In just the last three months, Donald Trump has made countless headlines for his treatment of the journalists reporting on his administration. The most provocative of his recent comments is when he told Bloomberg's Catherine Lucey, in response to a question about the release of the Epstein files, "Quiet. Quiet, piggy." When Trump's Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was later asked about the incident, she said, "The president being frank and open and honest to your faces, rather than hiding behind your backs, is, frankly, a lot more respectful than what you saw in the last administration." Leavitt is often tasked with justifying Trump's derogatory rhetoric, but there is some truth to her words. While Trump's relationship with journalists has been more obviously contentious than that of previous presidents, every president in the twenty-first century before him has, to varying degrees, impeded freedom of the press. 

Trump's relationship with the press has been increasingly scrutinized recently beyond tense verbal exchanges with the arrest of independent journalist Don Lemon. Lemon was arrested for violating the FACE Act, which bars interference with the right of religious freedom at a place of worship, after he entered a Minnesota church in January with a group of protestors who believed that the pastor leading the sermon was the head of the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. He was arrested even though he was there in his capacity as a journalist, streaming The Don Lemon Show. Attempting to prosecute a journalist for reporting on situations like these reveals that Trump is willing to censor journalism in a way reminiscent of presidents of the past, even if his reasoning and methods differ.

The most common tool of recent presidents to prevent the publication of articles that might harm the reputation of their administrations is the Espionage Act of 1917, initially passed under Woodrow Wilson. The Espionage Act criminalized spreading information that interfered with the war effort in World War I. After the war ended, Congress repealed many of the Espionage Act's restrictions on disloyal speech, but the portion of the Act criminalizing "seditious conspiracy" remains codified in federal law today. Although some provisions of the Act were further changed during the McCarthy era after World War II, it lay mostly dormant until the 1970s, when Richard Nixon attempted to use it to prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times. This was the first time the US government tried to censor a newspaper in federal court. When the courts sided with the Times and refused to let Nixon stop them from printing the papers, he instead tried to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the information to the Times using the sedition clause of the Espionage Act. Ellsberg was indicted, but the investigation against him was dismissed when the court discovered that Nixon had sent hired goons to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to discredit him. 

The most common tool of recent presidents to prevent the publication of articles that might harm the reputation of their administrations is the Espionage Act of 1917, initially passed under Woodrow Wilson.

Ellsberg's prosecution seemingly cleared the way for presidents to wield the Espionage Act against the members of the press by arresting their sources, but it wasn't until Ronald Reagan that the courts would finally side with the president. In 1984, the intelligence analyst Samuel Morison provided Jane's Defence Weekly, a British magazine with copies of satellite photos showing a new Soviet aircraft carrier. After he was arrested and convicted under the Espionage Act, he appealed the decision, arguing that the Act should not apply to someone who leaked information to the press, not a foreign government. In their decision, the appeals court rejected Morison's arguments, laying the foundation for the modern use of the Espionage Act to punish the sources for news organizations. 

Two decades after the Morison decision, the George W. Bush administration revived the Espionage Act. The most prominent instance of it doing so was when the Times reported on a secret program within the National Security Agency (NSA) that wiretapped the phone calls of millions of US citizens without search warrants. Bush's Department of Justice then launched a criminal investigation into how the Times found out about the program (not the illegality of the program itself, which Bush had secretly approved). During that investigation, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said that the government has legal authority to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, though he never acted on it. The investigation floundered until December 2008, right before Bush's term was set to expire. It was only then that former Justice Department attorney Thomas Tamm revealed himself as the Times' source. Barack Obama, who had criticized the wiretapping program on his campaign trail that year, took office a month later and declined to prosecute Tamm.

As it turned out, the Tamm situation was one of the few in which the Obama administration showed restraint in prosecuting whistleblowers who talked to journalists. His Justice Department led more than twice as many whistleblower prosecutions than all previous administrations combined, even though he promised on the campaign trail that he would "strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government." The most infamous case that the Obama administration pursued was that of NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who was accused in 2013 of providing tens of thousands of documents describing secret NSA programs to journalists, including ones spying on innocent citizens. Stories about these programs eventually led to a landmark court decision that declared the NSA's actions illegal. However, Obama's Justice Department charged him with violating the Espionage Act regardless--charges that are still active today and are why Snowden currently resides in Russia. 

As the twenty-first century has progressed, presidents have inched closer to outright censorship of the press.

The Obama administration also opened a grand jury investigation to consider charging Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, for publishing classified information, including footage of a US helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq. A warrant for Assange's arrest was initially issued in 2010, but it wasn't until Trump's first administration in 2019 that the Justice Department charged Assange with eighteen counts of violating the Espionage Act. He was imprisoned in Great Britain for five years after that, fighting a long legal battle against his extradition to the United States, where he argued that he could not receive a fair trial. He wasn't released until he signed a plea deal in 2024, under the Biden administration, at which point he was finally free to return to his native Australia. The case against Assange lasted for three presidential administrations and shows the extent to which presidents have recently prosecuted organizations like WikiLeaks for publishing information, rather than prosecuting whistleblowers. 

As the twenty-first century has progressed, presidents have inched closer to outright censorship of the press. What began as the prosecution of whistleblowers for sharing classified information with press organizations has escalated to prosecuting news organizations themselves for publishing that information, and the arrest of Don Lemon seems to be a step further in the direction of censorship. Arresting Lemon for reporting on a protest might just be another example of a frivolous Trump action against news media. But should the prosecution succeed, it would certainly have sobering implications for the future of independent journalism.