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Political and Legislative

The United States A.G. Sets New Limits for the DOJ’s Seizure of Media Records

The Department of Justice will no longer use compulsory legal processes to seize information from people working in the news media who are acting “within the scope of their newsgathering activities,” Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in a memo on Monday.

This new policy imposes further limits on when the DOJ can seize reporters’ records, a long-debated political issue balancing freedom of the press and government intelligence. The Justice Department under President Biden previously vowed not to secretly investigate reporters’ records. The previous department under Donald Trump seized the records of reporters in secret during a leak investigation, a policy Biden has criticized.

“Because a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy, the Department of Justice has long employed procedural protections and a balancing test to restrict the use of compulsory process to obtain information from or records of members of the news media,” Garland said in the memo.

Read the source article at Politics, Policy, Political News

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