Two federal courts reviewed the government\u2019s evidence against journalist Don Lemon and declined to approve his arrest last week. But nevertheless, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, persisted, desperate to please her authoritarian boss no matter what the constitution and law say or what her ethical obligations as an attorney require.<\/p>\n
Thursday\u2019s arrests<\/a> of Lemon and Georgia Fort, an independent journalist \u2013 like the recent raid<\/a> on Hannah Natanson, the Washington Post reporter \u2013 demonstrate the administration\u2019s lawless crusade against routine journalism. In normal times the expectation is that even when a journalist\u2019s conduct might technically fit the legal elements of a crime \u2013 jaywalking to get footage of a protest, for example \u2013 prosecutors will exercise their discretion and judgment to not apply the law in a manner that chills the free press.<\/p>\n Those assumptions are inverted now. Even when journalists\u2019 conduct is plainly non-criminal, prosecutors will work overtime to figure out some way to harass them, no matter how frivolous. Discouraging journalists from doing their job is not a side-effect they seek to avoid \u2013 it\u2019s the whole point. There is no telling what nonsensical legal theories the administration may advance if it decides to make an example of a reporter it doesn\u2019t like. The law and constitution are only marginally relevant \u2013 the only real rule is don\u2019t piss off Trump.<\/p>\n The two federal laws under which Lemon and Fort are reportedly charged are entirely inapplicable. One punishes<\/a> conspiracies to stop people from exercising constitutional rights. The journalists, of course, didn\u2019t conspire with anyone to do anything nefarious. They simply documented news. It\u2019s ironic that Lemon and Fort are accused of exactly what the Trump administration actually did \u2013 intimidating those who exercise core constitutional freedoms, like documenting news. In fact the very next section<\/a> of the criminal code prohibits deprivation of constitutional rights \u201cunder color of law\u201d, ie, by the government. Maybe the officials involved in Lemon and Fort\u2019s arrests should think about lawyering up.<\/p>\n The other law<\/a> being wielded against the journalists similarly requires an intent to interfere with religious worship (or access to reproductive health clinics), not the lawful documentation of news events by journalists who neither plan protests nor participate in them. Journalists follow the news \u2013 they don\u2019t decide where it happens. Protesters in Minneapolis chose to demonstrate at the church because the pastor was a higher-up with ICE \u2013 one of the federal agencies terrorizing their city and murdering their neighbors \u2013 not because some journalists told them to.<\/p>\n For those of us who have been monitoring press freedom abuses at the local level, it\u2019s all too familiar<\/p>\n These recent developments are unprecedented at the federal level \u2013 never before has an attorney general personally involved herself in pursuing vindictive criminal charges against journalists the administration doesn\u2019t like, who merely covered a protest. But for those of us who have been monitoring press freedom abuses at the local level (my employer, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) operates the US Press Freedom Tracker<\/a> database), it\u2019s all too familiar.<\/p>\n When Natanson was raided, we pointed<\/a> to the 2023 raid of the Marion County Record in rural Kansas on sham allegations that reporters broke identity theft laws, as well as the raid the same year of the Florida journalist Tim Burke\u2019s home newsroom over nonsensical computer crime charges for publishing news he found online.<\/p>\n This time, the first case that came to mind was that of the North Carolina journalists Matilda Bliss and Veronica Coit of the Asheville Blade<\/a>. It\u2019s a small, self-proclaimed leftist news co-op with which local officials have long feuded.<\/p>\n On Christmas night of 2021, Bliss and Coit went to a public park to document a homeless encampment sweep. Their filming of the obviously newsworthy event was routine, except that the park closed at 10pm, and police chose to conduct the encampment sweep after that time. They were arrested, charged and convicted, to the dismay of press freedom advocates everywhere \u2013 after all, they didn\u2019t decide where and when news would take place.<\/p>\n The cases against Lemon and Fort may be even weaker given the legal elements of the laws under which they were charged. But they underscore the same absurdity. What if police had shot someone at the encampment sweep (an even more realistic possibility at protests in Minneapolis)? Would reporters be expected to not report the news due to a curfew?<\/p>\n When an outlet like the Blade is targeted it\u2019s easy to assume that more mainstream reporters with larger audiences have nothing to worry about. Obviously, that\u2019s not so. We shouldn\u2019t give the Trump administration too much credit for creativity \u2013 their playbooks have been tested outside of the national headlines in places like Asheville.<\/p>\n The Blade is not the only example. Before Trump\u2019s administration sought to charge Lemon and Fort under a conspiracy law, nonsensically connecting dots between their first amendment-protected conduct<\/a> and alleged crimes by protesters, prosecutors in Atlanta tried (and failed) to convict people who had merely distributed pamphlets or held press conferences for \u201cconspiring\u201d with other activists opposing the \u201cCop City\u201d police training facility who allegedly committed real crimes. Trump\u2019s federal prosecutors tried something similar last year by indicting<\/a> the Texas activist Daniel \u201cDes\u201d Sanchez for conspiring to conceal evidence by transporting anarchist literature after a protest attended by his wife where someone else allegedly shot a police officer.<\/p>\n Once again, what starts on the fringes at the local level previews what\u2019s to come in the national news headlines. If local authorities like those who targeted Biss and Coit in furtherance of their own petty grudges don\u2019t like what they\u2019re seeing from the Trump administration, they need to take a good look in the mirror. And journalists need to be the ones to hold that mirror up to their censorial faces. Reporters are often reluctant to make themselves the story, but they\u2019re not the ones doing that, the government is.<\/p>\n Of course these days being seen as navel-gazing isn\u2019t the only thing journalists may be afraid of. It\u2019s understandable \u2013 no one wants to be arrested. But the Trump administration\u2019s unconstitutional prosecutions have repeatedly<\/a> failed<\/a> in court because judges and juries don\u2019t find them credible (unfortunately, the judges who rule against the administration have largely declined to sanction or hold in contempt attorneys who disregard the law \u2013 hopefully that\u2019ll change in Lemon and Fort\u2019s cases). We\u2019ve already seen in Minneapolis that public pressure makes a difference, even with this administration. Fighting back has a far better track record than self-censorship and capitulation<\/a>, which only invites more attacks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two federal courts reviewed the government\u2019s evidence against journalist Don Lemon and declined to approve his arrest last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":["post-449438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}