Trump Administration Reportedly Subpoenas New York Times Freelancer Over North Korea Story

Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo

President Donald Trump’s administration subpoenaed a freelance reporter for The New York Times over a story involving a failed top secret mission in North Korea, the paper said.

The previously undisclosed subpoena to reporter Matthew Cole was delivered to his home in New York by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigations and issued by prosecutors in Virginia, The Times revealed Saturday.

Prosecutors want Cole to reveal two years’ worth of contacts and sources, The Times said.

Cole “has dedicated his professional life to bringing official misconduct to light and informing the public about the workings of its government,”  his lawyer, David A. O’Neil, said in a statement.

The reporter “will not be intimidated from continuing that important work. He will defend press freedom and the First Amendment from this administration’s brazen attacks on journalists, and he will honor his commitment to his sources,” the attorney added.

News of the subpoena comes as the Trump administration sent shockwaves through the media by subpoenaing four journalists from The Times over their reporting on security issues with the new Air Force One.

The administration went so far as to seek phone records for those journalists and their relatives.

The Department of Justice was later forced to withdraw the subpoenas issued to reporters Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, and Eric Schmitt.

At the time, Judge Arun Subramanian of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, grilled the government’s lawyers and  questioned whether prosecutors had even followed the legal standards for subpoenaing journalists.

Trump had claimed the subpoenas were only intended to find “leakers,”  claiming earlier this month he didn’t “know what’s appropriate and what’s not.”

“We’re not after journalists. We’re after leakers,” Trump told reporters.

“We’re after people that are cowards, people that are unpatriotic, people that are treasonous, in many cases, and the way you find them is through the journalists… If it’s something having to do with national security, you tell the journalist, ‘Who is it?’ and we have a long way to go with that case.”

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