Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the rollback of regulations that have protected journalists and allowed government officials to anonymously leak information.
Bondi's order will give federal investigators the authority to use subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make “unauthorized disclosures” to journalists.
This comes after numerous leaks have damaged the Trump administration as leftist federal workers and officials have coordinated with leftist media outlets to spread damaging information.
The issue of leakers was so prolific during Trump's first term in the White House that Trump administration officials spent more time putting out fires than actually advancing Trump's agenda.
So far, Trump's 2nd term has seen much of the same damaging leaks, and the DOJ is now going to crack down hard on both journalists and the leakers feeding damaging information to damage President Trump and his agenda.
The Biden-era policy was put in place to protect journalists from having their phone records secretly seized during leak investigations. This regulation was strongly advocated for by the mainstream media and journalist advocacy groups.
With those regulations being trashed, the Trump administration is now introducing new regulations that will preserve journalistic freedom but not so much as to allow leakers to blatantly sabotage the White House.
The new regulations will compel journalists to respond to subpoenas “when authorized at the appropriate level of the Department of Justice.”
Furthermore, the new rules will allow prosecutors to use court orders and search warrants to “compel production of information and testimony by and relating to the news media."
However, in order to preserve journalistic freedom, the new regulations explicitly stated that journalists are "presumptively entitled to advance notice of such investigative activities,” and subpoenas are to be “narrowly drawn."
The Trump administration is committed to toeing the narrow line that will preserve freedom of the press while cracking down on political actors dedicated to stopping the Trump agenda through nefarious tactics.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been at the forefront of taking down leakers by announcing criminal referrals to the Justice Department against multiple individuals who were caught leaking sensitive information.
The Trump administration is going to throw everything they have at the leakers it can catch in order to dissuade other leftists in the federal government from throwing away their careers and lives to serve a political cause.
With these new regulations, the Trump administration is hoping to catch even more leakers and make more examples and stop the bleeding before it bogs down the rest of Trump's 2nd term.
