Justice Department

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday announced a government-wide crackdown on leakers, which will include a review of the Justice Department’s policies on subpoenas for media outlets that publish sensitive information.

U.S. antitrust officials have started talking to representatives from AT&T and Time Warner about possible conditions that could secure approval of their $85.4 billion tie-up, according to people familiar with the matter. The early-stage discussions suggest that government lawyers have nearly finished their months-long look at how AT&T, the biggest pay-TV distributor, would reshape the media landscape with its bid for the owner of CNN and HBO.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein issued an unusual, vague statement Thursday night, casting doubt on a series of recent media reports detailing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s growing probe into the Trump campaign for potential collusion with Russia in the 2016 campaign.

The Justice Department has gotten a warrant from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — also known as the FISA court — to conduct electronic surveillance on a group of journalists who’ve been the recipient of leaked information.

The U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of Fox News has widened to include a second law enforcement agency. Financial crimes experts from the United States Postal Inspection Service are now involved, according to four sources connected to the investigation. Mail fraud and wire fraud cases are part of the USPIS purview.

A member of President Donald Trump’s transition team, Makan Delrahim, will be nominated to head the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, the White House says. Delrahim is expected to move to Justice after finishing up in the White House counsel’s office, where he has worked to steer Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch through the Senate confirmation process.

AT&T is negotiating a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department to resolve allegations that DirecTV executives improperly colluded with other pay-TV providers three years ago, effectively blocking carriage of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ television channel in Southern California. A settlement could come in the next two weeks.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether advertising agencies manipulated the bidding process for contracts to produce commercials in order to favor their own in-house units.

The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday took the extraordinary step of suing AT&T, alleging that its DirecTV unit orchestrated an illegal campaign to block wide carriage of SportsNet LA,  the regional sports channel owned by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The U.S. Justice Department approved Charter Communications’ proposed $88 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable and Bright House networks on Monday. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler then circulated an order seeking approval of the deal from the five-member FCC.

Bridging the so-called digital divide — the gulf between people who have ready access to the Internet, and those like Escobar who do not — has long been a priority of President Obama. And addressing the issue has become a key component in the government’s review of Charter Communications’ proposed $67-billion plan to acquire two other cable companies — Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks — a  merger that could transform the pay TV landscape.

It’s time for the U.S. Department of Justice to clarify its new policies for investigating media newsrooms, argues Media Financial Management’s Mary M. Collins. Failing to do so means that publishers will continue to face large and uncertain expenses to protect their journalists and their reputation.

Gray and Schurz have entered into a proposed consent decree with the DOJ that requires the divestiture of television stations in the Wichita, Kan., and South Bend, Ind., markets.

Is Comcast using its muscle as the No. 1 cable provider to restrict competition and set local pay TV ad prices? The Justice Department’s antitrust unit is looking into this, and has asked the company for information.

FCC and Justice Department officials have spent the past few weeks sifting through allegations that Comcast violated 2011 agreements that enabled the cable giant to buy NBCUniversal.

Comcast’s record of compliance is now in the spotlight as regulators, and senators like Al Franken, scrutinize its proposed $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable. The Justice Department is evaluating whether the merger is anticompetitive and is scheduled to meet with Comcast today to discuss it. The FCC is considering whether the deal is in the public interest, and regulators in New York and California are also examining it.

Staff attorneys at the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division are nearing a recommendation to block Comcast Corp.’s bid to buy Time Warner Cable Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. Attorneys who are investigating Comcast’s $45.2 billion proposal to create a nationwide cable giant are leaning against the merger out of concern that consumers would be harmed and could submit their review as soon as next week, said the people. The division’s senior officials will then decide whether to file a federal lawsuit seeking to block the tie-up.

Comcast said in a blog post Wednesday that it now expects the FCC’s review to finish in the middle of the year. It had predicted the deal would close in early 2015. The FCC has delayed its review due to a court case that is pending.

Rupert Murdoch can breath a large sigh of relief at the dissipation of a major legal threat hanging over his corporate empire. In a filing with federal securities regulators, his companies have disclosed that the U.S. Justice Department has decided not to prosecute them for possible violations of U.S. federal law. The federal investigation stemmed from the phone hacking scandal that consumed his British tabloids. A prosecution could have complicated the ability of 21st Century Fox to maintain control of its 28 U.S. television stations.

