THIS IS A story about a story — one that I haven’t finished reporting.
Federal prosecutors are so consumed by my efforts to report on a terrorism court case that they accused me in a recent filing of having “improper motives.” They said that, by doing routine reporting, I was somehow colluding with a terrorism defendant to “taint the jury pool and undermine the fairness of the trial.”
These dangerous claims are the subject of an evidentiary hearing in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Thursday.
Although President Joe Biden boasts that his administration defends press freedoms around the world, his Justice Department’s public claims are an egregious attack against me filled with baseless assumptions and statements taken wildly out of context.
Prosecutors appear to have subjected me to this attack for no reason other than that I was doing journalism in the public interest. (Lawyers for The Intercept submitted a letter to U.S. District Judge Jonathan J. C. Grey and will be present at the hearing Thursday.)
I’m with the prosecutors. This seems like some rookie journalist is just parroting the stories he’s told by a criminal before trial without providing any evidence. He could have at least talked to some scholars or lawyers or get somebody to agree but it’s really just a story that seems to be made up.
How is that different from local news stations just parroting often verbatim, from police reports?
Why does it have to be different from that and how does that have anything to do with what I said?