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      in US Politics

      Trump spied on journalists. So did Obama. America needs more press freedom now | Trevor Timm

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      The US Department of Justice is under increasing fire for the still-unfolding scandals involving the secret surveillance of journalists and even members of Congress in the waning days of the Trump presidency. Some of these actions were even initially defended by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice.In response to the growing scandal – and the scathing condemnations from the surveillance targets at the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN – the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has vowed the DoJ will no longer use legal process to spy on journalists “doing their jobs”. The Times, the Post and CNN are set to meet with the justice department this week to seek more information on what happened and extract further promises it won’t happen again.But mark my words: if Congress does not pass tough and binding rules that permanently tie the DoJ’s hands, it will happen again – whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House.Promises are no longer enough. In many circles, these scandals are being portrayed as the Trump White House run amok. While some in the Trump justice department may have been motivated by political vengeance, the problem is far bigger than Donald Trump, William Barr or even the party in charge of the White House.As the reporter Charlie Savage detailed in an excellent piece in the New York Times over the weekend, administrations in both parties have spied on journalists with increasing abandon for almost two decades, in contravention of internal DoJ regulations and against the spirit of the first amendment. Many people already forget that before Trump was known as enemy number one of press freedom, Barack Obama’s justice department did more damage to reporters’ rights than any administration since Nixon.So yes, Garland needs to immediately put his “no more spying on reporters” vow into the DoJ’s official “media guidelines”, which govern investigations involving journalists. If he doesn’t, he or his successor could change their mind in an instant. But, why should we just “trust” Garland’s pinky promise to not investigate journalists and politicians without an ironclad law?Leaks of confidential and classified information to journalists are vital to our democratic system, yet the DoJ often diverts huge resources to root out their sources. If you want an example, look no further than ProPublica’s recent investigation into the American tax system and how the wealthiest billionaires in the country pay little to no taxes. The series of stories sparked outrage across the country as soon as it was published. Garland leapt into action, vowing an investigation … only, he promised to investigate the leaker – not the tax dodgers.The rise of internet communications has opened the floodgates to authorities’ ability to spy on journalists and root out whistleblowers; they can figure out exactly who journalists are talking to, where, when, and how long; and they can silence media lawyers with expansive gag orders that can leave them almost helpless to appeal. And as the pandemic has rendered in-person meetings even harder than before, people everywhere are more reliant on the communications infrastructure that can betray them at any time.For real safeguards, Congress needs to act. Perhaps the fact that multiple members of Congress itself, including the representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, have now been ensnared in the DoJ’s leak dragnet will make them more likely to move than in the past.The irony is Representative Schiff and Representative Swalwell have of course been some of Congress’s most ardent defenders of surveillance – even during the Trump administration. They fought against surveillance reform that would put in more safeguards at the DoJ on multiple occasions. In Representative Schiff’s case, despite literally being the co-chair of the “press freedom caucus”, he inserted a provision into an intelligence bill that would even make it easier for the government to prosecute reporters who published leaked classified information.Being the victim of unjust surveillance sometimes tends to make even the most devoted surveillance hawks soften their stance. If Garland is promising to bar the surveillance of journalists for the purpose of finding their sources, Congress can simply pass a law holding them to it. Anything else at this point is just empty rhetoric.But there is another issue looming large over this debate, one that many seem hesitant to talk about. Garland has said so far that the DoJ won’t spy on journalists unless they are engaged in a crime. Well, the DoJ is currently attempting to make newsgathering a crime, in the form of its case against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.Assange is, to say the least, not popular in Washington DC and in mainstream journalism circles. However, the actions described in the indictment against him, most notably the 17 Espionage Act charges, are indistinguishable for what reporters do all the time: talk to sources, cultivate their trust, request more information, receive classified documents, and eventually publish them.News outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post already know what a threat the case is to their reporters’ rights; they’ve said so in public. However, it’s vital that they say this to the attorney general’s face. Right now, there is little pressure on the DoJ to drop the Assange charges, despite the fact that virtually every civil liberties and human rights group in the US has protested against them.If Garland bars surveillance of journalists “doing their jobs” but secures a conviction that makes journalists’ jobs a crime, his promises will ultimately be worse than meaningless. More

