Garland Confronts Long-Building Crisis Over Leak Inquiries and Journalism

Prosecutors’ approach to unauthorized disclosures of government secrets has undergone a sea change in the 21st century.

WASHINGTON — Government leak hunters have been ratcheting up pressure on the ability of journalists to do their jobs for a generation — a push fueled by changing technology and fraught national-security issues that arose after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Now, those tensions have reached an inflection point. Recent disclosures about aggressive steps that the Justice Department secretly took under President Donald J. Trump while hunting for the confidential sources of reporters — at The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post — prompted a backlash from the top. President Biden ordered prosecutors to stop seizing reporters’ phone and email data. But Mr. Biden’s sweeping vow to ban a practice he called “simply, simply wrong” left crucial questions unanswered. Among them: How broadly will prosecutors define the journalistic activities that the new protections apply to? And will the changes be easy or difficult for a future administration to roll back?