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When you really stop and think about it, what was done was unconscionable.

The Justice Department of the United States of America went after the phone and email records of journalists from some of the nations most respected news outlets. Not only that, they did so in secret.

The journalists had done nothing wrong. They broke no laws. And yet in an effort to root out leaks within the government, as well as who knows what else, the DOJ targeted the records of journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.

And, I repeat, this happened in the United States of America, where the very First Amendment of the Constitution includes the freedom of the press. It started under the Donald Trump administration but apparently continued under Joe Bidens first couple months as president.

On Monday, CNN Pentagon reporter Barbara Starr wrote that the time was finally right to speak out on the Trump administrations months-long efforts to secretly gain access to tens of thousands of my 2017 work and personal emails and my work and personal phone records.

As Starr pointed out, she was not the subject of an investigation, and there was no suggestion that she had done anything wrong. The same goes for the other reporters targeted. Starr said she had no idea what the Trump administration was looking for.

Biden said reporters records will no longer be seized in his administration, and new policies will be put in place. The New York Times Charlie Savage wrote, In testimony last week, (Attorney General Merrick) Garland said the new policy will be the most protective of journalists ability to do their jobs in history. But many details remain unresolved, including how broadly the new protections will apply and whether he will implement it via a method that is easy or difficult for a future administration to roll back.

Or, as Starr wrote, Unless new protections are codified, this could all happen again to any journalist.

Starr added she is genuinely horrified by what happened. All of this is a sheer abuse of power in my view first against CNN and myself, since our work is and should always be protected by the First Amendment. But more importantly and more significantly, it is an abuse against the free press in this country, whether you are a television network correspondent or a reporter at a small town newspaper uncovering wrongdoing.

John Demers, the head of the Justice Departments National Security Division, announced to staff he will step down at the end of next week. Demers is a holdover from the Trump administration and was expected to step down eventually. But, The New York Times Katie Benner wrote, Mr. Demerss departure also comes as Democrats and First Amendment advocates have attacked the Justice Department following revelations that prosecutors supervised by Mr. Demers seized the records of reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN and of top House Democrats while investigating leaks of classified information.

On Monday, Garland met with leaders of the three news organizations whose journalists had their records confiscated.

The meeting included New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and deputy general counsel David McCraw; Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan along with executive editor Sally Buzbee and general counsel Jay Kennedy; and CNN was represented by Washington bureau chief Sam Feist and general counsel David Vigilante.

Bruce D. Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, spoke on behalf of the news organizations, adding that the meeting was off the record. Brown added, We are very encouraged by what we heard inside the meeting.

Sulzberger put out a statement that said, In todays meeting, we sought a full accounting of what happened and requested that the Department of Justice codify that it will no longer seize journalists records during leak investigations. We were encouraged by Attorney General Garlands statements but we will continue to push until our concerns are addressed.

In his statement, Ryan said, It was encouraging to hear the Attorney Generals commitment to the first amendment rights of all Americans. While we welcome the new policy to refrain from using compulsory legal procedures to seize reporter records in leak investigations, we feel steps must be taken to ensure it is durable and binding on future administrations. It is also essential that there be a full and complete public accounting of all the actions taken against our news organizations, including the secret subpoenas and gag orders, and an explanation as to what has been done with the information that was seized.

Its a little curious that three news organizations fighting for press rights would agree to an off-the-record conversation. According to The Washington Posts Matt Zapotosky, Brown said, We wanted to have a conversation inside the building where all sides could fully and freely share views.

In a statement, the Justice Department said, In the coming weeks the Attorney General will develop and distribute to the field a memo detailing the current policy. The Attorney General committed to working with members of the news media to codify the memo setting out these new rules into regulation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin being interviewed by NBC News. (Courtesy: NBC News)

During an exclusive interview with NBC News Keir Simmons, Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed accusations that the Russian government or hackers were behind cyberattacks in the U.S.

Putin told Simmons, We have been accused of all kinds of things. Election interference, cyberattacks and so on and so forth. And not once, not once, not one time, did they bother to produce any kind of evidence or proof. Just unfounded accusations.

In addition, Putin denied putting out a hit on political rival Alexei Navalny, but would not guarantee that Navalny would get out of prison alive.

Look, Putin said, such decisions in this country are not made by the president.

When asked whether it was a coincidence that several other political rivals had been assassinated in recent years, Putin said, We dont have this kind of habit of assassinating anybody.

