U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a presentation on U.S. nuclear innovation in the Oval Office of the White House on July 24, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Eric Lee | Getty Images
President Donald Trump on Friday defended the Justice Department’s subpoenas to New York Times reporters. google He also received a subpoena in the same criminal investigation into leaking information about the president’s new Air Force One plane.
President Trump’s comments about the subpoena came a day after the Justice Department notified a New York federal judge that it was withdrawing a subpoena seeking grand jury testimony and phone records from Times reporters. The Justice Department is investigating leaks reported in early July by the Times about security concerns on the presidential plane donated by Qatar.
Judge Arun Subramanian had warned prosecutors Thursday that he would throw out the subpoenas if they did not voluntarily withdraw them.
“We’re not going after journalists,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday. “We’re going after leakers. We’re going after cowards, unpatriotic people, and often traitors.”
“And the way we find them is through journalists,” the president said.
“That person has to be found, and the way to find it is to tell a journalist. If it’s something related to national security, you say to a journalist, ‘Who is that?'” Trump said.
“And we have a long way to go to solve this case,” he added.
Around the same time Trump spoke, a letter sent by Google’s lawyers to Subramanian on Friday was unsealed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on a judge’s order.
The letter revealed that Google was issued a grand jury subpoena on July 16 at the behest of the Department of Justice seeking “subscriber information related to phone numbers.”
The subpoena was sent to Google a day after Times lawyers moved to quash subpoenas issued to reporters.
On July 16, Google was also ordered not to disclose to its phone subscribers that they had received a subpoena for their information.
In a letter Friday, Google’s lawyers asked Subramanian to revoke the nondisclosure order signed by a magistrate judge, saying the order violates the First Amendment’s right to free speech.
“The government acknowledged that in its application to the NDO, it had inadvertently included language stating that the investigation was ‘private’, even though the facts of the investigation had been made public,” the letter states.
According to court filings, Subramanian granted NDO’s request to vacate.
