Can Trump Put Journalists In Jail?

Sources

Allen, Jonathan. “Trump Threatens to Jail Journalists in Hunt to Find Leaker of Iran Fighter Jet Story.” NBC News, April 6, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-iran-press-conference-jail-journalist-fighter-jet-pilot-rcna266958.

PBS News. “Supreme Court Rejects Appeal from Online Citizen Journalist over Her Arrest in Texas.” March 23, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/supreme-court-rejects-appeal-from-online-citizen-journalist-over-her-arrest-in-texas.

“Reporting on Info Illegally Obtained by 3rd Parties | The Reporters Committee.” The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, n.d. Accessed April 7, 2026. https://www.rcfp.org/resources/reporting-on-information-illegally-obtained-by-third-party/.

Romero, Simon. “La Gordiloca: The Swearing Muckraker Upending Border Journalism.” U.S. The New York Times, March 10, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/us/gordiloca-laredo-priscilla-villarreal.html.

Spirit, Lara. “Meet the Influencers Running the Pentagon Press Corps.” December 4, 2025. https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/legacy-media-influencers-running-pentagon-press-dlpwsg2mq.

“Villarreal v. Alaniz.” SCOTUSblog, n.d. Accessed April 7, 2026. https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/villarreal-v-alaniz/.

Vogus, Caitlin. “Publishing Government Secrets Shouldn’t Be Illegal.” Freedom of the Press, February 20, 2024. https://freedom.press/issues/publishing-government-secrets-shouldnt-be-illegal/.

Transcript

Hi it’s Tuesday, April 7th, 2026, you’re tuned in to Why, America? I’m your lawyer friend Leeja Miller. Journalists are under attack by the White House, the Pentagon, and across the country, and there are growing calls from all those entities to begin criminalizing journalists for the mere act of asking questions. That should be deeply troubling for everyone concerned with the preservation of our waning democracy and is a signal for what’s to come not just for journalists but for the free speech protections of everyone, especially leftists being targeted for “domestic terrorism” charges. It’s all connected.

Before we get into that, I want to just note that this morning around 7am Trump put out one of his most deranged Truth Social posts yet and not in a fun haha he’s crazy kind of way but in a I am scared to see what the next 12 hours brings kind of way. He said, quote “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!” Trump’s deadline for Iran to open the strait of Hormuz is tonight at 8pm eastern time. This man is unwell and surrounded by people who won’t tell him no, so today my thoughts are with the people of Iran while this shit plays out on a global stage in a way that truly none of us have any control over at this point. Israel has warned Iranians not to take trains today, Iran for its part has now completely cut off all indirect communications after Trump’s threat this morning and has threatened to start attacking beyond the region. Trump over the last week or so has doubled down on his threats to attack civilian infrastructure like bridges and power plants. And just so we’re clear attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Period full stop there is no negotiating or arguing out of it it’s a war crime. Trump doesn’t care if he commits war crimes, he literally said that, but just so WE all know, it is a war crime, it is completely beyond the pale, and the continued war in Iran is going to fuck up global supply chains for a long time to come, not to mention of course the deep human suffering that is happening because Trump decided to pick a fight that we had absolutely no business starting. This is a war of choice. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu chose to do this. And it is turning the United States into a pariah and alienating all our allies who want nothing to do with this. Just a reminder that NATO is a defensive alliance, it is meant to provide defensive support among NATO member nations so that if one of them gets attacked all of them will act to defend the attacked nation. It is not an offensive alliance, there is nothing that obligates NATO nations to get involved in a war of aggression that was instigated by a member state. No one is coming to save us and I hope to God Europe stands up to the US and not only refuses to get involved but rescinds access to airspace and military bases the US has been granted by certain European countries. This regime will go up in flames, at this point it’s just a matter of how much of the world we take down with us. The more alienated and isolated the US becomes, the better for the world, honestly. So Iran is absolutely on my mind right now, I just don’t often report on it because there is nothing I can really add, there’s not much depth or nuance happening it’s just back and forth threats and no one knows what will happen or how it will end.