In an article for NBCNews.com, Simmons, Corky Siemaszko and Yuliya Talmazan wrote, Throughout the interview, Putin relied on the Kremlins time-tested strategy of deflecting criticism by pointing out Americas failures, suggesting that criticism from the West was hypocritical because every country, including Russia and the U.S., acts in its own self-interest.

Also notable were Putins kind words for Donald Trump. Putin told Simmons, Mr. Trump is an extraordinary individual, talented individual. Otherwise he would not have become U.S. president. He is a colorful individual.

NBC News interview comes as Biden and Putin prepare to meet this week in Geneva.

I mentioned last week how all the major news anchors ABCs David Muir, CBSs Norah ODonnell and NBCs Lester Holt will be anchoring tonight from Geneva ahead of the summit. In addition, Fox News Channels John Roberts also will be in Geneva, anchoring America Reports (1 to 3 p.m. Eastern) today and Wednesday.

Ahead of Wednesdays meeting, here are some notable works to get you ready:

I actually found this to be a brilliant headline despite the you dont say aspect to it. The headline in The Washington Post: Coronavirus infections dropping where people are vaccinated, rising where they are not, Post analysis finds.

The report from Dan Keating, Naema Ahmed, Fenit Nirappil, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Lenny Bernstein also says, States with lower vaccination also have significantly higher hospitalization rates, The Post found. Poorly vaccinated communities have not been reporting catastrophic conditions. Instead, they are usually seeing new infections holding steady or increasing without overwhelming local hospitals.

While that might be encouraging, the Post wrote, But experts worry that unvaccinated people are falling into a false sense of security as more transmissible variants can rapidly spread in areas with a high concentration of unvaccinated people who have abandoned masking and social distancing.

Its a detailed report that requires your attention.

Christiane Amanpour. (Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Christiane Amanpour, CNNs chief international anchor and host of PBSs Amanpour & Company, said on-air Monday that she has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She said she had major surgery and is now undergoing several months of chemotherapy for the very best possible long-term prognosis, and Im confident.

Amanpour told viewers, Im telling you this in the interest of transparency but in truth really mostly as a shoutout to early diagnosis to urge women to educate themselves on this disease, to get all the regular screenings and scans that you can, to always listen to your bodies, and of course to ensure that your legitimate medical concerns are not dismissed or diminished.

Amanpour, 63, has been with CNN since 1983 and is widely recognized as one of the top journalists in the world. Her career also includes moderating ABC News This Week and being a reporter for CBS News 60 Minutes. Bianna Golodryga, CNNs senior global affairs analyst, had been filling in for Amanpour on CNN for the past month.

In true professional and Amanpour fashion, she concluded her on-air statement by saying, So, thats my news. Now lets get to the news.

This week is the 50th anniversary of The New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers the U.S. Department of Defenses history of the countrys involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967 that revealed how the Johnson Administration had lied to Congress and the American people about its involvement in the Vietnam War.

The New York Times is commemorating one of the most important newspaper stories and, maybe, the biggest journalistic scoop of all time with an amazing package: The Pentagon Papers at 50: A Special Report.

It includes an absolutely gripping and stunningly-well designed feature: Were Going to Publish The Oral History of the Pentagon Papers.

The package is elite and fascinating to all audiences, not just journalists and those who follow the journalism business closely.

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.

The Poynter Report is our daily media newsletter. To have it delivered to your inbox Monday-Friday, sign up here.

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Opinion: The US government crossed a line by seizing reporters' records. What happens now? - Poynter

In addition to the upcoming public meeting and public review period for the 2021/22 Annual Action Plan and First Amendment to the Five Year Consolidated Plan for FY 2020/21 through 2024/25, City staff is offering a Virtual Community Meeting on Monday, June 14, 2021 from 1:30pm - 2:30pm to discuss the City of Oaklands Fiscal Year (FY) 2021/22 Annual Action Plan and the First Amendment to the Five Year Consolidated Plan (Con Plan) for FY 2020/21 through 2024/25.

To observe or participate in this virtual community meeting, join us online at:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82404930201

Meeting ID: 824 0493 0201

Or Dial by your location

+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)

+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)

+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)

+1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC)

+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)

+1 929 205 6099 US (New York)

The Annual Action Plan accepts and appropriates funds appropriated to the City of Oakland under the FY 2021/22 Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), HOME Investments Partnership (HOME), Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG), Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS (HOPWA) programs.

