The US Department of Justice vowed that it will no longer seek journalists’ phone and email records while investigating government leaks as additional information about Trump’s efforts to silence the New York Times becomes public.

According to the Associated Press, Justice officials have said that they will implement a new departmental policy barring the practice of getting a court order to obtain reporters’ communications so they can uncover the source of information leaks from inside the Administration.  The practice has met with stiff resistance from journalists and civil rights advocates after it was revealed that the Trump administration had sought records from reporters with the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN in an effort to determine the sources of stories from inside the White House, and effort to “reverse engineer” contacts based on who the reporters talked to.

Law enforcement officials will still be able to obtain subpoenas for a journalist’s records if that individual is suspected of committing a crime in violation of standard “press shield” norms.

In a separate story, the New York Times reports that late into the Trump administration and into the Biden administration, the Department of Justice imposed a gag order on Times’ executives barring them from reporting on federal efforts to obtain reporters’ communications records.

Justice officials issued an order barring executives at the newspaper, who were informed of investigators’ efforts to get the communications records, from informing editors or reporters of the subpoena so the newspaper would not report on the effort.

David McCraw, a lawyer for the New York Times, said that the order, put in place March 3rd, was lifted Friday, allowing the Times to cover the Justice Department actions, which involved federal officials attempting to obtain email logs from Google, the platform hosting the Times’ email system.

“Clearly, Google did the right thing, but it should never have come to this,” Dean Baquet, the Times executive editor, said. “The Justice Department relentlessly pursued the identity of sources for coverage that was clearly in the public interest in the final 15 days of the Trump administration. And the Biden administration continued to pursue it. As I said before, it profoundly undermines press freedom.”