DOJ knocks on NYT doors over Trump's Qatar plane story
Federal agents are literally showing up at journalists' houses because of a story about a free airplane. Welcome to the current state of press freedom, everybody.
Imagine waking up, grabbing your coffee, and finding federal agents standing on your doorstep. That’s the new morning routine for a few New York Times reporters. The Department of Justice is handing out subpoenas to force them to testify before a grand jury next week.
The whole drama is about how Donald Trump got a shiny new Air Force One. Well, technically it's a multi-million-dollar Boeing 747-8 gifted to him by the ruling family of Qatar back when he was in office. Feds really want to know who leaked the details of how a foreign autocracy casually dropped a jumbo jet into the hands of an American president.
Instead of investigating the ethics of the actual billion-dollar gift, the government is focusing its energy on hunting down the whistleblowers who told us about it.
Protecting the secrecy of a giant free plane apparently ranks way higher on the federal to-do list than figuring out why a foreign government is handing out private jets in the first place.
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