The arrest of Don Lemon is blatant censorship. And he is not the only one | Seth Stern

2 hours ago 3

Two federal courts reviewed the government’s evidence against journalist Don Lemon and declined to approve his arrest last week. But nevertheless, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, persisted, desperate to please her authoritarian boss no matter what the constitution and law say or what her ethical obligations as an attorney require.

Thursday’s arrests of Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort – like the recent raid on the Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson – demonstrate the administration’s lawless crusade against routine journalism. In normal times the expectation is that even when a journalist’s conduct might technically fit the legal elements of a crime – jaywalking to get footage of a protest, for example – prosecutors will exercise their discretion and judgment to not apply the law in a manner that chills the free press.

Those assumptions are inverted now. Even when journalists’ conduct is plainly non-criminal, prosecutors will work overtime to figure out some way to harass them, no matter how frivolous. Discouraging journalists from doing their job is not a side-effect they seek to avoid – it’s the whole point. There is no telling what nonsensical legal theories the administration may advance if it decides to make an example of a reporter it doesn’t like. The law and constitution are only marginally relevant – the only real rule is don’t piss off Trump.

The two federal laws under which Lemon and Fort are reportedly charged are entirely inapplicable. One punishes conspiracies to stop people from exercising constitutional rights. The journalists, of course, didn’t conspire with anyone to do anything nefarious. They simply documented news. It’s ironic that Lemon and Fort are accused of exactly what the Trump administration actually did – intimidating those who exercise core constitutional freedoms, like documenting news. In fact the very next section of the criminal code prohibits deprivation of constitutional rights “under color of law,” ie, by the government. Maybe the officials involved in Lemon and Fort’s arrests should think about lawyering up.

The other law being wielded against the journalists similarly requires an intent to interfere with religious worship (or access to reproductive health clinics), not the lawful documentation of news events by journalists who neither plan protests nor participate in them. Journalists follow the news – they don’t decide where it happens. Protesters in Minneapolis chose to demonstrate at the church because the pastor was a higher-up with ICE – one of the federal agencies terrorizing their city and murdering their neighbors – not because some journalists told them to.

These recent developments are unprecedented at the federal level – never before has an attorney general personally involved herself in pursuing vindictive criminal charges against journalists the administration doesn’t like who merely covered a protest. But for those of us who have been monitoring press freedom abuses at the local level (my employer, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) operates the US Press Freedom Tracker database), it’s all too familiar.

When Natanson was raided, we pointed to the 2023 raid of the Marion County Record in rural Kansas on sham allegations that reporters broke identity theft laws, as well as the raid the same year of the Florida journalist Tim Burke’s home newsroom over nonsensical computer crime charges for publishing news he found online.

This time, the first case that came to mind was that of the North Carolina journalists Matilda Bliss and Veronica Coit of the Asheville Blade. It’s a small, self-proclaimed leftist news co-op with which local officials have long feuded.

On Christmas night of 2021, Bliss and Coit went to a public park to document a homeless encampment sweep. Their filming of the obviously newsworthy event was routine, except that the park closed at 10pm, and police chose to conduct the encampment sweep after that time. They were arrested, charged and convicted, to the dismay of press freedom advocates everywhere – after all, they didn’t decide where and when news would take place.

The cases against Lemon and Fort may be even weaker given the legal elements of the laws under which they were charged. But they underscore the same absurdity. What if police had shot someone at the encampment sweep (an even more realistic possibility at protests in Minneapolis)? Would reporters be expected to not report the news due to a curfew?

When an outlet like the Blade is targeted it’s easy to assume that more mainstream reporters with larger audiences have nothing to worry about. Obviously, that’s not so. We shouldn’t give the Trump administration too much credit for creativity – their playbooks have been tested outside of the national headlines in places like Asheville.

The Blade is not the only example. Before Trump’s administration sought to charge Lemon and Fort under a conspiracy law, nonsensically connecting dots between their first amendment-protected conduct and alleged crimes by protesters, prosecutors in Atlanta tried (and failed) to convict people who had merely distributed pamphlets or held press conferences for “conspiring” with other activists opposing the “Cop City” police training facility who allegedly committed real crimes. Trump’s federal prosecutors tried something similar last year by indicting the Texas activist Daniel “Des” Sanchez for conspiring to conceal evidence by transporting anarchist literature after a protest attended by his wife where someone else allegedly shot a police officer.

Once again, what starts on the fringes at the local level previews what’s to come in the national news headlines. If local authorities like those who targeted Biss and Coit in furtherance of their own petty grudges don’t like what they’re seeing from the Trump administration, they need to take a good look in the mirror. And journalists need to be the ones to hold that mirror up to their censorial faces. Reporters are often reluctant to make themselves the story, but they’re not the ones doing that, the government is.

Of course these days being seen as navel-gazing isn’t the only thing journalists may be afraid of. It’s understandable – no one wants to be arrested. But the Trump administration’s unconstitutional prosecutions have repeatedly failed in court because judges and juries don’t find them credible (unfortunately, the judges who rule against the administration have largely declined to sanction or hold in contempt attorneys who disregard the law – hopefully that’ll change in Lemon and Fort’s cases). We’ve already seen in Minneapolis that public pressure makes a difference, even with this administration. Fighting back has a far better track record than self-censorship and capitulation, which only invites more attacks.