Remember when the Trump administration pretended to care about free speech?
Cast your mind back to January 20, 2025, when, on his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” Or recall how Republican attorneys general sued the Biden administration for its collusion with social media companies to shadowban and deplatform so-called purveyors of misinformation.
Well, all of that stirring rhetoric looks hollow a year and a half into Trump’s second term. The latest outrage is a subpoena issued in the investigation of an alleged national security leak this month that landed on the front page of The New York Times. The story disclosed that the last-minute decision to fly the president and his entourage on the old Air Force One from the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, two weeks ago was in part because the new plane, a gift from the Qatari government, lacked the security features to defend against an attack.
It was no bombshell. The Times had already reported concerns that the new Qatari-gifted jet would not be properly retrofitted with the security gear necessary in the timeline the president had demanded to start using it. Nevertheless, the latest piece prompted the Justice Department to pull out all the stops. Not only did the DOJ subpoena the phone records of the Times reporters themselves, it also subpoenaed the phone records of two spouses of the reporters and one of the journalist’s mothers. The mother is a mental-health professional who has a right to keep her clients private. One of the spouses is a general counsel for a major law firm.