So today I want to talk about a topic I care deeply about and that is the First Amendment. Because even if this country is crumbling, we’ll need to understand the law in order to build it back better, and I think the First Amendment is one of the best examples of aspirational democracy at work, and the First Amendment protections we have historically enjoyed in this country have been one of the bulwarks protecting and growing this democracy. And journalists have always played a deeply important role in any revolution, uprising, or movement. The information gatherers and disseminators, the ones who hold the government to account, again it is oftentimes aspirational and our legacy news outlets do sometimes fail us on that front, but the idea of a free press and the protection of journalists is still one of the cornerstones of a functioning democracy and of successful movement building. And this regime knows that and it has gone to great lengths to stymie the honest reporting and truth gathering of our journalists in ways that are growing more dire by the day.

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This headline from NBC helped inform my reporting on this issue, “Trump threatens to jail journalists in hunt to find leaker of Iran fighter jet story.” Using the Ground News browser extension, I can get helpful background information on this publication in one quick glance. To get the big picture, I can click on Full Coverage, which will show me coverage of the same story from publications across the political spectrum.

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Let’s just get a lay of the land because in this current news cycle it is so easy to really get lost in the noise of it all so let’s step back and assess the situation for what it currently is. Legacy or mainstream media whatever you want to call it has spent the last 30 or so years conglomerating with zero government oversight, and somehow ramped it up to 11 over these last couple years. Now we have six companies that own most of our media, I don’t just mean news media I mean all media created in the United States, mostly it’s created by companies that are all owned by six different parent companies. Over the last year we’ve watched Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison do as much further damage as possible through a merger between Skydance and Paramount in 2024, so Paramount Skydance now owns Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, Showtime, etc etc etc but also CBS, including CBS news and has made concerted efforts to swing CBS news coverage, including on shows like 60 Minutes, further to the right by hiring right wing overseers including Bari Weiss, a self-proclaimed Zionist fanatic who founded The Free Press, a glorified substack that Paramount Skydance bought for a truly inexplicable $150 MILLION dollars. And now Paramount Skydance has offered to buy up Warner Bros Discovery for around $111 BILLION DOLLARS, this coming on the heels of the Warner Bros and Discovery merger back in 2022, so if that merger goes through that means that in the span of 4 years 4 giant media companies will have merged down to 2, and Larry Ellison, as a major investor in his son David’s media empire, will own at least a stake in Oracle, a major cloud processor that AI companies rely on that has grown astronomically in recent years, as well as Skydance Paramount which owns CBS and Comedy Central, which I’m including because we’re increasingly getting our news from places like The Daily Show, as well as CNN which is controlled by Warner Bros Discovery, and TikTok, another key source where people get their news these days. Then you have Jeff Bezos overseeing the Washington Post, Elon Musk overseeing twitter, another major source where people get their news, Mark Zuckerberg overseeing Meta, whose Instagram and Facebook are also major sources of news, and Google overseeing YouTube where hi you are getting your news right now. So a few billionaires control the newsgathering and the algorithms that in turn control the vast majority of the information we’re all exposed to on any given day, which is way more information than any other time in human history has ever been exposed to. And the people in power know how important it is to control those levers in order to control the narrative because it’s all about the PR.

So we have officially trained and hired journalists working fewer and fewer jobs and more and more conglomerated publications or for pennies at independent news agencies on the one hand, and you have, on the other hand, a growing cadre of quote unquote independent journalists who actually have no formal training in journalism or anything really but who figured out how to pick up a camera and create content that people find engaging. And increasingly it is these independent sources, these youtube commentators, hi yes including me, that more and more people are relying upon for their news because legacy news media has betrayed our confidence by being more aligned with advertising dollars and the whims of billionaires than with everyday people and readers, and so we are looking for sources we can trust more. And unlike a faceless journalist behind an article or a personality-less news anchor behind a desk, you and I can form a parasocial relationship where you’re gonna trust me more. And thanks to our failing school system and the just general lack of understanding by the populace about good news gathering practices, ethics, media literacy, etc., you have people masquerading as journalists able to sell trumped up stories that play to the confirmation biases and fears of their bases. Someone like Nick Shirley, a far right YouTuber who came to Minneapolis to supposedly “expose” the fraud at daycare centers here, got some personal security services and a camera crew to follow him around, and showed up in the middle of the day at daycare centers and was shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, when they wouldn’t let a group of strange men with cameras into their childcare centers. And the video got MILLIONS of views across social media and provided all the proof a lot of viewers needed to be convinced of a massive cabal of fraudulent Somalis running rampant throughout the city. To be clear, THERE IS FRAUD, but Nick Shirley did not uncover it, I made a whole episode about it. But this provides a really stark example of the types of bunk “investigative journalism” that gets the masses riled up and that convinces people that things are true when they actually very much are not what they seem from some clever editing and “on the ground reporting.” And this isn’t to say that citizen journalists and independent content creators who talk about the news are inherently bad. I’m one of them. I’m just saying people are not particularly thoughtful or careful about WHO they trust with giving them the news. And while there are many people who try to operate within the confines of ethics and the law, there are MANY MANY people who exploit this public trust to make a quick buck and cozy up to powerful people in our government.

