TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on Jan 14, 2015

The U.S. Justice Department today issued revised guidelines for obtaining records from the news media during criminal leak investigations, the Associated Press reports. Changes include the creation of new levels of review that must be completed before a journalist can be subpoenaed and deletion of rules that had governed when news organizations could challenge subpoenas or search warrants. Media outlets had complained that the language was vague. Today’s move comes just weeks after the department formally abandoned a yearlong effort to compel a New York Times reporter to testify in the trial of a former CIA officer accused of disclosing classified information.