US prosecutors drop NYT subpoenas in Trump plane leak probe

Less than two weeks after President Donald Trump's Department of Justice sent subpoenas to five New York Times reporters seeking to force their testimony before a grand jury, the department has backed down. Today in court, the judge was grilling the lead prosecutor in the case for about an hour and a half about a number of mistakes the government made along the way and for what the Times' lawyers said were overly heavy-handed tactics, including sending an armed agent to the door of a reporter's house to serve a subpoena while he was watching sheep detectives with his wife, including the phone numbers of the reporter's family members in their requests for phone records, and also not informing the reporters or the Times that they were subpoenaing these phone records, which is something they're required to do under law. So after being grilled on these mistakes, the lead prosecutor requested that he get five minutes to just privately talk with the Times' lawyer, and then he comes back and announces to the judge that the government is willing to voluntarily withdraw these subpoenas. He said the reasoning for withdrawing these subpoenas was that the investigation was ongoing. They might cut new subpoenas and seek the testimony again, but after taking some other additional investigative steps, which again is something that they're required to do under Justice Department policy, subpoenaing journalists is supposed to be a last resort. Instead, the timing of all this indicates that it was one of the first steps that the DOJ took.