US secretly issued subpoena to access Guardian reporter’s phone records

Ed Pilkington reports:

The US justice department secretly issued a subpoena to gain access to details of the phone account of a Guardian reporter as part of an aggressive leak investigation into media stories about an official inquiry into the Trump administration’s child separation policy at the southern border.

Leak investigators issued the subpoena to obtain the phone number of Stephanie Kirchgaessner, the Guardian’s investigations correspondent in Washington. The move was carried out without notifying the newspaper or its reporter, as part of an attempt to ferret out the source of media articles about a review into family separation conducted by the Department of Justice’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz.

Read more at The Guardian.

h/t, Joe Cadillic

Update: When I tweeted a link to The Guardian’s story with a question about whether DOJ OIG trampled press freedom, Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel responded:

The Guardian story is misleading. DOJ IG got subscriber records not reporter’s phone records. While they suspected the record was that of a journalist, normally they would not have known. They could have gotten it w/o a subpoena, probably.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 13, 2022