A screengrab from ‘Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist,’ featuring Timothy Burke
Credit: Netflix
Federal prosecutors withdrew an appeal this week that could have charged Tampa journalist Timothy Burke with wiretapping.
Burke allegedly obtained unaired clips of Kanye West—now known as the artist Ye—making antisemitic remarks in an interview with Tucker Carlson, and then sold them to Vice. He did so, prosecutors say, using a password obtained from a publicly-available website.
After the FBI raided Burke’s Seminole Heights office in 2023, the Department of Justice charged him with several crimes, including conspiracy, hacking, and wiretapping. In late-2025, the wiretapping charges were dismissed. Prosecutors then indicated their intent to appeal.
But on Wednesday, they withdrew their attempt to appeal the dismissal.
Burke’s lawyer, Mark D. Rasch, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that according to the DOJ, Solicitor General D. John Sauer must approve the appeal, or a notice to withdraw it.
Prosecutors never filed the appeal, says Rasch, which could indicate that Sauer did not approve it. There are currently no wiretapping charges against Burke.
Burke is still on the hook for one count of conspiracy and six counts of intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization.
Rasch told CL that the charges weren’t dismissed “with prejudice,” meaning that prosecutors could potentially try to bring those charges again. But he also said that the constitutional issues are too integral to the charges to fix, so he doesn’t anticipate a successful appeal.
“This represents a much broader attack being waged by the Justice Department on journalism and free speech generally,” Rasch told CL. “The goal here is to ensure that [journalists] cower and capitulate. This is meant to send a message out to others: ‘Don’t do journalism.’”
The feds aren’t the only ones trying to paint Burke’s journalism as something else.
The Tampa Bay Times’ top editor penned a lengthy column explaining that the publication refuses to call Burke a journalist, mostly because he also works as a media consultant. The Times—which recently launched a marketing service—said people working in public relations cannot also be journalists.
“It’s not really practical or possible to straddle both worlds at once,” Tampa Bay Times editor Mark Katches said in his letter. “… That mission [of objective journalism] would be compromised if we represented clients in politics or instructed businesses on messaging, even if we tried to keep separate the local stage from the national arena. It all blends into a murky soup.”
The Times’ own marketing agency instructs businesses on messaging.
“I think that has a little bit more to do with sort of a bit of editorial snobbery by legacy media,” Rasch told CL. “The truth is that people who are journalists are more than just people who have ink on their hands.”
Rasch maintains that obtaining newsworthy information and disseminating it publicly is categorically journalism. The ACLU, the Florida Press Association and the National Press Club agreed and also called Burke a journalist in a letter to the U.S. Attorney General.
“Courts have rightly warned against limiting the First Amendment’s press clause to established media outlets,” reads the letter, “a warning that is especially important as technological advances give rise to new forms of journalism while traditional news outlets close their doors at alarming rates.”
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This article appears in September 10 – 16, 2026.
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