The First Substantial Amendment to the 2020/21 - 2024/25 Five Year Consolidated Plan (Con Plan) includes the following modifications to the Con Plan, including the FY 2020/21 AAP portion of the Con Plan:

1. Performance Period of HOPWA projects;

2. List of Planned Backup Projects to fund with CDBG if there are CDBG projects completed under budget, delayed or canceled; and

3. Neighborhood Stabilization Program reallocation of $326,581 fund balance and related actions required.

For further information on the Plans, public review periods, and the upcoming City Council/Public Hearing please go to https://www.oaklandca.gov/services/annual-action-plan-21-22 .

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Notice of Community Meeting for the City of Oakland's 2021/22 Annual - City of Oakland

The state Board of Regents will review processes to ensure compliance with the new law prohibiting divisive concepts and critical race theory.

Ryan Adams for the Daily Iowan

Gov. Kim Reynolds listens to Senate President Jake Chapman speak during the State of the State address in the house chamber of the Iowa State Capitol on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2021 in Des Moines. Gov. Reynolds highlighted in the address expansion of broadband internet, a push for in-person learning, and economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law June 8 that will prohibit teaching critical race theory and divisive concepts in K-12 and higher education, in school curricula, and in mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

Venise Berry, the University of Iowa African American Studies department chair, said critical race theory is misunderstood. She said critical race theory highlights certain elements that are tied to race that are critical and important for Americans to pay attention to.

Teaching critical race theory is not about telling white students theyre racist, Berry said. Its about helping all students understand the environment that we live in and experience in this system. That its positive, in relation to race, but also its negative in relation to race.

Josh Lehman, the state Board of Regents senior communications director, wrote in an email to The Daily Iowan that the regents and Iowas regent-governed universities will review processes to ensure compliance with the new law.

The Board and our universities strongly believe in free expression, and have spoken out frequently in their support of free speech and the First Amendment, Lehman wrote to the DI. We will continue to fight for the rights of all students, faculty, and staff to have all voices and opinions heard. We must hear all viewpoints without stifling speech.

The law (HF 802), effective July 1, covers nine divisive concepts in training and education.

Leslie Schwalm, chair of the Department of Gender, Womens, and Sexuality Studies at the UI, said as someone who teaches about systemic racism and the history of institutionalized racism, the prohibited divisive concepts are irrelevant to her course curricula.

No one teaches that members of a race or sex are inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, Schwalm said. In fact, one of the things that critical race theory helps us understand is that racism isnt about individual acts of discrimination, but rather about the system.

While the new law prohibits divisive concepts, the term critical race theory is not stated in the bill.

In a statement from June 8 regarding the law, Reynolds said, Critical race theory is about labels and stereotypes, not education.

According to June 9 data from Chalkbeat, Republican governors or legislators in 21 state governments have proposed or passed legislation across the country to restrict education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics.

Berry said the law and other censoring instances could lead UI faculty of color to leave.

Laws like these are the kinds of things faculty of color look at when they interview and apply, Berry said. I just would like to see our state government focus more on the needs of the people than on these culture issues that they blow out of proportion.

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University of Iowa professors say new law prohibiting 'divisive concepts' misrepresents critical race theory - UI The Daily Iowan

Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson speaks to the Milwaukee Press Club, June 3, 2021.(Photo: Milwaukee Press Club screen grab)

The Milwaukee Press Club circumvented a YouTube ban and has now posted on its websitea controversial interview with Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson.

On Friday, Johnson was suspended from uploading videos to YouTube after the company said he violated the website's COVID-19 "medical misinformation policies."

Johnson made the comments in questionduring a June 3 appearance with the Milwaukee Press Club.

The full video was also taken down from the press club's YouTube site, with an accompanying message that said it wasremoved "for violating YouTube's community guidelines."

In a statement issued Sunday, the press club said:"As an organization that includes journalists as well as others who strongly support our nations First Amendment, the Milwaukee Press Club believes it is extremely important to provide information on topics of interest regardless of their political perspective.

"Its also important to note, while we do provide this access, we do not endorse the positions of our Newsmakers or any other guests who speak at our programs."

The Milwaukee Press Club states it is"the oldest continuously operated press club in North America."

In taking down Johnson's remarks, aYouTube spokesperson said: "We removed the video in accordance with our COVID-19 medical misinformation policies, which dont allow content that encourages people to use Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus."

According to a copy of its policy statement: "YouTube doesn't allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities or the World Health Organizations (WHO) medical information about COVID-19."

