We’ve said before that by extracting a guilty plea to Espionage Act violations from WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, the Biden administration set up its successor to punish journalists who expose government secrets. But President Donald Trump’s also got oligarchs to protect.
Not to worry — former President Joe Biden handed him a road map to censoring corporate secrets too, by prosecuting Florida journalist Tim Burke under computer crime laws for exposing Fox News outtakes of Ye’s unaired, antisemitic rant to Tucker Carlson.
Our Director of Advocacy Seth Stern explains in Lawfare that Burke’s prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and federal wiretap laws “could create new precedent that opens the floodgates for the second Trump administration to prosecute any digital journalist who publishes news that authorities would rather keep secret by simply asserting that they ‘exceeded their authorization’ by finding what others failed to hide.”
