How will court challenges in these cases look any different than in the first administration, if at all?

Well, so this particular case is even more stark because you have the president saying that he is excluding news organizations from the White House explicitly because of coverage that he does not like.

And if there's one thing that is crystal clear under the First Amendment is that even in a place like the White House, where the White House doesn't need to open itself up to journalists, once it opens itself up to journalists, it can't exclude journalists because it doesn't like what they say.

I mean, it's interesting to watch the contortions.

Yeah.

Well, access is great.

And it's great that Governor Huckabee is emphasizing the importance of access.

What's dangerous is selective access, because that is what leads to a distortion in the information that is going out to the public.

Can you just clarify, you know, is that an accurate view? And when you talk about threats to press freedom in the United States, what specific issues or behavior are you really referring to?

So it's a great question.

And I think that the way that you've framed it is correct.

The U.S. has both in law, but also in political culture, a real commitment to freedom for the thought that we hate, which is a phrase that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used.

used right after the U.S. had entered World War I in a case that represented kind of the birth of the modern understanding of the First Amendment.

In other words, the U.S. has very, very, very strong speech protections, which also bleed over into protections for the press, right? And so the courts have long said that we have a free press, not necessarily a fair press, for instance.

And the Bottom line is there's a balance that has been struck that has long been agreed to in the US that when you're talking about the government's interference in press independence, you know, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze.

So I'd love to get sort of a run through of those main points possibly.

So what questions does that raise, and, and what concerns does the FBI search of her home, uh, trigger more broadly?

Well, so I think there's two points to make there.

One, uh, it is notable that, uh, the attorney general's pointing out that the Department of Justice has a suspect in custody, and in fact, has charged that suspect.

Uh, and so it raises the question as to why, uh, the Justice Department and the FBI would take the extraordinary step of executing a search warrant at the home of a reporter, uh, and seizing her el- electronic devices.

Uh, the, the other point that I would make here is that, um, th- this is actually something that we haven't seen before.

Um, w- again, we're talking about the FBI raiding the home of a journalist in a national security leak case.

Um, at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where I work, uh, we track these cases closely.

Is that right?