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Trump DOJ revealed to have sought journalists' phone records


cr47t

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While that is interesting. The DOJ has no business doing such things without a warrant. Although, it feels more like accusations aimed at the administration as opposed to the people who actually control the laws. Yes, freedom of press is protected under the first amendment but that freedom pretty much ends when you can be sued for slander and/or defamation of character. So never really a prime ideal to attack the president with slander/defamation claims that you can't prove.

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Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel. Either way, you're assuming that the reports were defamatory, implicitly justifying accessing people's private records. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-justice-dept-seized-post-reporters-phone-records/2021/05/07/933cdfc6-af5b-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html

This is supposedly about sources leaking information, so we should focus on that. This has nothing to do with assumptions of defamation. Barr granted the warrant, and that is also a problem.

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Well, if a warrant exists then there is no legal issue. But what was Barr's actual reasoning behind issuing said warrant? I mean, I understand that the articles were defamation attempts against the president, but in all fairness, Trump is a celebrity and when you're a celebrity, any publicity is good publicity. Also, any claims made by the Times obviously had no effect on Trump as he never missed a beat. So again, if said claims didn't affect Trump, why was Barr so interested in snooping through their phone records and emails?

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Barr issuing the warrant still violates the First Amendment, and even though he was Attorney General, it was still an abuse of power.

What articles? Nothing about these reports actually say what articles caused these reporters to be targeted. Again, there were no attempts at defamation, so I'd like to ask you to focus.

I frankly have no reason to believe the story the DOJ is saying, because it sounds like trying to give a weak excuse to cover for invasion of privacy.

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I can agree on that. Mostly because a lot of shady stuff goes on regardless of who the president is. And of course Barr would use the defamation claim to snoop simply so he could remain off the president's radar so to speak. I doubt he was making any real attempts to protect the president. But I am pretty certain he had an agenda that he was trying to push.

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