A note on what this newspaper can and cannot vouch for. The New York Times reported on Monday that the administration sought phone records belonging to its journalists and to relatives of those journalists. The Herald has not been able to independently confirm the element concerning relatives, and readers should treat it as the Times's reporting rather than as established fact until it is corroborated.

What follows is what is established, and it is substantial enough on its own.

The subpoenas

Earlier this month the Justice Department subpoenaed four Times reporters, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt, to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan. Federal agents delivered the subpoenas to reporters' homes.

The four had bylined reporting on the Boeing 747 given to the United States by Qatar and put into service as Air Force One. According to those stories, the Secret Service assessed that the aircraft lacked defensive countermeasures present on the older presidential plane, and recommended the president fly the older aircraft to a NATO summit.

The investigation is into who disclosed that assessment. The department has said the reporters are not themselves targets, and has defended the effort by noting that leak investigations are not peculiar to this administration. "Every administration has addressed the crime of leaking national security information," it said.

The rule that used to prevent this

The reason this is possible is a specific, datable decision.

In 2022 the Justice Department adopted a policy generally barring prosecutors from using subpoenas, warrants or other compulsory process to obtain journalists' records in leak investigations. In April 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded it.

Without that policy, the constraint on seeking a reporter's records is a matter of internal discretion rather than a standing rule. That is the whole practical significance of the change, and it is why press-freedom groups treated the rescission as more consequential than any single subpoena.

Both parties have done versions of this

This is where the story requires some discipline, because the temptation for any newspaper covering an attack on a newspaper is to write it as unprecedented.

It is not. The 2022 policy existed because of what came before it. In 2013 the Obama Justice Department secretly obtained records from around 20 Associated Press phone lines in a leak investigation, and that administration pursued leak prosecutions at a rate that drew sustained criticism from the same press-freedom organizations now objecting.

The honest description is that presidents of both parties have gone after leaks by going after reporters' records; that the practice was formally restrained in 2022; and that the restraint has since been removed. What is new is not the impulse, it is the absence of the rule.

The objections

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said the subpoenas depart from the practice of seeking information from reporters only as a last resort after other avenues are exhausted.

The Times has moved to quash the subpoenas, with its deputy general counsel arguing they were brought to punish the paper for its coverage. That is an allegation of motive, and it has not been tested in court.

Why an Angeleno should care

The subpoenas are in Manhattan and the reporters work in Washington and New York. The principle is not local, but its consequences are.

Reporting that depends on people inside government talking to journalists is how the public learns about things institutions would rather it did not: what happened in a jail, what an agency knew before a fire, what a department did after a shooting. Every story of that kind in Los Angeles rests on a source's judgment about whether talking is survivable.

A source weighing that decision reads the same news everyone else does. When the calculation shifts, it shifts here too, and it shows up not as a dramatic event but as stories that never get written.