Trump defends DOJ subpoenas of NY Times reporters; Google also was targeted

President Donald Trump on Friday defended the Justice Department’s subpoena to New York Times reporters. Google He also received a subpoena in the same criminal investigation related to the leak of information about the president’s new Air Force One plane.

Trump’s comments about the subpoenas came a day after the Justice Department told a New York federal judge that it was withdrawing those subpoenas for grand jury testimony from Times reporters and their phone records. The Justice Department is investigating leaked concerns about security measures on the president’s Qatar-donated plane, the Times reported in early July.

Judge Arun Subramanian He warned prosecutors on Thursday that he would rescind the subpoenas if they did not voluntarily withdraw them.

“We’re not after journalists,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday. “We’re going after leakers. We’re going after cowardly people, unpatriotic people, in many cases treacherous people.”

“And the way to find them is through journalists,” the president said.

“This person must be found, and the way to find him is to tell the journalist; if it has something to do with national security, ask the journalist, ‘Who is he?’ say. ” said Trump.

“And we have a long way to go in this case,” he added.

Around the time Trump spoke, a letter Google lawyers sent to Subramanian on Friday was unsealed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by order of a judge.

The letter revealed that on July 16, Google was issued a subpoena by a grand jury on the orders of the Department of Justice, seeking “subscriber information associated with the phone number.”

The subpoenas were sent to Google a day after Times lawyers moved to quash subpoenas sent to its reporters.

Google also received an order on July 16 not to disclose to the telephone number subscriber the fact that it had received a subpoena for its information.

In their letter Friday, Google’s lawyers asked Subramanian to vacate a privacy order signed by a magistrate judge, arguing that the order violated the First Amendment to the Constitution, which governs the right to free speech.

In the letter, the government admitted that “during its application to the NDO, it mistakenly used language stating that the investigation was ‘not public’ when the fact of the investigation was public.” ” it was said.

According to the court file, Subramanian agreed to the request to evacuate the NDO.