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      in Elections

      Birx hinted she wanted Trump to lose election, new book says

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      Dr Deborah Birx, then the White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, hinted to an Obama-era official shortly before the 2020 election she wanted Donald Trump to lose to Joe Biden.Andy Slavitt, a former acting chief of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, writes in a new book, according to CNN, that he spoke to Birx “to get a sense for whether, in the event of a strained transition of government, she would help give Biden and his team the best chance to be effective.“At one point, after a brief pause, she looked me in the eye and said, ‘I hope the election turns out a certain way.’ I had the most important information I needed.”Slavitt stepped down last week as senior adviser to the Biden pandemic response. His book, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response, is published on Tuesday.The book draws on conversations with Trump insiders. Slavitt, who also worked to fix the Affordable Care Act website, spoke to such figures in an informal role.“Her early optimism was long gone,” Slavitt writes of his meeting with Birx, according to CNN, adding: “At the end of October 2020, she was beyond all of that; she was downright scared.”Slavitt also writes of conversations with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who led the federal response. Slavitt says Kushner told him some governors “clearly don’t want to succeed” and had “bad incentives to keep blaming us”.Kushner’s view that governors should take the blame for US failures has been reported elsewhere. He is reportedly working on a book of his own.Speaking to the Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal podcast, Slavitt said he had “kind of a front-row seat” to the chaos of the US response, prominently including Scott Atlas, a Stanford medic but not an epidemiologist or infectious diseases specialist and an aggressive champion for Trump in the press.“I contacted the White House,” he said, “I contacted Jared Kushner, every one of my conversations with Jared Kushner and Deborah Birx, they’re in the book. And you know the job that they had to do was, essentially, at a bare minimum, acknowledge that we have a more serious situation than we have ever had.“Show a little bit of empathy, lead the country by asking for even a small amount of sacrifice. They didn’t do any of those things and they didn’t plan and put together a competent response and it largely it had to do with the person they all worked for.”Slavitt told the Daily Beast Birx “did some good things”. He called Atlas “a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster that Donald Trump created”.Deaths from Covid-19 have slowed dramatically as more Americans are vaccinated and society reopens. But under the shadow of Covid variants, vaccination rates are also slowing and the US is on track to pass 600,000 deaths this week.Slavitt reportedly writes that Birx, a respected public health official with a history in the fight against Aids before she joined the Trump taskforce, told him she had “no illusions” about the effect on her government career.Another official who came to mass media prominence as part of the Trump response, Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has continued to serve under Biden. Birx has not. More

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      Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany says she ‘never lied’ as Trump press secretary