And the right has spotted this and tapped into it in a way the left has failed to do, and this second Trump presidency has taken this relationship with independent influencers to a new level. A few examples include early last year when a group of right wing influencers were invited to the White House and given “Epstein Files” binders that had already publicly disclosed information in them. Then there was the Antifa round table where Trump sat with a group of right wing influencers while they went around in a circle and talked about all the ways in which Antifa had victimized them, devoid of any facts, proof, or adherence to any journalistic standards. There was the moment during Hilary Clinton’s closed-door Epstein testimony when the entire proceeding had to be paused when it was revealed that Lauren Boebert had sent right wing content creator favorite Benny Johnson a leaked photo of the proceedings. And then in December the Pentagon released a new set of requirements for journalists that barred them from seeking out information the Pentagon did not want released. Instead of complying, every major news organization, INCLUDING FOX, handed in their press passes and vacated the building. In their place, a new crop of “journalists” have come in. This includes One America News Network, including their star reporter disgraced former Congressman Matt Gaetz, a network called RedScare, Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, far right political commentator Jack Posobiec, a right wing Catholic publication called LifeRiteNews, and more, all interfacing with 26 year old Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, who used to work for Russell Vought-founded think tank Center for Renewing America, truly a parade of horribles. That is who now has inside access to the Pentagon. Serious reporters are still able to get information, they still have their sources, but they have been barred from posing serious questions during press conferences and accessing the inside of the Pentagon. And it is the posing of serious questions that I want to talk about, because not only are the people running our country trying to dodge hard questions by pushing out the media and journalists that would be asking those questions, they are not stopping there. Trump and his goons understand the power of the media and of journalists. So they want to go further. They want to fully criminalize anyone who steps out of line.

Over the weekend, the US military conducted an incredibly risky mission to rescue an airman who had been shot out of the sky and landed in Iran. His presence in Iran had been reported on before the US was able to make that rescue. In a press conference yesterday, Trump threatened to root out the media company and the journalist that broke the news and do whatever he can to jail that reporter. To put the reporter in jail for reporting the news. That was just the latest in a long long litany of threats Trump has thrown at reporters for asking hard questions or reporting on things he didn’t like. And of course he has a long track record of suing news publications for publishing stories or videos he doesn’t like, and many of those publications have bent the knee over the last year, often settling court battles they could have won or attempting to pre-empt the lawsuits by pulling shows or stories off the air. Trump knows the threats work, and often threats are all he needs to chill the freedom of the press and bend the major news media to his will. And when it’s a major corporation getting sued, whether it ends in settlement or a protracted court battle, the news organizations can handle the lawyers fees that come with that. But especially for independent journalists or journalists who potentially face CRIMINAL charges for doing their job, there are fewer options, creating even more fear and silencing important journalistic work.

