Floyd Abrams Sees Trump’s Anti-Media Tweets as Double-Edged Swords

Trump’s anti-media Twitter posts still serve as reminders of his campaign vows to “open” libel laws, his veiled threats to punish corporate owners of news organizations whose coverage he does not like and his occasional calls for leak investigations. They took on a more ominous tone as the Justice Department began considering whether to bring a case against WikiLeaks that the Obama administration decided against pursuing, fearing it would start a trend of prosecuting news organizations and criminalizing journalism.

If the Trump administration decides it has no such qualms, then the president’s tweets just might wind up being journalism’s great insurance policy. His Twitter trail could be a gift to lawyers for the news industry during leak investigations into articles that made the president mad enough to pick up his Android and tap, Tap, TAP! It could provide great grist for legal arguments that the investigations are less about prosecuting damaging leaks than they are about punishing journalists. That, at least, is the view of Floyd Abrams, the titan of free speech jurisprudence. Abrams is seeking to re-educate the public about the thing that stands between it and, say, becoming Russia: the First Amendment.