THIS IS A story about a story — one that I haven’t finished reporting.
Federal prosecutors are so consumed by my efforts to report on a terrorism court case that they accused me in a recent filing of having “improper motives.” They said that, by doing routine reporting, I was somehow colluding with a terrorism defendant to “taint the jury pool and undermine the fairness of the trial.”
These dangerous claims are the subject of an evidentiary hearing in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Thursday.
Although President Joe Biden boasts that his administration defends press freedoms around the world, his Justice Department’s public claims are an egregious attack against me filled with baseless assumptions and statements taken wildly out of context.
Prosecutors appear to have subjected me to this attack for no reason other than that I was doing journalism in the public interest. (Lawyers for The Intercept submitted a letter to U.S. District Judge Jonathan J. C. Grey and will be present at the hearing Thursday.)
They’re not being silenced or anywhere close to it. The prosecutors asked the judge to order the defendant to stop talking to them about some aspects of the case, I guess because they don’t want anything that might build any sympathy for the guy they’re prosecuting, and the judge (apparently, from all appearances, since they wrote the story and seem to still be talking to the guy uninterrupted) said no.
And then the guy wrote a story like “hey it seems like every single action these prosecutors are taking is like they want to put him in prison, what the fuck is that, that’s not balanced.”
FWIW it’s not a paywall; they just want your email address
Thank you. That’s about what I suspected. And an email may not technically be a paywall but imo if they’re going to sell it or even just use it to spam me with shit that’s just another form of payment. I could make a fake email address or something but honestly I’m not going to go through all of that for what seems like a clearly shitty article from that parts that I can see.