoenas. This time, FBI Director Kash Patel was reportedly dragged into the White House for an eight-hour Friday strategy session to micromanage the leak investigation. The fact that this operation was conducted from the seat of executive power, rather than FBI headquarters, is an egregious violation of the post-Watergate norms meant to keep federal law enforcement free from partisan political interference. But norms mean nothing to Patel, who recently sued The Atlantic over its reporting.
The Times, for its part, called the subpoenas “an extraordinary escalation” and said the appearance of federal law enforcement at journalists’ homes should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the First Amendment. If the administration were sincerely worried about classified leaks, it would focus on the people who allegedly mishandled classified material, not on the journalists doing the work of reporting. Instead, the government is demanding testimony that could make every insider think twice before telling the press something the public needs to know.
Notably, nobody in this saga has claimed the reporting is false. The White House isn’t accusing the Times of fabricating a story about the plane’s vulnerabilities. Instead the administration’s tactics echo the broader Trump-era pattern documented in earlier leak probes, including the Justice Department’s aggressive hunt for sources during Trump’s first term that swept up journalists and lawmakers’ records. Earlier this year, the DOJ issued similar grand jury subpoenas to reporters at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, then quietly withdrew them after both outlets pushed back — a reminder that these campaigns are not immovable legal inevitabilities but tests of institutional nerve.
Before the Times published its story on Trump’s new plane, a senior FBI official contacted a reporter and a senior editor at the newspaper and asked them to hold the article, framing it as a national security matter while declining to explain what the actual security issue was. The official also asked the paper to disclose its sources, but the Times refused.
The guidelines for targeting journalists have been steadily eroded under this administration. In 2025, then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued new guidelines that drastically expanded the type of information that could trigger a federal media crackdown, lowering the bar from strictly “classified” information to anything deemed “sensitive” or “protected.” Armed with this loosened standard, the administration has weaponized the justice system through investigations of leaks.
Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon and the DOJ are standing up a joint task force to hunt down and prosecute government leakers. In a video posted to X, Hegseth said he has delegated broad new authority to the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel to gather “all information, records and support” related to media leak investigations, and warned that anyone who discloses sensitive information will be met with “the full force of the law.”
But an administration that had actually cowed the media into submission wouldn’t need a joint task force.
Hegseth spent his first year at the Pentagon trying to strangle the press corps that covers him: evicting news organizations from their workspaces, imposing mandatory security escorts on reporters simply moving through the building and demanding journalists sign pledges that they would seek official pre-approval before publishing stories about his department. Reporters, to their credit, refused and walked out rather than sign away their independence. Lawsuits followed. Meanwhile, the information kept flowing. The embarrassing stories kept landing, and the man in charge of the Pentagon now needs the Justice Department’s help to plug a hole he cannot plug alone.
Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, put it perfectly when he noted that the administration’s obsession with leaks is actually a testament to the resilience of the press. “Every day, there’s another story coming out about what’s happening in this administration,” Baron told The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr. “They crank up their efforts to stop leaks [in response], going to an extreme that we haven’t seen before.”
After the Times published its story about Trump’s flight out of Turkey, the president, attuned to any public perception of weakness, did what he always does: He went to Truth Social to spin a ridiculous lie. He claimed he took the original plane “for old time’s sake” — a ludicrous tale, considering his unsentimental nature and the volume of complaints he has leveled against the aircraft — and sent the new luxury jet to a U.K. airbase to “honor our brave men and women of the Military” by letting them tour it.
But his diversions won’t work. They never really do. The embarrassing stories keep coming because the sources keep talking. Trump’s administration is a chaotic, paranoid ecosystem where officials constantly leak to either protect themselves, damage their rivals or sound the alarm on the shocking incompetence they witness every day. Try as he might, Donald Trump cannot subpoena his way out of the truth.
Read more
by Sophia Tesfaye