6/14/21 50 Years After the Pentagon Papers, the Press Faces A Different Threat

It was June 13, 1971 when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, an avalanche of secret government documents about the Vietnam War. It blew the lid off the stories that the federal government was telling about their reason for pursuing the war.

“Yes, everybody was lying but for different reasons and for different causes," says Daniel Ellsberg, who copied and distributed the papers. "In particular, a very large range of high-level doves ... were lying to the public to give the impression that they were supporting the president ... they would have spoken out at the cost of their jobs and their future careers."

The reckoning included Richard Nixon's resignation from the Presidency, and a wariness about government secrets that still feeds Americans' conspiracy thinking.

*

Today, Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland will huddle with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, which didn't exist 50 years ago, to talk about the excesses of the Trump Department of Justice.

Starting in 2017, Trump's DOJ demanded information about individual journalists who had made the President angry in some way, or whom Trump suspected knew the sources of embarrassing leaks from his administration.

Running down personal information on reporters is seedy to begin with, but Trump's DOJ had no scruples. They demanded phone and email records and used gag orders to silence the people they leaned on to obtain those records.

"Whether Merrick Garland knows the details of how that came about, we don't know, but we're certainly going to ask," says CNN's Washington bureau chief.

Biden's attorney general has already said that the DOJ will not be using such tactics -- but the publishers want a change in policy that will stick if another lout ascends to the presidency. We can only say, Godspeed.

What do you expect to hear from Garland? Should Congress pass laws that protect journalists from rogue Administrations in the future? How badly did Trump’s DOJ overstep? How bad was the cover-up?

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/13/media/merrick-garland-trump-doj-media-probe/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1ilqSPgL4Ptju8n_HiGCpzhBqxsi-eAeun11q6fsLlHY5xsD-So_YT3d8