Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he could not make a “blanket commitment” to putting journalists behind bars for “doing their jobs.”
“Can you commit to not jailing reporters for doing their jobs?” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., asked the attorney general during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday.
Sessions replied: “I don’t know that I can make a blanket commitment to that effect.”
In August, Sessions said the Trump administration was going to look into ways to more aggressively subpoena journalists as part of its effort to crack down on leaks of classified information from the government, including reviewing the Department of Justice’s internal guidelines for issuing subpoenas and search warrants to journalists.
The announcement spurred concerns the review meant the department was looking to put more journalists behind bars.
Earlier this month, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein met with representatives from top news organizations at the Justice Department to discuss the agency’s review.
The group, dubbed the News Media Dialogue Group, was first convened in 2014 when the Justice Department changed its internal guidelines for the first time since the 1980s. The subsequent change in guidelines in early 2015 was sparked by the seizure of Associated Press and Fox News journalists’ emails and phones in 2013.
