Trump administration subpoena NY Times reporters to testify after Air Force One security story

Subpoenaing reporters over an Air Force One story is the kind of move that hands your critics a gift they didn't have to earn. The Times ran a piece about the president swapping planes in Turkey for a "security precaution," and rather than let that detail sit there and get picked apart by aviation nerds and security wonks, the administration decided to make it a fight about the reporters themselves. That's a strange hill to die on.

Here's the thing: if the security concern was real, say so plainly and let the story die of boredom. If it wasn't, and the swap was really about optics on a $400 million jet gifted by Qatar, then a subpoena doesn't make that go away either. It just adds a second story on top of the first one, and this second story is worse, because now it's about the government trying to compel journalists to testify about sourcing rather than about whatever actually happened on the tarmac in Turkey.

We've said plenty of times that the press deserves scrutiny and often earns it. Reporters get things wrong, they run with anonymous sources that don't check out, and outlets like the Times have a long record of stories that didn't hold up. None of that is in dispute. But the remedy for a story you think is wrong or overwrought is to rebut it, not to drag the people who wrote it into a subpoena fight. That approach reads less like confidence and more like an administration that didn't like being asked a question about its own plane.

If there's a real security rationale here, the administration should be able to explain it without needing a courtroom to do it. Making reporters the story is usually what you do when you'd rather not talk about the story itself.