Trevor Timm

What, if anything, is constraining the Trump Justice Department in its dangerous war on leakers, whistleblowers, and journalists? The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Freedom of the Press Foundation are teaming up to find out.

[Commentary] National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign Feb 13—just three weeks into the job—following the revelation that he lied to both the Trump administration and the public when he said he did not discuss outgoing President Obama’s sanctions on Russia with that country’s US ambassador just after the election. But here’s the important part: It turns out it wasn’t the lying that got him fired; it’s that his lying leaked to the press.

The Washington Post reported that the acting attorney general told the White House weeks ago that transcripts showed Flynn likely misled administration officials. It wasn’t until the public found out he lied—based on a torrent of leaks from inside the administration in the past week—that Flynn was forced out. Speaking to the press about confidential and classified material is a risky and often courageous move. Many people, especially those close to the Obama administration, were highly critical of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden in the past. But it’s now more clear than ever that we will need more people like them in the next few years if we really want to hold the Trump administration accountable.

[Trevor Timm is the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation]

[Commentary] Donald Trump's Outright Contempt for journalists and press freedom is well known—but in the past month he has outdone himself. In the span of a long weekend in mid-September, Trump threatened to sue The New York Times, his staff had a Vice reporter arrested outside a campaign event, and he blamed the New York terrorist bombings on “freedom of the press.” The weekend of Sept 30, Trump struck again. After the Times’ huge scoop detailing how he took an almost billion-dollar loss on his 1995 taxes, Trump’s lawyer threatened “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action” against the Times once more. By my count, it is at least the 11th time Trump has threatened to sue a news organization or journalist during his campaign for president.

[Trevor Timm is the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation.]

[Commentary] Donald Trump shocked a lot of people when he suggested (maybe sarcastically, maybe not?) that he hopes Russia is hacking the e-mails of Hillary Clinton so they can find the ones she deleted from her private server. There was another phrase, however, he used later in the day that didn’t get the same attention yet was perhaps more disturbing. While claiming he didn’t have anything to do with the hacking of his political enemies at the Democratic National Committee, he said: “I wish I had that power, man, that would be power.”

This really gets at the crux of why civil libertarians have been arguing for years that the National Security Agency has to be significantly curtailed. Even if you believe that the Obama Administration is 100 percent trustworthy and no one at the NSA under his watch has abused the agency’s vast spying powers (which, by the way, evidence refutes), the real danger is the infrastructure in place that would allow some future leader to wreak havoc. A future leader just like Donald Trump. In fact, this was the exact scenario that Edward Snowden warned about when he first went public in 2013.

[Trevor Timm is the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation.]

[Commentary] If you got angry in May when the National Security Agency, the White House and Eric Cantor's spy-friendly House of Representatives took a once-promising surveillance reform bill and turned it into a shit sandwich, I've got some good news for you: so, apparently, did many members of Congress.

Recently, in a surprising rebuke to the NSA's lawyers and the White House -- after they co-opted and secretly re-wrote the USA Freedom Act and got it passed -- an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives voted to strip the agency of its powers to search Americans' emails without a warrant, to prohibit the NSA or CIA from pressuring tech companies to install so-called "back doors" in their commercial hardware and software, and to bar NSA from sabotaging common encryption standards set by the government.

But the House's support of these new fixes, by a count of 293 to 123 and a huge bipartisan majority in the House, just put the pressure back on for the rest of the summer of 2014: the Senate can join the House in passing these defense budget amendments, or more likely, will now be pressured to plug in real privacy protections to America's new snooping legislation before it comes up for a vote. This all puts the White House in an even more awkward position. Does President Obama threaten a veto of the defense bill to stop this?