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      The White House press secretary turned Fox News contributor Kayleigh McEnany has claimed she “never lied” while speaking for Donald Trump.Addressing a conservative group on Sunday, McEnany said of her first steps in the role: “And then there was the question, ‘Will you ever lie to us?’, and I said without hesitation, ‘No’, and I never did, as a woman of faith.“As a mother of baby Blake, as a person who meticulously prepared at some of the world’s hardest institutions, I never lied. I sourced my information, but that will never stop the press from calling you a liar.”The press has questioned the veracity of McEnany’s claims. So have political factchecking sites. For instance, Politifact gave McEnany a “pants on fire” rating last September after she told reporters: “The president never downplayed the virus.”She was responding to questions about reporting by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, to whom Trump said in March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold: “To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”Politifact said: “The record shows she’s wrong.”McEnany restarted White House briefings after more than 400 days without one under Stephanie Grisham. Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders also presided over a deterioration in relations between the press and the White House and, critics said, the relationship between the White House and truth.Reporting McEnany’s first appearance, on 1 May 2020, the Guardian said that “even on an assured debut, McEnany skated close to peddling dodgy information about Trump’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic (‘This president has always sided on the side of data’) and allegations of sexual misconduct (‘He has always told the truth’).”The Washington Post’s factcheckers put Trump’s final tally of false or misleading claims at 30,573.At the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Dallas, McEnany said she came up with a motto for her press operation: “Offense only.”“Because I knew what we were up against. Republicans always get the bad headlines, always get the false stories, always get the lies, if I can use that word, told by the press. There is one standard for Democrats and another for Republicans, and we must be on offense, confident, bold and willing to call it out. We cannot be silent.”Regarding supposed lying by the press, McEnany cited coverage of the clearing of Lafayette Square, intelligence on Russian bounties on US troops and the theory the coronavirus escaped a laboratory in China – all stories subject to evolving reporting.McEnany is one of a number of veterans of the Trump White House to have found roles at Fox News, where she is a commentator and co-hosts Outnumbered.But when she was press secretary, even Fox News cut away from her remarks when she advanced Trump’s lie that his defeat by Biden was the result of electoral fraud.In March, responding to news of McEnany’s new job, an anonymous Fox News staffer quoted by the Daily Beast referred to the 6 January attack on the US Capitol in calling McEnany “a mini-Goebbels” who “helped incite an insurrection on our democracy”.On Sunday, amid uproar over her claim never to have lied in service of Trump, she tweeted: “Haters will hate!” More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden to use Nato summit to atone for damage of Trump years

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      Three years ago it was Donald Trump who stunned Nato members at a summit in Brussels, warning that he may be prepared to pull the US out of the western military alliance if its other members did not increase their defence spending.At a summit in the same city on Monday, it falls to Joe Biden to repair the damage from four years of his predecessor’s freewheeling theatrics, although experts caution that the Trump era will have lasting consequences.Rhetorically, at least, the omens are favourable. The US president declared Nato’s article 5, under which an armed attack against one member is deemed an attack against them all, a “sacred commitment” last week.Similar language and a respectful tone, long a Biden trademark, are expected in the Belgian capital, not least because the US wants Nato, along with the G7, to take a more robust line against Russia, particularly on cyberwarfare, and even China, not traditionally seen as an opponent.US officials were confidently briefing before the summit that “this will be the first time that the Nato countries will be addressing the security challenge from China”.The alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has promised a new cybersecurity policy and has said relations with Russia, from where most hacking emanates, were at their lowest point since the end of the cold war.Karin von Hippel, the director general of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said: “Biden is arguably the United States’ most experienced foreign policy president. He really does value alliances and knows they are needed to tackle problems like China.“But Nato allies also know that four years can go by pretty quickly in world affairs. They know that Trump, or a politician like him, could return to the presidency soon. They have to imagine a world where the US is not there all the time.”Until Biden’s election, Nato had been paralysed or in retreat. Three years ago, Trump arrived late to a morning session and bulldozed into a discussion about Ukraine’s application for membership and the situation in Afghanistan with a theme of his own.The president accused the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, of refusing to spend more on defence and went on to declare that Nato allies would have to raise their spending by January 2019 or Washington would go it alone.No firm commitments were extracted in the emergency discussion that ensued and most leaders left hastily, but Trump held a press conference and declared, in a parallel universe, that the summit had been a great success. “I’m very consistent. I’m a very stable genius,” he said, repeating an already familiar phrase.Nato officials pared back the 2019 summit in London but Trump ensured it was even shorter anyway, storming out after a group of leaders were caught on video ridiculing his lengthy press conferences. The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was two-faced, Trump said, accusing Ottawa of not spending enough on defence.It was almost something of a relief that the coronavirus pandemic intervened in 2020, although Trump ordered the withdrawal of 12,000 US troops from Germany, a decision Biden has reversed. The idea that other Nato members should increase their defence spending and share more of the burden has, however, united a string of US presidents.At the Nato summit in Cardiff in 2014, when Barack Obama was president and Biden his deputy, members agreed to reverse cuts in defence spending and lift it above 2% of GDP. Helped somewhat by falls in GDP related to the pandemic, the UK will hit 2.29% in 2021 and France 2.01%, but Germany’s spending stands at 1.53%.Nor is Biden’s commitment to US militarism absolute. He followed through with Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, even though other Nato allies such as the UK would have preferred to continue the long-running peacekeeping mission.Stoltenberg was asked at a press conference on Friday whether Trump’s absence would allow other alliance members to go easy on defence spending. During his reply, he argued that the “transatlantic bond in Nato goes beyond individual political leaders”.Von Hippel, however, cautioned against over-confident talk at what is likely to be an upbeat gathering. “The threat of another Trump should make the Europeans less complacent,” she said. More

