![]() The revelations have sparked First Amendment concerns and placed increasing pressure on President Joe Biden to commit to breaking with the practice aggressively deployed by his two most recent predecessors. Recounting the protracted court battle on Wednesday, Vigilante wrote that DOJ lawyers “showed no interest in exploring good faith ways to narrow the order” or help CNN’s lawyers better grasp the scenario, as they were barred from knowing what specifically the government was searching for, who they were targeting, or the subject matter of the reporting in question-“in short, all the tools lawyers use every day to navigate these situations were refused to us.” Vigilante said he was “told in no uncertain terms (multiple times) that I was forbidden from communicating about any aspect of the order or these proceedings to the journalist whose interests I am duty-bound to protect” and “subject to charges of contempt and even criminal prosecution for obstruction of justice” if he violated the secret order, one he noted he, in his two decades at CNN, had never faced before. A month earlier, CNN’s lawyers successfully fought to narrow the scope of what the government was seeking, as a federal judge ruled that the DOJ’s request for access to Starr’s internal emails was “unanchored in any facts” and “not sufficiently connected to any evidence relevant, material, or useful to the governments ascribed investigation.” Starr’s phone records and data from her personal email account had been separately seized, she learned in May, a disclosure CNN said it had not been made aware of prior. The Justice Department’s months-long court battle to obtain tens of thousands of CNN reporter Barbara Starr’s records from 2017 ultimately “resulted in the network agreeing to turn over a limited set of email logs,” CNN revealed, a resolution that came in January, just days after President Joe Biden took office. New details about the Trump Department of Justice’s secret pursuit of a CNN reporter’s email records emerged Wednesday as parts of the case were unsealed, lifting a gag order that had prohibited CNN general counsel David Vigilante from discussing the government’s prolonged legal efforts beyond a select group of people-network president Jeff Zucker, and other lawyers for CNN-for nearly a year.
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