And we’re seeing the pervasive bullying and the silencing of journalists from the White House and the Pentagon on down to the states. And last week the Supreme Court declined to weigh in on the practice. The case, Villarreal v. Alaniz involves a citizen journalist in Loredo, Texas, Priscilla Villarreal, who goes by the name La Gordiloca on her Facebook page of over 100,000 followers. She reports on local news in Loredo and Webb County, and is often critical of police departments and local officials. She often would livestream to her audience–her original Facebook page was shut down, but she has another one that she continues to post from. She reports on car crashes and local gossip, but also legitimately helped to uncover fraud and other sketchy stuff going down in her community. A New York Times profile of her in 2019 called her work “muckraking”, but she was often uncovering stuff long before local newspapers did. Back in 2017, Villarreal texted a source at a local police department with questions about events she knew had happened in her community. That source provided her with the information, which she then posted on her Facebook page to her followers. Six months later, she was arrested for posting the information under an obscure Texas law that criminalizes the quote “misuse of official information.” The law had never been enforced in Webb County in the 23 years it had been on the books. The District judge dismissed the case against her, stating that the statute was unconstitutionally vague. Villarreal then sued the officials involved in her arrest for violating her First Amendment rights first for arresting her for asking questions, which is protected under the First Amendment, and also for retaliating against her for her past reporting. Her lawsuit was dismissed due to a finding that the public officials had immunity from prosecution because they were acting in their official capacity. The 5th Circuit, a notoriously conservative circuit, after some technical back and forth with the Supreme Court, ultimately agreed that the officials had qualified immunity. And Villarreal appealed that decision back up to the Supreme Court, which last week denied her petition without providing any comment or reasoning, which means that the 5th Circuit’s order still stands, meaning that Villarreal cannot receive any type of redress for the wrongs committed against her because the officials who did the violating of her First Amendment rights are protected by qualified immunity. The lone Supreme Court justice who bothered to put pen to paper to justify their decision with any effort at all, was Sonya Sotomayor, who dissented from the court’s decision to deny her petition to be heard.

And I think it’s worth discussing this case because it also lays out how easy it is for public officials to target journalists and face no consequences for it. As Justice Sotomayor lays out in her dissent, quote “To defeat a claim of qualified immunity, an individual must show that an official violated her constitutional rights, and that the official had “fair warning that their conduct violated the Constitution.”” This is a really REALLY high bar, because it gives officials a ton of leeway to play stupid. The burden rests on the wronged individual to prove that the official had “fair warning that their conduct violated the constitution.” To be able to point to something and say the official should have known their conduct would have violated my constitutional rights. And especially by this Supreme Court this has been interpreted to mean that the claimant better have a really good case to be able to point to and say see, this has happened before, there was a case about it, the official should have known this was wrong. And if there’s nothing on point, or the public official can poke enough holes in it to say mmm I don’t knoooow it seems like there’s no way I could have known this was against the constitution…. Then they get qualified immunity. Which seems backwards, right? Like yes we want public officials to be able to do their jobs without fear of retribution but should we not also hold them to a HIGHER standard because they’re public officials? Like should they not be MORE informed about the laws around their conduct, ESPECIALLY the constitution, if they hold those positions of power? I mean we could go on for hours about why qualified immunity is such fucking bullshit, maybe an episode for another day??

Anyway, Justice Sotomayor argues that even with that high bar the conduct of the officials clearly violated Villarreal’s First Amendment rights such that qualified immunity shouldn’t apply here, she should be able to move forward with her claim. In a dissent Sotomayor wrote for a different case decided the same day as Villarreal, a case involving qualified immunity for an excessive use of force case against a police officer, Justice Sotomayor pointed out the distressing trend at the highest court in the land, quote “In the past, I have noted the “troubling asymmetry” in this Court’s “unflinching willingness ‘to summarily reverse courts for wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity’ but ‘rarely interven[ing] where courts

wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity.’”

In the Villarreal dissent, Sotomayor also lays out why this case is so fucking important, especially right now. Quote “This case implicates one of the most basic journalistic practices of them all: asking sources within the government for information. Each day, countless journalists follow this practice, seeking comment, confirmation, or even “scoops” from governmental sources. Reasonably so. “A free press cannot be made to rely solely upon the sufferance of government to supply it with information.”” And she lays out what the law says about what journalists are allowed to do, which is also important to reiterate here because it’s NOT what Trump and his goons would have you believe. Quote “If an official voluntarily chooses to convey information, three things are clear. First, only in the rarest of circumstances can the government prevent or punish the information’s publication. [She cites to cases that require there to be a state interest of the highest order and stating there is a heavy burden to show justification for the restraint of the publication] Second, the government is free to discipline the official, the very person it hired, trained, and supervised in the handling of confidential information. Third, the government certainly cannot punish the journalist simply for making the request.” “By arresting Villarreal, rather than solely disciplining the employee for any wrongdoing, county officials took this “everyday journalism” and transformed it “into a crime.””