During the nearly hour-long interview, Johnson was asked a range of policy questions. According to his office, the segment that ran afoul of YouTube came in response to a question on some of his views on COVID-19 treatments.

During the appearance, Johnson criticized the Trump and Biden administrations for "not only ignoring but working against robust research (on) the use of cheap, generic drugs to be repurposed for early treatment of COVID."

In a tweet, Johnson expressed support for the press club's reposting of the video.

"I think they're right," he said. "Interesting YouTube doesn't agree."

Our subscribers make this reporting possible. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Journal Sentinel at jsonline.com/deal.

Read or Share this story: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/14/milwaukee-press-club-posts-ron-johnson-video-prompted-youtube-ban/7688524002/

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YouTube took down Ron Johnson's controversial remarks on COVID-19. The Milwaukee Press Club has reposted the entire interview. - Milwaukee Journal...

This article is part of a special report on the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers.

The Pentagon Papers case was a triumph for press freedom. Or was it?

The Supreme Courts unsigned opinion rejecting the Nixon administrations attempt to censor publication of a secret history of the Vietnam War was just three paragraphs long and declared only that the government had not overcome a heavy presumption against prior restraints on that occasion.

The vote was, moreover, fairly close 6 to 3. Every justice contributed a concurring or dissenting opinion, none of which got more than two votes. You need a spreadsheet to make sense of who voted for what, but the bottom line is at odds with the conventional view that the case was a flat-out First Amendment victory.

A majority of the Supreme Court not only left open the possibility of prior restraints in other cases but of criminal sanctions being imposed on the press following publication of the Pentagon Papers themselves, Floyd Abrams, who represented The New York Times in the case, wrote in his 2014 book, Friend of the Court.

There are, it turns out, two ways to understand the Pentagon Papers decision. One is that it was a potent vindication of press freedom establishing a bedrock principle: The government cannot stop the new media from providing information to citizens in a democracy.

Another view takes account of the letter and limits of the decision. Even as to prior restraints, the Supreme Court left the door slightly ajar. As to the possibility of punishing the press after publication, two justices in the majority wrote that they had no doubt that news organizations could be prosecuted under the espionage laws.

To be sure, the decision has taken on a symbolic weight that has swamped its technical holding, said Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and an editor of a volume of essays commemorating the 50th anniversary of the decision, National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press.

The case created a largely overwhelming sense that the press cannot be either enjoined from or prosecuted for publishing national secrets, he said. Thats become the expectation as a result of Pentagon Papers.

But even if the decision seems to have created near-absolute protection for the press, he went on, it addressed only one piece of the relationship between citizens and their government.

An intermediary the press was protected. But neither its sources nor its readers gained rights.

What Pentagon Papers and its successor decisions created, Professor Stone said, was an incoherent state of the law.

The decision did not live up to its promise, Anthony Lewis, a Supreme Court reporter and columnist for The Times and an authority on the First Amendment, wrote in his 1991 book, Make No Law.

The Pentagon Papers case was a famous victory for the press, and for the Madisonian principle that the public must know what its government is doing, wrote Mr. Lewis, who died in 2013. Or so it seemed at the time. Later decisions showed that it was not much of a victory.

Prior restraints against the press may have been effectively barred, Mr. Lewis wrote, but the Supreme Court did not hesitate to block books by former government officials who sought to write about national security secrets they had learned in the course of their employment.

In those later decisions, Professor Stone said, the court took the view that there is no right to leak and no public right to information.

The decision had another, darker side, wrote Alexander Bickel, the Yale law professor who argued the case for The Times in the Supreme Court.

The American press was freer before it won its battle with the government, he wrote in his classic 1975 book, The Morality of Consent.

Through one civil and two world wars and other wars, there had never been an effort by the federal government to censor a newspaper by attempting to impose a prior restraint, he wrote. That spell was broken, and in a sense, freedom was thus diminished.

Justice William O. Douglas, who was in the majority in 1971, wrote two years later that the vote had been too close and had followed two weeks of successful government-imposed censorship.

We have allowed ominous inroads to be made on the historic freedom of the newspapers, he wrote. The effort to suppress the publication of the Pentagon Papers failed only by a narrow margin and actually succeeded for a brief spell in imposing prior restraint on our press for the first time in our history.

The Supreme Court: Upcoming Cases

It was unimaginable, though, that the Supreme Court would rule out prior restraints entirely, and that posed a litigation-strategy puzzle for Professor Bickel when he argued before the justices.

