The president’s phantom threats

[Commentary] During his tumultuous campaign, Donald Trump declared war on the press, pledging to “open up our libel laws” and impose fines on critical journalists if elected. Within a month of taking office, he vowed to go after leakers, comparing them to Nazis, and urged then-FBI director James Comey to jail reporters who published classified information. In response, money began pouring into legal defense funds set up to protect the press from the looming legal onslaught and defend the First Amendment. In his first year in office, Trump has attacked the press relentlessly, describing critical media outlets as the enemy of the American people, fake, and failing. He singled out individual journalists by name. But the legal assault has not come. The US Press Freedom Tracker, a project of 30 organizations (including CJR) that documents press freedom violations in the United States, has logged 34 arrests and 44 physical attacks on journalists in the last year as of mid-January—but only one leak prosecution. 

So is President Trump all bark and no bite? Should the legal defense funds be put to other uses? Not so fast, cautions Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “We’re still in year one of the Trump administration and it does take time to build a case, identify a suspect, and make a decision to prosecute,” Aftergood pointed out. The clearest evidence that leak prosecutions might be coming is the public statements from Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “We have 27 investigations open today,” Sessions said in a House Oversight Committee hearing last fall. “We intend to get to the bottom of these leaks.”

[Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Alexandra Ellerbeck is the North America program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists.]