By Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — For President Donald Trump, this latest leak hunt is really personal.
Last week, reporters at The New York Times received subpoenas referencing “an alleged violation of federal criminal law” just two days after they published a story contradicting Trump’s claims about the new Qatari-gifted Air Force One.
Journalists involved in the matter strongly suspect that the subpoenas were rushed out in response to Trump’s anger about the news coverage.
Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The Times, called the subpoenas “impulsive” in a memo to staffers denouncing the “naked attempt to intimidate individual reporters” and to prevent reporting.
The court orders compel the reporters to testify before a grand jury about their anonymous sources, though The Times will fight to stop that from happening.
“The law protects news gatherers from this sort of retaliatory abuse of prosecutorial power,” Kahn wrote. “It is essential that the courts reaffirm that protection and quash this overreach. We are confident they will in this case.”
While the use of subpoena power against journalists has always been highly controversial, officials in past administrations sometimes justified it by arguing it was used as a last resort, after other investigative avenues were exhausted.
This time, the subpoenas seem more like a first step. FBI director Kash Patel was called to the White House for meetings about the leak investigation on Friday, shortly before the subpoenas were delivered to Times reporters.
Renowned First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams told CNN, “I can’t think of another such conflict in which the president himself is so personally involved… Nor can I think of one in which there is every reason to think that the president himself was personally involved in the decision to seek to force the press to reveal its sources.”
“Most telling of all,” Abrams added, “I can’t think of a situation in which the public has had such a genuine and appropriate interest in the topic about which the article dealt.”
The plane gift was already highly controversial; figures across the political spectrum bashed the plan to accept the luxurious plane from Qatar last year, and some likened it to a “bribe.”
Trump seemed eager to show off the new jet, however. “The compressed timetable set by the president limited the modifications to the plane,” The Associated Press reported on July 1, the day Trump proudly took his maiden voyage on board.
“Images of the jet captured since its unveiling and analyzed by the Associated Press show that it is not equipped with at least some of the same missile detection and countermeasure systems as the outgoing Cold War-era jets,” the news outlet said.
Indeed, that information was ascertained just by looking at the plane up close.
But when Trump announced, during a NATO summit last Wednesday, that he wouldn’t be flying the Qatari-gifted plane out of Turkey, he claimed the change had nothing to do with security concerns.
He said the plane was being sent to England’s Mildenhall Air Force Base to give US service members “a chance to tour the aircraft.”
Anonymous sources undermined that claim right away. T