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      Pelosi: ‘beyond belief’ that Trump DoJ chiefs didn’t know of secret subpoenas

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      The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Sunday it was “beyond belief” that the three top justice department officials of Donald Trump’s administration had been unaware of secret subpoenas seeking private data from the former president’s political opponents.Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first pick as attorney general, his successor, William Barr, and the long-serving deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein have all claimed to have no knowledge of the alleged attempts by their department to harvest information covertly from leading Democrats during the investigation into whether Donald Trump and his campaign utilized links with Russia during the 2016 election, according to CNN.In expressing skepticism of their claims, Pelosi, a California Democrat, said on CNN’s State of the Union that the actions of a “rogue” justice department were worse than the Watergate scandal.“What the Republicans did, what the administration did, the justice department, leadership of the former president, goes even beyond Richard Nixon,” she said.“Richard Nixon had an ending. This is about undermining the rule of law. And for these attorneys general, for Sessions, at least, to say they didn’t know anything about it is beyond belief.”In another new development, the New York Times reported on Sunday that Donald McGahn, Donald Trump’s White House counsel, was also the subject of a subpoena issued by the justice department.The newspaper said that Apple had told McGahn last month that it had released details to the FBI of accounts he had with the company, but it had not informed him of what information was handed over.The reason for the subpoenas was unclear, the Times reported, noting that a department of justice (DoJ) inquiry into a sitting White House counsel was an extraordinary move.McGahn testified to Congress and to the Russia investigation led by the special counsel Robert Mueller into alleged collusion between the Trump administration and Russia. McGahn resigned in October 2018 after falling from Trump’s favor by allegedly refusing the president’s order to fire Mueller.The DoJ announced on Friday it had launched its own internal inquiry into the scandal, first reported by the New York Times, which the newspaper said had begun when prosecutors subpoenaed Apple early in the Trump administration as the DoJ was investigating apparent leaks of classified information.Their secretive inquiries were allegedly focused on at least a dozen people connected with the House intelligence committee, including the Democratic members Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell. The Biden White House on Friday called the news “appalling”.Barr revived the languishing investigation soon after he succeeded Sessions in February 2019, the Times said, despite no evidence being found.Pelosi said Congress would instigate its own investigation and hinted that Barr, Sessions and Rosenstein could all receive subpoenas to testify.“Well, let’s hope that they will want to honor the rule of law,” Pelosi said when the CNN host Dana Bash asked what she would do if the trio refused to appear voluntarily.“The justice department has been rogue under President Trump in so many respects, this is just another manifestation of their rogue activity. The others were perpetrated by the attorneys general, but this is one they claim no knowledge of.“How could it be that there could be an investigation of other members in the other branch of government, and the press, and the rest, to the end the attorneys general did not know? So who are these people, and are they still in the justice department?”Rosenstein, as deputy attorney general, would have had authority at the beginning of the investigation because Sessions recused himself from inquiries into the Trump administration’s links to Russia.In recent days, according to CNN, he has told people he had no knowledge of subpoenas to Apple, which were the subject of multiple gag orders to keep their existence secret. Sessions said on Friday that he too was unaware, while Barr declared on Friday that he “didn’t recall” being briefed about it. More

