The New York Times denounces that the government tried to spy on the emails of its journalists. Both the Trump and Biden administrations repeatedly tried to access the emails of four of their journalists through the account managed by Google.
The American newspaper ‘The New York Times’ has denounced that the last two administrations of the USA have tried to appropriate the content of the emails of four of its journalists to find out their sources, in the continuation of carrying out similar actions with the ‘ Washington Post ‘and the chain CNN .
The Justice Department has not explained what it was investigating , but the identity of the four reporters implies that it refers to classified information in an April 2017 article in relation to the investigations carried out by the now former FBI Director James Comey during the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations imposed a gag order on the media’s top executives, finally lifted on Friday, according to attorney David McCraw . The gag order prevented executives from revealing the government’s efforts to confiscate the records even to executive editor Dean Baquet and other newsroom officials.
Via google
The initiative came to light after a final , ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the Justice Department to seize email records from Google , which operates the Times’ email system, and which had resisted the effort to obtain the information.
The disclosure came two days after Biden’s Justice Department notified the four journalists that the Trump administration, in search of their sources, had secretly confiscated months of their phone records, as it already did with the ‘Post’ and CNN.
Baquet has repudiated the behavior of the Trump and Biden administrations for their actions, and described the operation as an assault on the First Amendment . “Google has done the right thing, but we should not have reached this point,” he lamented.
The Biden administration tried to delay the execution of the order “on multiple occasions in recent months” and then voluntarily acted to withdraw it before it was recorded in court records, “Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley explained in a statement. to the newspaper in which he reiterates the White House’s commitment to press freedom .
Peter Barzilai is a high school pitcher and college rower turned longtime World News journalist. Peter has also written for Buzz Feed and Huffington Post and many other major publications, Peter Loves everything about sports and loves to write on trending topics and he is WideWorldMag member since 2017.