He conceded, at least in the abstract, that courts could stop a publication if it would lead directly and unavoidably to a disastrous event.

Justice Potter Stewart explored the point. What if, he asked, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?

Professor Bickel tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him: You would say that the Constitution requires that it be published and that these men die?

Professor Bickel yielded, to the consternation of some of The Timess allies. Im afraid, he said, that my inclinations of humanity overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion to the First Amendment.

As a matter of litigation tactics, it was a necessary answer, said David Rudenstine, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and the author of The Day the Presses Stopped, a history of the case.

I dont think an advocate could say anything else, Professor Rudenstine said, unless you really wanted to lose the case.

Still, Professor Bickels response outraged the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an unusual brief that same day disavowing Mr. Bickels answer. It said Justice Stewarts question must be answered in a totally different manner and that the answer is, painfully but simply, that the right of a free people to determine its destiny has been, and should continue to be, paramount to any attempt by the government to impinge upon, erode or ultimately destroy the right of the people to know.

Professor Bickel had made another concession when he argued the case in the federal appeals court in New York. Asked for an example of a government secret that would justify a prior restraint, he posited, presciently as it turned out, one in which the hydrogen bomb turns up.

Eight years later, on the only other occasion on which the federal government has sought a prior restraint on national security grounds, a federal judge in Wisconsin barred The Progressive magazine from publishing an article called The H-bomb Secret, which included detailed instructions for making a hydrogen bomb.

While the appeal was pending, others published similar information and the government dropped its case.

As that case suggests, prior restraints that actually keep information already in the hands of the press from the public are hard to accomplish. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in the Pentagon Papers case, more than a dozen newspapers had published parts of them. These days, a whistle-blower like Daniel Ellsberg could skip the intermediaries entirely and post documents directly on the internet.

In a contemporary context, the prohibition on prior restraints is almost irrelevant, Professor Rudenstine said.

The more significant constraint is the possibility of criminal prosecution after the fact, one left open by some of the justices in the majority in the 1971 decision.

According to a 1975 memoir by Whitney North Seymour Jr., who was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan in the early 1970s, Richard G. Kleindienst, a deputy attorney general, suggested convening a grand jury in New York to consider criminal charges against The Times. Mr. Seymour said he refused. A grand jury was then convened in Boston, but it did not issue an indictment.

So far, there have been no prosecutions of journalists in the United States for seeking or publishing classified information, but the espionage laws on their face may well be read to forbid possession and publication of classified information by the press.

One, enacted in 1917, prohibits anyone with unauthorized access to documents or information concerning the national defense from telling others. In the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Byron R. White, joined by Justice Stewart, said it seems undeniable that a newspaper can be vulnerable to prosecution under the 1917 law.

But the law, as Harold Edgar and Benno C. Schmidt Jr. described it in a comprehensive 1973 article in the Columbia Law Review, is in many respects incomprehensible and so sweeping as to be absurd.

If these statutes mean what they seem to say and are constitutional, they wrote, public speech in this country since World War II has been rife with criminality.

At the same time, there is an almost universal consensus that the government classifies far too much information. Erwin Griswold, a former dean of Harvard Law School who argued the case for the Nixon administration as U.S. solicitor general, agreed that the classification system was broken.

It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material, he wrote in a 1989 essay in The Washington Post, that there is massive over-classification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.

That applied, he wrote, to the Pentagon Papers themselves. I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication, he wrote. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat.

The presss victory in the Pentagon Papers case may have been incomplete. But a loss would have been devastating.

What would be the law today if the case had come out differently? Professor Rudenstine asked. Its very possible that there could have been a prosecution of The Times. That would have changed American law quite a lot.

The general thought, he said, was that if you lost the prior restraint case that there was no chance of winning the criminal prosecution. The opposite happened, said Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University and the other editor of National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press. As a practical matter, the press and the government have arrived at the state of mind that there will not be prior restraints or subsequent prosecutions that that would violate the spirit of the First Amendment, he said. Apart from the Progressive case, the government has not gone after the press in either form.

But he added that this was in large part a product of mature accommodation among responsible institutions, one that was at risk during the Donald Trump administration.

The continuing viability of a fulsome Pentagon Papers doctrine does not apply in the context of a near-authoritarian government like the one we had, he said. Its those kinds of ambiguities about Pentagon Papers that makes the whole system much more vulnerable when you have a true threat to democracy.

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The Complicated Impact the Pentagon Papers Had on Free Speech - The New York Times