Judge Very, Very Mad At DOJ For Sending Me, A Subpoena, To New York Times Reporters

Yep, very mad.

Courtroom sketch of DOJ lawyers trying to explain themselves to Judge Subramanian.

Have you ever wondered about your purpose in life? I didn’t. No existential crises here! No buying a boat and divorcing my wife and getting hair plugs in middle age for me! I knew who I was and why I was here from the moment a Justice Department flunky typed me up on a computer and sent me off to a judge for his signature.

That’s right, I’m a subpoena to The New York Times and my life’s purpose has been taken away from me by a woke federal judge.

Let me explain here. Not long ago, reporters at The New York Times broke a story that Donald Trump had insisted on flying his new Qatari bribe jet to the NATO summit in Turkey even though the plane had not been retrofitted with all the security measures that the jets that usually serve as Air Force One have. Once that leaked, the Secret Service made Trump leave Turkey on an old jet for security purposes.

This leak was hugely embarrassing to the infantile little shit. Or maybe he was just mad because he had to spend a few hours in a space that isn’t covered in so much gold that King Midas would suggest he take it down a notch.

Whatever the reason, Trump’s administration has gone on the warpath in search of whoever leaked to the Times. How embarrassed is the White House? The Times published its story on Wednesday, July 8. The Department of Justice then wasted zero time subpoenaing not just the phone records of the Times’s reporters, but their spouses and at least one reporter’s mother as well.

To top it off, DOJ made sure to deliver these subpoenas to the reporters at home on a Friday night for the extra “fuck you” factor.

In fact, reporting has it that FBI Director Kash Patel was sitting on the runway on Friday in his own federally-supplied jet, about to take off for Chicago for another knot in his endless string of abusing government resources for personal trips, when he was summoned to the White House to spend the day getting the investigation up and running personally.

And sure enough, Friday night, July 10, two days after the story was published, I was being handed to a Times reporter.

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Now, less than two weeks later, a federal judge told DOJ lawyers to quash me, or he would quash me himself. They had no choice, really. This is like being asked if you want to put your rabid dog down yourself or have Animal Control do it, subpoena-quashingwise.

That judge, Arum Subramanian, was piiiiiiiiissed off too. At a hearing on Thursday, he got DOJ lawyers to admit that yes, subpoenaing reporters to reveal sources is an absolute last resort to only be used when all other investigative methods have been exhausted. There is even a legal precedent for this, in another NYT case called The New York Times v. Gonzales, as legal journalist Chris Geidner explains here.

Under questioning by Subramanian, a DOJ lawyer admitted that — oopsie! — he had not known that Gonzales, with its instruction to seek journalists’ records only after it had “exhausted alternative investigative means,” was precedent. The judge couldn’t get over that one:

Judge: You were not aware of the leading case in this field?

Buckley: No.

This was all weird. Sean Buckley is the #2 guy (heh heh) at the Southern District of New York office, which is handling the investigation. Buckley is not some recently appointed Trump administration hack with no idea what he’s doing. He worked in the SDNY for nine years before he got the Deputy AUSA job. He should have known better.

On the other hand, maybe he was always a secret fascist. Who knows. Not me, I am but a humble (and now withdrawn) subpoena.

Anyway, this from NPR was also an important note:

In his answers, Buckley repeatedly made it sound as though the period in which the subpoenas were issued was frenzied, with little immediate sense of what other avenues to pursue.

Of course. The Trump administration wanted to use me to lash out and intimidate the reporters. They couldn’t care less what that means for the DOJ lawyers who had to go into court and defend serving me.

I feel so used. So betrayed. Maybe not “Ciara from ‘Summer House’ finding out that Amanda was in a secret relationship with West” betrayed, but betrayed nonetheless. At least my buddy Bill got a “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoon out of his brief time on Earth.

Eventually, the judge told DOJ it could withdraw me, or he would quash me. Let me give you my version of how that went:

JUDGE: Withdraw or quash?

DOJ: How about some bullshit compromise where we hold the subpoenas in abeyance for a couple of weeks while we do all the other investigative stuff we should have done first before issuing the subpoenas to journalists and their spouses and mothers?

JUDGE: What if I mention that your work is so unprofessional and shoddy and such an all-around fuck-up that I am strongly considering sanctioning you?

DOJ: Okay, we choose withdrawl.

JUDGE: Goooooooood answer.

This is all great for the journalists, I guess. But what about me? I was created to do one thing. One thing! And that one thing is to compel NYT reporters to come into court and reveal their sources in violation of all sorts of journalistic ethics and First Amendment protections. And this judge said, Nein. Mike Johnson is wrong; communism isn’t rising in America, it has already taken over.

Remember in Speed, when Dennis Hopper tells Keanu Reeves his life is wasted because he spends it preventing bombs from fulfilling their entire purpose of going boom? That’s me, the subpoena, getting tossed in the trash before the people I was issued to have to come to court.

Shoot, even pantry moths live long enough to get to bang a few times in their short lives. I just get people writing pissy editorials about me.

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That the judge pulled me the day before the White House Correspondents Association holds its annual (and this year, rescheduled) dinner to honor the First Amendment is especially rich. Trump is still going to be there as an honored guest. Reporters from the Times don’t attend this dinner, but so many other journalists will be sitting in the Waldorf, nibbling on canapés while Trump harangues them about doing their jobs as if a judge did not just one day prior tell his administration to suck it

Good times. Maybe the WHCA can leave a copy of me at every place setting, right next to those First Amendment pocket squares.

[Law Dork / NPR]

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