A federal appeals court barred the Trump administration Tuesday from accessing extensive LinkedIn chat records between multiple journalists and scores of their confidential sources as part of a national security leak investigation, arguing the government’s request would “deal a damaging blow” to First Amendment freedoms.
In a unanimous opinion written by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, the three-judge panel said the Justice Department’s demand that the professional networking site turn over 18 months worth of the journalists’ private chat history records without their knowledge amounted to a “substantially overbroad” maneuver.
The data sought by the DOJ would have unnecessarily revealed the identities of “a vast number of confidential sources” to the federal government, swaths of whom would have had nothing to do with the investigation at hand, Wilkinson reasoned.
“Confidentiality of sources is the lifeblood of a free press,” Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, wrote in the opinion. “Without confidentiality, press coverage would be pushed in the direction of official handouts and outside sources. Without confidentiality, the ability of journalists to report on events of large importance and governmental behavior of dubious legality and integrity could not help but be hampered.”
The ruling ordered a district court to significantly narrow the set of records the Trump administration can access in connection with the DOJ’s probe, which the agency opened after a news outlet published an article that revealed “a top-secret United States military operation in a foreign country” and included “classified intelligence,” according to Wilkinson. Neither the news organization nor the reporters who wrote that story have been identified.
The Trump administration has mounted aggressive bids to access reporters’ confidential source records across multiple leak investigations. A federal judge in February refused the Justice Department’s demand to search Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s laptop and other devices after they were seized from her home by the FBI in connection with a national security leak investigation.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department also served a subpoena on freelance journalist Matthew Cole in connection with his reporting on a failed, top-secret military operation in North Korea. Last month, a magistrate judge recommended enforcing the subpoena; a district court is slated to hold a hearing on the matter next week.
The LinkedIn data the Justice Department sought to obtain in this probe would have identified by name every person the journalists spoke to during an 18-month period but would not have included the messages themselves.
“During that time, the targeted journalists collectively published nearly 1,000 different articles on a variety of topics, less than five percent of which appear to have anything to do with the subject at issue here,” the panel wrote. “The metadata records sought [to] identify every user (and, necessarily, every confidential source) the targeted journalists corresponded with on LinkedIn concerning any of those stories.”
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Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter covering national politics and policy for MS NOW. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at SydneyCarruth.46 or follow her work on X and Bluesky.
Lisa Rubin is MS NOW’s senior legal reporter and a former litigator.
