"More sweeping than we thought"

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department “secretly” obtained a CNN reporter‘s records related to phone calls and email, the network said on Thursday.

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The news comes less than two weeks after The Washington Post reported that Trump’s Justice Department secretly got three Post reporters’ phone records and tried to get their email logs.

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“This is a big story that just got bigger,” Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement. “That a journalist from another news organization had communications records seized by the Trump Justice Department suggests that the last administration’s efforts to intrude into reporter-source relationships and chill newsgathering is more sweeping than we originally thought.”

  Politico

I think you can expect there to be a constant drip of stories about what fascistic, despotic, and illegal things the Trump administration did in the last four years.

Brown called on the Justice Department to give a “detailed explanation” of what happened and why, and how “it plans to strengthen protections for the free flow of information to the public.” [Justice Department spokesperson, Anthony] Coley told POLITICO that department leaders are convening with reporters “soon” to “hear their concerns” and “further convey Attorney General [Merrick] Garland’s staunch support of and commitment to a free and independent press.”

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The Post’s story on Russia, which indicated then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak had said he discussed Russia-related topics with Jeff Sessions, a Trump campaign adviser at the time, drew the ire of Trump in the early months of his term. Two weeks after the story, Sessions — who at that time was attorney general — announced a crackdown on a supposed “culture of leaks.”

A Justice Department spokesperson, Marc Raimondi, said that the goal of the investigation involving Post reporters wasn’t to prosecute reporters.

“The targets of these investigations are not the news media recipients but rather those with access to the national defense information who provided it to the media and thus failed to protect it as lawfully required,” Raimondi said.

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Under guidelines changed in 2013 under then-Attorney General Eric Holder after controversies about the department’s use of law enforcement mechanisms involving journalists, the DOJ is required to notify journalists about searches within 45 days, or 90 days under pressing circumstances.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.