Now the Villarreal case was based on a Texas state statute, but at the federal level, there has been a concerning use in the past of the Espionage Act to prosecute people for reporting on confidential information, even when that information was obtained again through routine, non-criminal journalistic activity. To be clear, the line is essentially about the journalist’s conduct. Did the journalist do something illegal to obtain the information? Did they steal it? That’s where it gets murky. But when it comes to the Espionage Act, it’s less clear, because that World War I law criminalizes the unauthorized dissemination of “national defense information.” Frankly there is no case law for me to point to here, there’s never been a Supreme Court case to clarify whether journalists face criminal liability if they publish national defense information they don’t have authority to publish. Because, again, if they obtain the information through regular journalist activities, like sending a question to the source, then typically that would be protected First Amendment activity to turn around and publish it. But Trump and his goons LOVE finding these little areas of the law that are untested and pushing through lawsuits to get the Supreme Court to weigh in and create binding precedent that will last for generations to come. So you have to assume that there are lawyers with lawsuits tee’d up and waiting for the perfect scenario to test out the Espionage Act claims against a journalist. And this publication of the downed airman over Iran over the weekend could be the perfect scenario. Trump and his team have not disclosed who that journalist is or what publication broke the news, I couldn’t find that information, the regime seems to be hunting for it themselves, but it would present a great opportunity for the Trump regime to officially criminalize basic journalistic practices like asking questions. It shifts the burden onto journalists to know whether or not the information they have access to is “legal” for them to publish, when that burden should be on the public officials they are speaking to to know whether or not they’re allowed to divulge the information. To give you an example of the absurdity that would ensue if journalists were able to be punished for obtaining information from officials who should know better, that could potentially open the door so that the journalist who was accidentally added to that signal chat last year, remember signal gate, all those months ago?? Yeah if we open that door then that journalist could potentially be CRIMINALLY LIABLE for being accidentally added to a signal chat. Just to give you an example. It would have a profoundly chilling effect on the ability of journalists to do their job.

And that is especially important in this regime because we are seeing historic levels of leaks. This is something historian Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out repeatedly lately–we are seeking a LOT of leaks in this regime, which is a good indication that there are fractures happening inside that we can’t see. That there is dissent within the ranks. That people are unhappy with Trump and with the regime’s policies, and that’s important. It’s important to pay attention to what is leaking and to who is doing the leaking. And a lot of the leaks are coming from the Pentagon and the military, because they know what they’re being ordered to do is wrong. But instead the Trump regime wants to divert that attention and the responsibility away from public officials and onto the backs of journalists, and to criminalize journalists for the act of asking questions. They’ve already kicked them out of the Pentagon press room, they already have the billionaire media owners in their pockets and under their control, they already silence the mainstream media through the threat of civil lawsuits, defamation lawsuits, but criminalization takes it a step further. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 25 years under the Espionage Act before Obama commuted her sentence. That was a different scenario, as she was in that case the government official who did the divulging of information and that activity more clearly falls within the statute, as opposed to journalists who asked questions and got information. But there are VERY public examples of the severity of an Espionage Act conviction, and that has a very profound silencing effect if journalists are on notice that they could be criminally charged, arrested, under the Espionage Act, for the act of asking questions. It’s happening at the state level and the feds are gunning to criminalize journalists at the federal level as well. And this is connected with the feds trying to crack down on quote unquote “Antifa” and criminalizing people for their adherence to a purported ideology. This puts a double target on the backs of left-leaning journalists, which is further amplified by the fact that this regime thinks any journalist that isn’t a far right conspiracy theorist is a left-wing antifa nut job. This is something I am keeping a very close eye on, as these attacks continue to ramp up against the First Amendment protections that journalists need to do their jobs, and their job is so so important at a time when it is more pressing than ever to speak truth to power and hold the government to account.

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from last week about the erosion of the rights of trans people across the country.