In the summer of 2009, less than a year after President Obama took office, one of the first orders of business for the newly empaneled Senate Judiciary Committee was passing a long-stalled federal ‘media shield’ bill, which would finally provide a uniform level of protection to reporters who get subpoenaed to testify against their sources in court. The bill, which had previously been scuttled by Republican Congress, now had strong support in a Democratic Congress, and seemingly, a newly-elected Democratic president, who had co-sponsored an almost identical bill when he was a senator. But just as it looked like the bill would sail through Congress and make its way to the president’s desk, it was stopped in its tracks. President Obama suddenly reversed course from his previous position and announced he would oppose the bill if the Senate didn’t carve out a giant national security exception that would make the important protections within it all but meaningless. Threats to press freedom around the world are at an all-time high. Sign up to stay up to date and take action to protect journalists and whistleblowers everywhere. Thanks for signing up for our newsletter. You are not yet subscribed! Please check your email for a message asking you to confirm your subscription. Sen. Arlen Specter, then a Republican, called Obama’s reversal “unacceptable” at the time, adding: “The White House’s opposition to the fundamental essence of this bill is an unexpected and significant setback. It will make it hard to pass this legislation.” The Democrat’s main sponsor, Sen. Chuck Schumer expressed his dismay as well. National security leak cases are usually the only cases the federal government prosecutes that regularly ensnare journalists, so Obama’s decision essentially killed the bill. Sadly, this incident was only the first of several moves by the Obama administration that laid the groundwork for a potentially unprecedented crackdown on the press by the incoming Trump administration. In the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump was the most openly hostile presidential candidate to press freedom we have seen in modern history. But many of the tools that will be at Trump's disposal were entrenched and expanded by the Obama administration. While a strong federal shield bill quickly became a pipe dream under Obama, there were still a patchwork of state laws and common law privileges in some federal court districts that did provide some protection to journalists who get called to testify against their sources. Unfortunately, Obama’s Justice Department then moved to attack ‘reporter’s privilege’ in the courts as well. When Obama came into office, New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen had been facing a subpoena under the Bush administration for a story in his book about a spectacularly botched CIA operation that handed over almost complete nuclear bomb blueprints to Iran. Many were expecting the Obama's Justice Department, led by then-Attorney General Eric Holder, to drop the subpoena. Instead they renewed it, and in the process, ended up destroying reporter’s privilege in one of the most important federal circuits in the country. After a district court ruled that Risen didn’t have to testify against his source because he was protected by a common law reporter’s privilege previously established in the Fourth Circuit, the Obama administration took their case to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. There, a three judge panel reversed the prior ruling and held that reporter’s privilege did not, in fact, exist. Risen would be forced to testify—along with any other reporter the Justice Department decided to subpoena in the future. The Obama administration eventually dropped their subpoena against Risen right before the trial because Risen was threatening to go to jail rather than reveal his source, but the damage had already been done. Obama’s Justice Department had eviscerated important protections for journalists in the federal court district that covers Virginia and Maryland, where hundreds of thousands of national security workers—and potential sources—live. Under his newly-proposed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, also an avowed hater of the press, Trump is now free to subpoena reporters working in the Fourth Circuit at will. The Justice Department’s “media guidelines” that supposedly restrict the Justice Department from subpoenaing or surveilling reporters—updated by the Obama administration after several other scandals involving going after journalists—can potentially be ripped up on Trump’s first day in office.