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Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

We’re taking action against alarming attempts to stifle the press from state and federal adversaries. And don’t forget: we have tools and advice for how to safely share leaks with the press. Read the latest here.

Prosecutor puts DOGE ahead of First Amendment

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and a coalition of rights groups sent a letter to interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Edward R. Martin Jr. demanding he clarify statements suggesting he would prosecute critics of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. 

“There’s nothing more central to the First Amendment than the press and public’s right to criticize those carrying out controversial government work, harshly and by name,” we said in a statement. “A sitting U.S. attorney threatening to prosecute this constitutionally protected conduct is highly alarming — even un-American.” Read the statement and letter here.

Judges: Stop facilitating Trump’s extortionate settlements 

Companies like ABC and Meta aren’t the only ones to blame for capitulating to President Donald Trump by settling his SLAPP suits. So are the judges who bless these extortionate agreements. Judges don’t have to rubber-stamp settlements when there are glaring indicators of impropriety.

“It violates public policy — embodied by the First Amendment — for the courts to facilitate bribes paid by media publishers to presidents,” writes FPF Advocacy Director Seth Stern. “All of this is out in the open, and judges should not bury their heads in the sand when asked to sign off on it.” Read more here. 

Freelance journalists are journalists 

The Utah Legislature recently changed its press credential rules to exclude “blogs, independent, or other freelance journalists,” and one journalist alleges in a new lawsuit that the change was made to retaliate against him specifically.

The timing seems to support that claim, but even if he’s wrong about the legislature’s motives, the new rules show a troubling disregard for press freedom. “The Legislature should be celebrating the enhanced coverage that independent journalists bring to the statehouse and finding ways to accommodate them,” writes FPF Senior Advocacy Adviser Caitlin Vogus in The Salt Lake Tribune. 

USAID’s records must survive — even if the agency doesn’t

In a dubious legal move, the Trump administration is trying to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development. But the widespread coverage of USAID’s future misses something important: the status of its records and the processing of its Freedom of Information Act requests.

These should not be secondary concerns. Our Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper has the full story. And for more secrecy news, subscribe to Harper’s newsletter, The Classifieds.

What we’re reading

This is not a moment to settle with Trump (The New York Times). “Courage is contagious, but cowardice and cravenness can be, too. Soon it may be unusual and even more perilous for a news organization to protest when it is accused by the president of reportorial recklessness, however outlandish the charge might be,” Jameel Jaffer writes.

FCC launches investigation into KCBS after host reveals details of ICE agents in area (Barrett Media). The Federal Communications Commission cannot deem constitutionally protected journalism outside the "public interest" whenever it wants to censor the press. It’s an even more slippery slope with an unprincipled partisan hack like Brendan Carr in charge.

Judge tosses SF lawsuit that spurred Streisand Effect for tech exec’s arrest (Gazetteer San Francisco). While news giants with armies of expensive lawyers capitulate to the powerful, independent journalists represented by rights organizations and law professors fight back and win. Congratulations to Jack Poulson.

Protecting free speech in Texas: We need to stop SB 336 (Electronic Frontier Foundation).  Texas needs a strong anti-SLAPP law. If you live there, call or email your state representatives or the senators on the Senate Committee on State Affairs today and urge them to vote “no” on SB 336. It would weaken protections against anti-speech lawsuits by billionaires and politicians.

Justice Dept. says it will not bring charges in investigation of Project Veritas (The New York Times). The theory that publishers could be prosecuted for possessing or transporting documents their sources stole was constitutionally problematic. It's good this case won't set a bad First Amendment precedent, although we very much doubt that's why the Trump DOJ dropped it.

CIA analyst’s plea deal adds further intrigue to Espionage Act prosecution (The Dissenter). Plea deals requiring defendants to let the intelligence community supervise their communications with the press seem rather problematic under the First Amendment, no matter who the defendant is. 

Fox sues LinkedIn co-founder Hoffman for litigation funding info (Bloomberg Law). We’re for full transparency when it comes to billionaires funding defamation cases against media outlets, no matter who the billionaire is or who the media outlet is.

How to share sensitive leaks with the press

We’re just going to leave this one here for the foreseeable future. 

Continue Reading

by Justin Elliott, Avi Asher-Schapiro and Andy Kroll

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

As members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have fanned out across the government in recent days, attention has focused on the young Silicon Valley engineers who are wielding immense power in the new administration.

But ProPublica has identified three lawyers with elite establishment credentials who have also joined the DOGE effort.

Two are former Supreme Court clerks — one clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, another for Justice Neil Gorsuch — and the third has been selected to be a Gorsuch clerk for the 2025-2026 term.

Two of the lawyers’ names have not been previously reported as working for DOGE.