Comcast Corp.’s bold move to buy rival Time Warner Cable in a $45-billion deal once seemed inevitable. But that was 11 months ago — and a lot has changed. Now, it is unclear whether the U.S. Department of Justice and the FCC will give Comcast their blessing.

In a bid to shore up his legacy on press freedom issues as he prepares to leave office, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Wednesday that he’s making some changes news media organizations had requested to Justice Department policies on investigations involving reporters.

The Justice Department announced revised guidelines for obtaining records from the news media during leak investigations, removing language that news organizations said was ambiguous and requiring additional consultation before a journalist can be subpoenaed.

As the former CBS reporter launches legal actions against them, the Justice Department and Postal Service strenuously deny hacking her computer and phones.

The Wall Street Journal reports Sinclair Broadcast Group has moved one step closer to closing its long-pending $985 million purchase of the Allbritton family’s television holdings on Tuesday, after agreeing to settle an antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department. The settlement was reached in the wake of Sinclair’s agreement, announced last month, to sell one of the stations it is buying from Allbritton, ABC affiliate WHTM Harrisburg, Pa., to Media General for $83.4 million. WSJ subscribers can read the full story here.

Walt Disney Co., Discovery Communications and CBS Corp. are being asked for information by U.S. antitrust officials probing Comcast Corp.’s planned purchase of Time Warner Cable Inc., according to three people familiar with the matter.

What is ordinary about “ordinary newsgathering”? That question was at the heart of discussions Tuesday between Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and a group of media representatives over rules that guide federal prosecutors in their pursuit of leaks of classified information.

The Justice Department is taking an extra step to bolster its support of  TV networks in their U.S. Supreme Court case argument that Aereo is illegally retransmitting local TV station signals. U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who previously filed a friend of the court brief siding with broadcasters, is now asking to be allowed to argue his view endorsing TV networks stance during high court oral arguments in the case April 22.

The Department of Justice asked Gannett and Belo for more information about Gannett’s $1.5 billion purchase of Belo, the companies said Friday. Announced in June, the merger would double Gannett’s TV station portfolio and create the nation’s fourth largest owner of “big four” network affiliates. Gannett played down the DOJ’s second request as a “standard part of the DOJ review process” and reiterated that the company expects to close the transaction by the end of the year. Still, a second request can soak up a lot of time.

Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, appeared with The Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward and The Daily Beast’s Daniel Klaidman on CBS’s Face The Nation. Abramson on the DOJ’s leaks investigations: “In all of these cases I think the important thing is there’s supposed to be a balance between the needs to prosecute leakers and a free press. And it appears that in the pursuit of these cases … that balance doesn’t seem to have been applied inside the department.”

There is an ongoing legal case that raises the same protection-of-sources-issues that have been debated in the media firestorm surrounding the DOJ’s pursuit of AP and Fox News sources.

President Obama told the country that he didn’t want to criminalize reporting, and that he was going to ask his Justice Department to make sure not to do that anymore. To that end he is going to convene a panel, and urge the passage of a shield law. The question is, what will he do about Attorney General Eric Holder?

News Corp. said on Monday it is still reviewing whether it has any record of a notification from the United States government involving a subpoena for a Fox News reporter’s phone records.

Leonard Downie: “The Obama administration’s steadily escalating war on leaks, the most militant I have seen since the Nixon administration, has disregarded the First Amendment and intimidated a growing number of government sources of information — most of which would not be classified — that is vital for journalists to hold leaders accountable.”

The Obama Justice Department seized the phone records of numbers that are associated with White House staffers and, apparently, with Fox News reporters, according to a document filed in the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. Kim is a former State Department contractor accused of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified information to James Rosen, a Fox News reporter. The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia has seized records associated with two phone numbers at the White House, at least five numbers associated with Fox News, and one that has the same area code and exchange as Rosen’s personal-cell-phone number.

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material. They used security badge access records to track Fox chief Washington correspondent James Rosen’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012.