JUST IN: CNN General Counsel Says He Was Under Gag Order About Trump DOJ Efforts to Obtain Reporter’s Emails for Almost a Year
A new report from CNN reveals the lengths the Trump administration went to in trying to obtain the email records of CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr.
Last month news came out that the Trump-era Justice Department obtained Starr’s phone and email records, in between other reporting about the same happening to journalists at the Washington Post and New York Times.
CNN’s report Wednesday says that CNN general counsel David Vigilante was under a gag order “prohibiting him from sharing any details about the government’s efforts with anyone beyond the network’s president, top attorneys at CNN’s corporate parent and attorneys at an outside law firm.”
The New York Times reported recently that top executives at the paper knew about the DOJ’s efforts there, but were similarly under a gag order.
CNN reports the network went to court last September trying to “quash or narrow the order.” The legal back-and-forth continued into January. You can read more from CNN’s reporting here.
Vigilante appeared on CNN Wednesday and said that this order was “incredibly unusual.”
“I understood the gravity of the order, because I was familiar with them from some of our own coverage over the years,” he said. “Truthfully, I really did not have any idea what the government wanted, and candidly, to this day I don’t know, because it was such an opaque process.”
Vigilante detailed their attempts in court to narrow the request and said, “I think finally when Judge [Anthony] Trenga issued his ruling, after a lot of foot-dragging, we were able to reach a resolution.”
CNN’s report says on January 26th of this year, the DOJ “agreed to a much narrower disclosure and agreed that the July order would no longer be in effect going forward.”
Representatives of CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post will be meeting with Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday.
Vigilante said they want “more understanding of what happened” and remarked that he’s personally “skeptical that the factual predicate was really met.” He added that this is about creating a set of rules “so this situation is not repeated and we’re not dependent on the good graces of whatever incumbent office-holder there is.”
You can watch above, via CNN. Vigilante wrote a piece for CNN.com going into more detail, which you can read here.
