New York, July 11, 2026 — The New York Times revealed early this morning that the Trump administration subpoenaed its journalists over reporting that the new Air Force One, which was gifted to the president by Qatar and retrofit at a cost of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, was deemed unsafe to fly President Donald Trump back from the NATO summit in Turkey.
According to the Times, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had previously requested it not report on the debacle, calling it a national security matter.
The following can be attributed to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern.
“We’ve long said that when the government claims it needs to investigate journalists to protect national security, it really means its own reputational security. This is as clear an example as you can get. The administration’s embarrassment that it reportedly charged taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit a flying bribe that still isn’t secure enough for hostile times does not supersede the need for a free and independent press. These kinds of stories show us exactly why we need to protect journalists and whistleblowers — without them, we’d never know about this sort of waste and incompetence.”
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