Attorney general will discuss Trump administration media probe with leaders of CNN, WaPo, NYT

Leaders from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post will meet with US Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday to discuss the Trump administration’s controversial leak investigation that involved seeking reporter records from all three media outlets.

The planned meeting comes after the revelation that Department of Justice officials took aggressive steps to obtain 2017 phone records, and in some cases email records, of reporters at the three outlets, including CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr.

In an extraordinary step, a gag order was placed on CNN general counsel David Vigilante to keep a leak probe from being disclosed to the public, or even to Starr.

CNN Washington Bureau Chief Sam Feist, who will be attending the meeting on Monday, provided details during Sunday’s broadcast of “Reliable Sources.”

Feist said Garland’s previous statement that the Biden Administration would never use the same tactics against the media as Trump’s DOJ officials isn’t enough to fix the problem.

“What we’re asking the attorney general tomorrow is to try to bind future administrations,” Feist said. “Don’t just send a memo. Change policy.”

Feist told CNN Chief Media Correspondent Brian Stelter that the Trump DOJ gag order on Vigilante lasted 11 months. Feist said he doesn’t think that the three news organizations caught up in the probe were chosen by accident.

“These are the organizations that were at the top of [Trump’s] list of enemies of the American people,” Feist said. “Whether Merrick Garland knows the details of how that came about, we don’t know, but we’re certainly going to ask.”

Feist pointed out that tomorrow’s meeting will take place one day after the 50th anniversary of The New York Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

“Our goal is to make sure that the Pentagon Papers and other stories of extraordinary public interest could be published in the future,” he said. “It is to protect the freedom of the press now and in the future.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified the source of the original reporting. Additionally, it misidentified some of the reporters who were involved in the probe.