All three — Keenan Kmiec, James Burnham and Jacob Altik — have DOGE email addresses at the Executive Office of the President, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. Altik was recently an attorney at the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, but his bio page is now offline. Neither the White House nor any of the three lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment about their roles.

Referring to DOGE work, the White House told ProPublica in a statement earlier this week that, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law.”

However, DOGE’s aggressive actions across the government have already drawn lawsuits contending that the group has broken the law.

The legal challenges brought by several groups could ultimately reach the Supreme Court. This week, for example, more than a dozen Democratic attorneys general said they would sue to block DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, and federal employee unions sued to challenge the DOGE-led dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“What’s striking is how contemptuous the administration seems to be of traditional administrative law limitations — in ways that might get them into trouble,” said Noah Rosenblum, a law professor at New York University. “When this stuff goes to the courts, one important question is going to be: How well-lawyered was it?”

Trump formally created DOGE with an executive order on the first day of his administration. The order describes teams of at least four people — a leader, a lawyer, a human resources professional and an engineer — who would be detailed to government agencies. Exactly how DOGE is currently structured is not clear, nor are the specific assignments of each of the DOGE lawyers identified by ProPublica.

Trump has granted Musk, the world’s richest man, vast powers to seize control of government agencies, their offices and staff. “He’s a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs, and we put him in charge of seeing what he can do with certain groups and certain numbers,” Trump said of Musk on Monday, adding that “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.”

The Trump administration has declined to provide information on who is working in Musk’s DOGE group. More than two dozen members of the effort have been identified, and ProPublica is compiling them as part of an ongoing reporting project.

A bit more about the three DOGE lawyers most recently identified by ProPublica:

James Burnham, whose title at DOGE is listed internally as general counsel, is a prominent lawyer in conservative legal circles. In Trump’s first term, Burnham said he was brought to the White House counsel’s office by the office’s top lawyer, Don McGahn. He said he worked on the administration’s judicial selection process, including Gorsuch’s appointment to the high court. He went on to work in the Trump Justice Department and clerk for Gorsuch in 2020.

"He’s a smart guy, and a very conservative lawyer,” Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the first Trump White House, said of Burnham in an interview.

Burnham later launched a boutique law firm and a litigation finance fund that seeks to “ensure righteous lawsuits never falter for lack of financial resources,” according to its website. Burnham was also helping DOGE with legal matters before Trump’s inauguration, The New York Times reported in January.

Keenan Kmiec’s career veered from elite law to, more recently, crypto. After clerking for then-Judge Samuel Alito on a federal circuit court, he clerked on the Supreme Court for Roberts in the 2006-2007 term, according to his LinkedIn. He did a stint at a corporate law firm and had his own firm focused on insider-trading litigation.

Kmiec appears to have become interested in crypto long before it went mainstream. A friend wrote an essay published online recalling meeting Kmiec at an Irish pub in Washington’s Dupont Circle in the mid-2010s, where the men spoke about “the errors of central banks, the libertarian movement, and Bitcoin.”

In 2021, Kmiec began working for a Swiss foundation that promotes a blockchain called Tezos, according to his LinkedIn. He then served for nine months as CEO of a now-defunct startup called InterPop, which described itself as “forging the future of digital fandom with comic, game, and collectible NFTs minted responsibly on the Tezos blockchain.” A former staffer at InterPop described the company in an interview as a refinement of the Magic: The Gathering card game. But the former staffer added, “We ran out of money and the game failed.”

There’s little in the public domain about Kmiec’s political views. In 2009, he wrote a column for Politico critiquing the widespread use of the term “judicial activism,” which he called an ill-defined “empty epithet.” The previous year, he gave $500 to Barack Obama’s campaign, according to federal election records. Kmiec’s father, Douglas Kmiec, a former Reagan administration lawyer and prominent conservative law professor, also made headlines for endorsing Obama. (Obama later named Douglas Kmiec ambassador to Malta.)

DOGE lawyer Jacob Altik is a 2021 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. Altik was selected to clerk for Gorsuch at the Supreme Court in the term that starts this summer, according to an announcement by his law school that was confirmed by a Supreme Court spokesperson.

Altik recently worked as a corporate litigation associate at Weil and previously clerked for D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee known for critiquing the administrative state. He also interned at a nonprofit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which has been at the forefront of legal efforts to rein in the power of federal agencies.

We’ve added these names — along with more than 20 others — to ProPublica’s ongoing project tracking DOGE members.

We are still reporting. Do you have information about any of the people listed below? Do you know of any other Musk associates who have entered the federal government? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

Kirsten Berg, Christopher Bing and Annie Waldman contributed reporting.