Bruce Brown, third from left, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, speaks accompanied by Washington Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, left, Washington Post general counsel Jay Kennedy, CNN executive vice president and general counsel David Vigilante, right, after a meeting with Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice, Monday, June 14, 2021, in Washington.
Bruce Brown, second from right executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, speaks accompanied by Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan, left, Washington Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, Washington Post general counsel Jay Kennedy, New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, and CNN executive vice president and general counsel David Vigilante, right, after a meeting with Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice, Monday, June 14, 2021, in Washington.
Bruce Brown, right, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, followed by Washington Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, and others come out to speak with reporters after a meeting with Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice, Monday, June 14, 2021, in Washington.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Executives from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post met Monday with Attorney General Merrick Garland to protest the Trump-era Justice Department’s efforts to seize phone and email records of journalists.
After the hourlong meeting in Washington, Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the journalists explained how this represented an “existential crisis” for the organizations.
None of the media executives would answer questions, with Brown saying they had agreed the meeting was off the record. The meeting included the publishers of the Times and Post, A.G. Sulzberger and Fred Ryan, respectively, as well as Post executive editor Sally Buzbee and Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief.
The Justice Department said the group had a “productive conversation about the need for new rules” governing the ability of prosecutors to seek this material.
Records were sought for eight journalists at the news organizations, all of whom had worked on stories in 2017 involving investigations into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In the cases of CNN and the Times, a gag order temporarily put in place prevented lawyers at the news organizations from even telling their journalists what was happening.
News organizations are concerned that efforts to seek records that could reveal whom the journalists had used as sources would prevent such officials from revealing sensitive government information in the future.
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