NYT Reporters Subpoenaed Over Air Force One Reports
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- The Trump administration issued subpoenas Friday to multiple New York Times journalists following the paper's reporting on security concerns involving the new Air Force One — a jet President Trump received as a gift from Qatar that entered service last week after a $400 million retrofit.
- Federal agents delivered some subpoenas directly to the reporters' homes, with the orders seeking to compel testimony before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday.
- The subpoenaed NYT reporters are Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt, per the paper, which said the NYT report could not be independently confirmed and that there was no immediate White House or DOJ response.
- The NYT's reporting, citing anonymous sources, said the Secret Service urged Trump to switch to an older Air Force One at a Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England, and that the newer plane lacks advanced security features including antimissile capabilities — claims Trump denied to reporters on the flight, saying "I have a threat all the time. I'm No. 1 on their list."
- White House spokesman Steven Cheung called the new Air Force One "a state-of-the-art aircraft" with "high-level security protocols" and framed the Mildenhall stop as "distraction and misdirection" against enemies.
- NYT lawyer David McCraw said "the appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects"; the DOJ earlier this year issued and then withdrew subpoenas to Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters.
Why it matters: Federal agents physically showing up at journalists' homes to compel grand jury testimony marks an aggressive escalation in the DOJ's use of reporter subpoenas, a tool the department already deployed against the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal earlier this year before backing down. With four named NYT national-security reporters now legally compelled to testify about anonymous sources behind Air Force One stories the administration calls unfounded, the case tests whether press-shield norms can withstand a White House that publicly denies the underlying reporting while criminal-process machinery targets the reporters who produced it.
