Media leaders to meet with Garland to discuss leak investigations

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland will meet with leaders from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post on Monday to discuss the leak investigations that were carried out by the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Trump administration.

CNN reports its Washington bureau chief Sam Feist will be attending the meeting. Feist said previous statements from Garland promising that the Biden administration would not use the same tactics as the previous administration were not enough.

“What we’re asking the attorney general tomorrow is to try to bind future administrations,” Feist said of his expectations of the meeting with Garland. “Don’t just send a memo. Change policy.”

“These are the organizations that were at the top of [Trump’s] list of enemies of the American people,” Feist added. “Whether Merrick Garland knows the details of how that came about, we don’t know, but we’re certainly going to ask.”

In early June it was reported that the DOJ under the Trump administration and into the Biden administration secretly sought to obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters, later, under the Biden administration, imposing a gag order to prevent them from publicly revealing the probe.

Apart from looking into reporters, it was revealed last week that the Trump administration had subpoenaed Apple for records on accounts belonging to two Democratic representatives on the House Intelligence Committee as well as accounts belonging to their aides and family members.

Former Attorney Generals Jeff Sessions and William Barr as well as former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein have all claimed to have no knowledge of the secret subpoenas.

The DOJ announced last week that it would be launching an investigation into the Trump administration’s subpoenas for lawmaker’s records.

“The review will examine the Department’s compliance with applicable DOJ policies and procedures, and whether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations,” DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in a statement.