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      in US Politics

      Global standing of US fails to regain ground lost by Covid response, poll shows

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      The United States’s reputation as the leading global power has suffered in France and Germany because of Washington’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed nearly 600,000 Americans, according to a new poll of views in 11 countries.On the eve of President Joe Biden’s trip to Europe, the survey by the German Marshall Fund and the Bertelsmann Foundation said he had not won back the standing of the United States as it was before Covid-19 struck. China’s reputation had risen slightly.According to US research papers released on 26 March, the United States under Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective strategy.“The first three months of the Biden administration have not affected French and German views of US influence in the world,” the study said.“These numbers are in line with the results of the 2020 survey, which had fallen by about 10 points from the pre-pandemic numbers, to the advantage of China.“That compares with the perception within the United States that US influence abroad has risen, the survey found.Biden embarks on his first European tour as president on Wednesday to attend G7, Nato and European Union summits. He faces the challenge of repairing transatlantic ties damaged by Trump, whose withdrawal from international agreements and sharp criticism of Nato undermined European faith in Washington.On his trip Biden, who defeated Trump in a November election and took office in January, will be putting to the test his “America is back” motto, with allies disillusioned during the Trump years looking for tangible, lasting action.Biden has spent most of his first four months in office focused on domestic issues and grappling with a deeply divided US Congress. The trip is his first outside the United States as president.Only 51% of Germans see the United States as a reliable partner, rising to 60% in France, 67% in Britain and 76% in Poland. Fewer than a quarter of Turks trust the United States. Most Americans regard the European Union as a reliable partner, the study said.A majority of respondents surveyed still think that the United States should be involved in the defence and security of Europe, except in Sweden, where views are divided, and Turkey.Conducted online between 29 March and 13 April, the survey sampled 1,000 adults in each of the 11 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. More

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      Trump adviser Lewandowski: he ‘lost the election’ and will not be reinstated

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      The morning after Donald Trump returned to frontline politics with a speech in North Carolina, a close adviser poured cold water on his reported belief that he will be reinstated in the White House when it is proved Joe Biden beat him thanks to electoral fraud.Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager in 2016 and a loyal sidekick since, told Fox News Sunday Trump “lost the election”.Indeed he did, by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result Trump called a landslide when it was in his favour against Hillary Clinton in 2016.Experts agree there was no mass voter fraud in 2020. Nonetheless, according to multiple reports Trump has told aides he believes he will be reinstated.Lewandowski said he had “spoke to the president dozens, if not more than 100 times since he has left the White House and I have never had that conversation about him being reinstated”.But, he added: “I know of no provision under the constitution that allows it to occur, nor do I know of any provision under the constitution that allows an individual who lost an election to come back in if a recount is dubbed inaccurate.”On Friday, Facebook announced that it was suspending Trump for two years, over the nadir of his push to overturn his defeat: his incitement of the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.In Greenville on Saturday, Trump said he was “not too interested” in returning to Facebook in 2023. Facebook is however a vital fundraising and communications resource for candidates for office, which Trump could yet be in 2024. He also called the decision to suspend him “so unfair”.On Sunday Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister who is now Facebook’s vice-president for global affairs, told ABC’s This Week: “For Donald Trump, of course we don’t expect him to welcome [our] decision. We do hope, though, that reasonable observers will believe that we are acting as reasonably and proportionately as we can in these very difficult circumstances.”In North Carolina, Trump also repeated his lies about the election, which he called “the crime of the century”, and referring to Republican attempts to restrict voting and overturn results, said: “I am not the one who is trying to undermine American democracy, I am the one who is trying to save it.”Clegg was asked: “If the president gave the speech he gave last night in January 2023, would the suspension be extended?”The Facebook executive declined to answer, saying he had not heard the whole speech, but did say he thought people did not want Facebook “to be a sort of truth police” and said inciting violence was more of a concern than telling lies.“It doesn’t matter who you are,” Clegg said, “you can be the pope, the queen of England, the president of the United States, you cannot use our services … to aid, abet, foment or praise acts of violence.”Trump’s spoke for 90 minutes on Saturday, ranging over familiar subjects as he began a series of appearances some think presage another run for the presidential nomination in a party he still dominates.Repeatedly hitting out at Biden, Trump touched on hot topics among conservatives. His successor, he said in one such jab, was “pushing toxic critical race theory … into our nation’s schools. Joe Biden and the socialist Democrats are the most radical Democrats in our nation’s history.”Trump also took sustained aim at Dr Anthony Fauci, the senior public health official with whom he was often at odds in his last year in office, as the coronavirus took hold.Fauci, 80, has served seven presidents since 1984 and is now Biden’s chief medical adviser. Trump said he was “not a great doctor but he’s a hell of a promoter, he’s been wrong on almost every issue”.On Sunday, Lewandowski said: “If we’re going to follow the science and listen to Dr Fauci, who has been lifted up by the media as the foremost expert on this matter in the world, listen to what Dr Fauci said.”Lewandowski mentioned Fauci’s initial advice against the need to wear masks, which Fauci has said was meant to preserve supplies for medical personnel; Fauci’s view of travel bans, which he said would prove irrelevant if a pandemic began; and a claim that “through his government agency [Fauci] funded at least $800,000 of government taxpayer money to the Wuhan laboratory”.US funds were routinely allocated to laboratories in China.Republicans have seized on new interest among US intelligence agencies in the theory that the coronavirus escaped a Chinese lab. Most public health experts still think it more likely the virus reached humans via the consumption of animals, but Fauci is among those who have said the lab leak theory could prove true.Lewandowski suggested the formation of an unlikely investigatory commission, featuring two former secretaries of state.“Let’s appoint Secretary Mike Pompeo and maybe Secretary Clinton to look into why 600,000 Americans have died because of this. Let’s hold China accountable.”Repeating a line from Trump’s speech, he also said the US should “ask for the reparations which they owe not only us but probably the world, and I think $10tn.” More

