Pam Bondi Rolls Back Leak Inquiry Constraint Stemming From Fox News Case

Attorney General Pam Bondi has rolled back a constraint on leak inquiries that the Justice Department imposed more than a decade ago, making it easier for investigators to get around a legal bar on search warrants to seize news gathering records.

The safeguard was imposed in 2013 after the revelation that the F.B.I. had portrayed a Fox News reporter as a criminal to bypass restrictions on seizing reporters’ emails.

The change was part of a revised regulation Ms. Bondi issued this week involving leak inquiries. Most of the discussion has focused on how investigators can once again use court orders, subpoenas and search warrants to go after reporters’ information, ending a flat ban on those tactics imposed in 2021 by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.

Essentially, Ms. Bondi returned to the standard in place before Mr. Garland’s intervention. But a close reading shows that in doing so, she also deleted a key section of the earlier regulation that had emerged from the Fox News incident. The section had limited the ability of investigators to sidestep a 1980 law that generally bars search warrants for newsroom records.

The omission was striking because many conservatives and Republicans were outraged by the events that led the department, under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., to make the reform. The targeted reporter at Fox News, James Rosen, is now the chief Washington correspondent for another conservative network, Newsmax.

In a memo last week announcing the end of Mr. Garland’s ban on using compulsory tools to go after reporters’ communications records, notes or testimony, Ms. Bondi declared: “This Justice Department will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”