Trump Justice Dept. seized phone records of 4 NYT reporters

It is the third instance in the last month in which a news media organization has disclosed that federal authorities seized the records of its journalists in an effort to identify sources for national security stories published during President Donald Trump’s administration.

President Joe Biden has said he would not allow the Justice Department to continue the practice of obtaining reporters’ records, calling it “simply, simply wrong.”

Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said the department notified the newspaper on Wednesday that it had obtained phone records for the four reporters last year and that it had tried to obtain non-content email records as part of “a criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”

The newspaper said the records that were seized covered a nearly four-month period in 2017 and belonged to reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt. Lichtblau has since left the newspaper.

The Justice Department did not disclose which article it was investigating, according to the newspaper. But the period covered by the phone record seizure encompasses an April 2017 story from the four journalists that described the decision-making of then-FBI Director James Comey during the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and described a classified document obtained by Russian hackers.