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      Trump justice department secretly obtained New York Times reporters’ phone records, paper says

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      The justice department under Donald Trump secretly obtained the phone records of four New York Times reporters as part of a leak investigation, the newspaper has reported.The case announced on Wednesday is the third instance in the past month in which a news media organisation has disclosed that federal authorities seized the records of its journalists in an effort to identify sources for national security stories published during Trump’s administration.President Joe Biden has said he would not allow the department to continue the practice of obtaining reporters’ records, calling it “simply, simply wrong”.A department spokesman, Anthony Coley, said it notified the four reporters on Wednesday that it had obtained their phone toll records last year and that it had sought to obtain non-content email records as part of “a criminal investigation into the unauthorised disclosure of classified information”.The newspaper said the records that were seized covered a nearly four-month period in 2017 and belonged to reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S Schmidt. Lichtblau has since left the newspaper.The journalists are neither the subjects nor the targets of the investigation, Coley said.Coley added: “Forthcoming annual public reports from the department covering 2019 and 2020 will indicate that members of the news media have now been notified in every instance in this period in which their records were sought or obtained in such circumstances.”The department did not disclose which article it was investigating, according to the newspaper.The period covered by the phone record seizure encompasses an April 2017 story from the four journalists that described the decision-making of then-FBI director James Comey during the conclusion of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and that referenced a classified document obtained by Russian hackers.Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, said in a statement published by the newspaper that seizing reporters’ phone records “profoundly undermines press freedom”.“It threatens to silence the sources we depend on to provide the public with essential information about what the government is doing,” Baquet said.The Washington Post disclosed last month that the justice department had last year obtained phone records belonging to three of its journalists who covered the investigation into 2016 Russian election interference. CNN later revealed that the department had seized phone records of its Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr.After those disclosures, Biden told a reporter he would not allow the department to persist in obtaining reporter phone records. That would mark a break from Democratic and Republican predecessors alike, whose administrations have seized reporter call logs in an effort to identify sources of classified information.The justice department under former attorney-general Eric Holder announced revised guidelines for leak investigations, requiring additional levels of review before a journalist could be subpoenaed – though it did not end the practice.Jeff Sessions, who served as Trump’s first attorney-general, announced in 2017 an aggressive government crackdown on leaks. More