On the Monday, February 9, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast:The Trump administration has been pushing back on the press in unprecedented ways by banning outlets from White House access, raiding a reporter's home and even arresting journalists. Are these actions even legal?
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Dana Taylor:
It started with the banning of the Associated Press from certain White House events over the refusal to use the term Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico. Then there was a recent FBI search of a Washington Post reporter's home. And then in January, two journalists, including former CNN host, Don Lemon, were arrested following an immigration protest at City's Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. What's happening to freedom of the press?
Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Monday, February 9th, 2026. PresidentDonald Trumpwasn't particularly friendly to the press in his first term. In his second term, he's been downright openly hostile towards specific reporters and outlets in his Oval Office briefings. Should the media fight back? And if so, how? Here to help us dive into all things First Amendment is RonNell Andersen Jones, professor of law at the University of Utah. It's good to have you here, RonNell.
RonNell Andersen Jones:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Let's start with this latest story involving two reporters covering a recent church protest in Minnesota. Both have now been released. Can you give us some of the context here?
RonNell Andersen Jones:
Yeah. These two journalists, one, a local Minneapolis journalist and the other former CNN journalist, Don Lemon, accompanied protestors to the church in Minneapolis. The protestors were going to the church to protest a pastor there who is an ICE official. They documented and interviewed people who were there, both parishioners and protestors and the pastor, although it wasn't the pastor who was the subject of the protest.
And then later were charged for violating two federal laws. One, a law that bans disruptions at houses of worship. And the other, a law that makes it a felony punishable up to 10 years to disrupt the exercise of constitutional rights of other people here, the exercise of the freedom of religion. And it was an extraordinary move. Never in the history of the country that I can find have journalists been charged under either of those statutes. And at an early stage, the government sought to charge them and a magistrate judge and an appellate judge declined to issue the arrest warrants saying that these acts of journalism warrant criminal behaviors or conspiracy to commit criminal behaviors, but this represents an aggressive move on the part of the administration to seek the grand jury indictment against them and to move forward with a criminal action against them on these charges.
Dana Taylor:
Beyond the rights of these individual reporters, it's hard not to assume that even if a judge dismisses the charges, the signal to the press from this administration is possibly intended to intimidate. For reporters working with larger established organizations like USA TODAY, there are teams of lawyers to fight the charges, but for freelancers who don't have access to those resources, these arrests may very well make them think twice next time. What are you hearing on this front?
RonNell Andersen Jones:
This is a grave concern for press freedom advocates, both domestically and internationally who are watching some of these developments. The individual arrests themselves are concerning, but the wider messaging is what's most concerning. There is a clear First Amendment doctrine that refers to the chilling effect. It's the notion that these sorts of actions by the government that infringe on freedom of speech or freedom of the press aren't just having an impact on the individual journalists here who are the targets of the government. They're having and are designed to have a wider impact on everyone else who is potentially practicing journalism and the sources who are potentially working with those who are practicing journalism.
The idea is that it has this ripple effect and that those who think that they couldn't afford the legal battle that might be on the other end of it or who in this instance don't want them to be criminally charged will think twice before they engage in behavior that is critical of the government or that might be aggressive investigative journalism. And the overarching effect of this, the fear is that it quells important government on matters of public concern because people are making front end calculations to sort of stop the kind of coverage that they engage in.
Dana Taylor:
The ACLU or the American Civil Liberties Union has long championed freedom of the pressed causes. What are they saying?
RonNell Andersen Jones:
So lots of civil rights organizations, including the ACLU are condemning these sorts of moves. The concern that they're expressing is that this is part and parcel of a wider Democratic backsliding, that there's an interrelationship between press freedom and the backsliding of democracy more generally, that it's central to our conversations about self-government and the kind of policies that we want to have and the kinds of viewpoints that we want to advance with our government to be able to have a free flow of news coverage. The concern here that has been expressed by lots of these civil liberties organizations is that these become tools for government to avoid transparency or to reshape truth. And those sorts of concerns are broader than the individual rights of particular journalists. TheSupreme Courthas said lots of times that press freedom rights really aren't about special rights for journalists. They're about the rights for all of us. The journalists are standing in our stead and engaging in that behavior on our behalf. And so there's a wider democratic concern that's at play there.
Dana Taylor:
RonNell, I want to shift now to the recent FBI search on that Washington Post reporter's home. What happened there?
RonNell Andersen Jones:
The Department of Justice got a warrant to search the home of a Washington Post reporter named Hannah Nadinson. The search was broadly executed. They took laptops and a cell phone and a smartwatch and recording devices and a portable hard drive that the Washington Post says contained multiple terabytes of information, something like 30,000 emails, took all of this in this search of her home. A search of a journalist's home is a very big deal and really an unprecedented move and is governed by federal law in a way that is making this a real challenge. And all of the sort of dynamics about the wider chilling effect that we were just discussing come into play again here.
The concerns are not just the target of the individual search, but all of the sources who might be swept up in that search. So that case is progressing through the court both to challenge the individual search, which press freedom advocates are concerned violated a clear federal law, but also to think about some of the wider constitutional concerns that are at play when we think about the Espionage Act, which is the statute that is likely to come into play here.
Dana Taylor:
And how have the Washington Post and the administration responded?
