Last week, President Donald Trump launched a new assault on the First Amendment by sending swarms of subpoena-wielding FBI agents to the homes of New York Times journalists, demanding that they reveal sources to a recent story about security concerns regarding his Qatari-gifted jet. But while Trump may be making an intimidating show of force, a former federal prosecutor says that his attack is likely already doomed for two reasons his Justice Department should have realized.
This is according to former assistant US attorney Elie Honig, who on Tuesday examined the legal context of a White House attempting to force a journalist to give up its sources. According to legal precedent and obvious facts here in the present, writes Honig, the president has a flimsy case.
According to Honig, “The Justice Department’s own internal policy — most recently updated in April 2025, during the current Trump administration — exposes just how abusive the Times subpoenas are. The newly revised Justice Manual specifies that subpoenas should be served on journalists only as ‘an extraordinary measure to be deployed as a last resort’ in a case of ‘substantial importance’ to law enforcement or national security.”
Honig says this makes it clear that there are two problems, writing, “First, forget about a case of ‘substantial importance’ — the Times’s reporting barely poses any security risk at all. The Times didn’t reveal war plans or expose an undercover agent or publicize information about an ongoing crime or disclose details about potential domestic vulnerabilities to foreign attack. In fact, it was already widely and publicly known that Trump had flown to Turkey on the Qatari plane and that the switch back to the original Air Force One happened before his return home. All the Times added was that the change in aircraft was ‘a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran.’”
“Crucially,” Honig elaborates, “the Times did not report anything about the specific nature of those security concerns around the Qatari plane, or where weaknesses might exist. Nobody with bad intentions could realistically use the information in the Times story to do anything malicious, beyond rolling their eyes that Trump had accepted the dubious foreign gift in the first place.”
“Second,” writes Honig, “it’s doubtful the Justice Department tried less intrusive measures before deploying the ‘last resort’ — the Trump DOJ’s own words — of subpoenaing journalists. Did investigators first make any effort to get information about the apparent leaks from other evidentiary sources? Did prosecutors give the journalists a chance to negotiate their disclosures, or perhaps to voluntarily provide certain limited information? Given how quickly this all unfolded — the Times story broke on July 8, and subpoena-wielding agents came knocking two days later — it seems DOJ broke its own rules.”
The Times has filed a motion to block the subpoenas. While Honig says the aforementioned issues should be compelling to the judge, he concludes on a grim note, writing, “If the Times ultimately prevails, the Justice Department’s leak investigation could still continue but the reporters won’t have to give up their sources. But if the Times loses and the subpoenas are deemed lawful, things will get dark. Each journalist will have to decide whether to comply and reveal their sources to prosecutors — or to risk a contempt finding and imprisonment.”