Lawfare Archive: Gabe Rottman on the Justice Department's New Guidelines on Press Subpoenas

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

From June 5, 2023: It's been about six months since the attorney general issued new guidelines on compulsory process to members of the press in criminal and national security investigations, and two officials of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press—Bruce Brown and Gabe Rottman—wrote a detailed analysis of the document in two parts for Lawfare.

Rottman joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to go through the document carefully: the long history that led to it, the shifting policies that have gotten more restrictive over the years since the Supreme Court ruled in Branzburg v. Hayes, the ramp-up of leak investigations and reporter subpoenas in the Obama and Trump administrations, and the new policy that creates a red line policy against them under most (but not all) circumstances. They talked about the document, about why the Justice Department has forsworn a historic and upheld authority, and about what it means for reporters and criminal investigations going forward.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Isabella Royo, Internet Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare
0:13.1	for October 25, 2025. On October 22nd, the Defense Department announced the launch of a new
0:19.4	Pentagon Press Corps, composed of
0:21.4	60 journalists from right-leaning media outlets. The announcement came a week after Secretary
0:26.2	of Defense Pete Heggzeth imposed strict new limitations for journalists, which the New York Times,
0:31.4	Fox News, and all but one of the other media outlets who regularly report on the Pentagon,
0:35.8	refused to accept. The controversial replacement of the
0:38.6	Pentagon Press Corps constitutes another flare-up in the fraught relationship between the Trump
0:43.0	administration and the press. For today's archive, I chose an episode from June 5th,
0:47.4	2003, in which Benjamin Wittes and Gabe Rotman unpacked the longstanding structural tensions
0:52.6	between the press and a different executive department, the Department of Justice. Wittis and Rotman unpacked the long-standing structural tensions between the press and a different
0:54.2	executive department, the Department of Justice.
0:57.2	Wittes and Rotman discussed the evolution of the press Justice Department relationship across
1:01.3	different administrations, the role of administration-specific Justice Department guidelines in
1:06.2	determining if and how journalists can be subpoenaed for confidential sources during leak investigations.
1:11.9	Then Attorney General Merritt Garland's unconventional move to issue guidelines that were relatively
1:16.5	protective of journalists and more.
1:35.4	I'm Benjamin Wittes, and this is the Lawfare podcast June 5, 2023.
1:43.6	It's been about six months since the Attorney General issued new guidelines on compulsory process to members of the press in criminal and national security
1:47.7	investigations. And two officials of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Bruce
1:54.2	Brown and Gabe Rotman, wrote a detailed analysis of the document in two parts for lawfare a couple of weeks ago.
2:03.2	Gabe Rotman joined me in the Goat Rodeo studio to go through the document carefully,
	...

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