RonNell Andersen Jones:
So the administration's explanation is that they are investigating a very serious charge of an espionage act violation by another person, a potential source of this Post reporter. That individual was apparently a government contractor who is alleged to have misused, mishandled confidential classified information that he came into contact with over the course of his work. And the government has said that there were illegalities involved and that they were investigating those illegalities, and so they needed to search the reporter's home in order to tackle them. The Washington Post and the reporter have noted that there is a federal law. It's called the Privacy Protection Act, and it has a fairly strict ban on searching newspapers and reporters, homes, and newsrooms for work product and documentary materials that were gathered by the reporter in the course of news-gathering. And there are only very, very narrow exceptions. One problem that exists here is that the government itself didn't address that law.
And so tussling with what exception it exists, I think is a part of the ongoing court battle here. One exception that does exist to that law is if the journalists themselves are the target of the investigation, that is they are suspected of committing a crime, then those searches are legal. And one large concern that press freedom advocates now have is that this might signal that the Justice Department believes that the journalist herself could somehow be implicated under the Espionage Act. That would be a radical expansion of the treatment of the Espionage Act and would be fraught with a lot of First Amendment concerns that we've discussed over the last decade in thinking about the scope and contours of that act.
Dana Taylor:
I also mentioned the White House ban on AP reporters to certain events last year because of their refusal to use Trump's preferred Gulf of America terminology. Of course, as a wire service, many hundreds of outlets around the world rely on their coverage to share with their audiences. So that came with a big economic cost to them. Did the AP ever get their access back? And if so, what did they have to do to lift the ban?
RonNell Andersen Jones:
Yeah, this case has been challenged in the courts. Initially, a lower court judge who was a Trump appointee ruled in favor of the AP and said that while the White House didn't need to open things up to reporters more generally, once they had done so, they couldn't engage in brazen viewpoint discrimination, eliminating the access on the grounds that the president didn't like that they refused to use his preferred words and phrases. The Appellate Court in DC heard this case as a procedural matter over the last summer and signaled that they would reverse when they got to the merits of the case, suggesting that this is at the President's discretion, that this isn't a public forum, and that particularly now that the White House Correspondence Association doesn't oversee this pool. The president himself and the White House itself does so. They sort of signal that they might see this as the equivalent of offering up an exclusive interview or an invitation to a private event, and that if you get the invitation, you get it.
If you don't, you don't. The undercurrent of concern for press freedom advocates is that it is messaging that those who favor the president or the administration will have access and those who do not won't, which raises concerns for the sort of free flow of information on matters of public concern to people across the country.
Dana Taylor:
The Pentagon also implemented a new media policy last year forbidding any reporting with the DOD with any sources that were not officially sanctioned. As our listeners might imagine, investigative reporting on defense issues almost always involves confidential sources. What happened after this Pentagon announcement?
RonNell Andersen Jones:
Yes. This was a really rare instance of the entirety of the media really banding together to push back on this. A number of news organizations gathered together to issue a statement against it, opposing this policy, ABC and CBS and NBC and CNN, but they were also joined by Fox News. A lot of organizations across the media spectrum suggested that this was a bad policy and it was problematic. The policy itself really required them in order to keep their press passes, to sign on that they understood that soliciting information from a military official was tantamount to committing a crime, which sort of felt to them like it was a criminalizing, doing something as basic as seeking news tips. And dozens of reporters who had been there for a very long time, essentially all of the core of the Pentagon Press Corps surrendered their badges rather than submitting to these conditions.
It was seen by press advocates as a really powerful show of support for press freedom, but of course what it leaves as a vacuum. We're left without the folks who had the knowledge and the experience and the insight into coverage of defense and military issues that have been there for a long time. A little more than a month ago, the New York Times filed suit against the policy, arguing that it violates the Constitution's due process and free speech and press freedom provisions. That case remains in the courts.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, I want to bring up the highly controversial settlement that CBS News made with the president after he sued them for airing what he called, "Nothing but fake corrupt anti-Trump propaganda." Despite publicly issuing a statement that the suit was completely without merit, the network settled with Trump for $16 million. Meanwhile, an $8 billion merger between Paramount Global, which owns CBS News and Skydance Media was awaiting approval from the FCC. Tell me about the suit and what message it sent to other media outlets that Trump has sued.
RonNell Andersen Jones:
The CBS suit is actually just one of a really quite large number of suits in which Trump appears as a plaintiff in either defamation cases or cases that are similar to defamation cases in that they are civil suits that challenge a decision to run something that cast the president in a light that he found disfavorable. The President of the United States right now is one of the most prominent and most prolific defamation plaintiffs in the country. In addition to CBS, we've seen suits against ABC and the BBC and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Pulitzer Board and the Des Moines Register. He's been a very active litigant in cases that are designed to punish and to push back on the coverage in these spaces.
So we have this real environment in the defamation law space that is quite unique from anything that we've seen, and it's part and parcel of this wider framework of the presidential pushback against the press.
Dana Taylor:
It's good speaking with you. Thank you so much for being on the excerpt RonNell.
RonNell Andersen Jones:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, her production assistant. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Was the FBI's search of a Washington Post reporter's home legal? | The Excerpt
