Todd Blanche: We're not targeting reporters. They're material witnesses, just like a reporter would be a material witness to a car crash.

Brooke Gladstone: Todd Blanche this week defending the subpoenas of several New York Times reporters during his confirmation hearing for the top job at the DOJ. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. How does this administration's aggressive actions against journalists compare to those that came before?

Lee Levine: Richard Nixon's undoing was ultimately his efforts to engage in a cover-up. Donald Trump doesn't care about cover-ups. He does everything out in the open.

Brooke Gladstone: Also on this week's show, sometimes reporter intimidation is ripped straight from a horror flick, like what happened to two bloggers who wrote about eBay.

David Steiner: That reinforced my fear that the book had been a message, "You're going to lose your wife."

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. On Wednesday, The New York Times filed a motion to quash the subpoenas that had been issued to three of its reporters, delivered by federal agents to their homes.

Brooke Gladstone: The New York Times says the Justice Department has subpoenaed several of its journalists after they reported on security concerns involving President Trump's new Air Force One plane.

Matt Gertz: Yes, this is personal for President Trump. He's been angry about the news reports involving this new plane. He said one thing to the public, government sources said another thing to the public, and then Trump was angry about being contradicted by his own government.

Micah Loewinger: The orders came down the line from the White House to the FBI to the DOJ: "Find the leakers." Forcing journalists to give up their sources at the very start of an investigation is not how these things are supposed to work. We'll get to that in our next segment. We're going to lead with the story of the man who signed off on those subpoenas, Todd Blanche, currently acting attorney general, who, in his job interview on Wednesday for the top spot at the Justice Department, said:

Todd Blanche: We're not targeting reporters. They're material witnesses, just like a reporter would be a material witness to a car crash.

Micah Loewinger: It was something else Blanche said, a slip of the tongue in response to Republican John Kennedy's question, that got the most attention this week.

John Kennedy: Are you and President Trump friends?

Todd Blanche: I'm his lawyer. Was his lawyer.

Micah Loewinger: Oops. The long history of the DOJ goes back to the Judiciary Act of 1789. Back then, the role of AG was part-time, held by lawyers who also ran their own practices. The department grew in size and importance over the next century or so, up until the next big shift following Watergate and the Ethics in Government Act, which reinforced the independence of the department from the president, and that held for a while. From Trump's first term in office, it was obvious that he didn't want an independent and impartial DOJ or attorney general.

Matt Gertz: That is just not how Donald Trump thinks about the position at all.

Micah Loewinger: Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters and author of the recent piece, "With Todd Blanche, MAGA Media Is Finally Getting Its Dream AG."

Matt Gertz: He's been very clear through both of his presidencies that he wants the Justice Department to serve his interests as he sees them.

Micah Loewinger: This breaks with the longstanding tradition at the DOJ to insulate itself from the White House, and we've seen that change dramatically across Trump's two terms. Can you take us back to his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions? How did he interpret the role, and how did it go for him?

Matt Gertz: Jeff Sessions is an arch-conservative. He was the first senator to endorse Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. At the same time, he was someone who thought that the ethical guardrails around the Justice Department should stand. In particular, he recused himself from the Justice Department's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Donald Trump never really forgave him for that.

Sessions was relentlessly hounded by Trump, by his right-wing media allies, for refusing to just end Robert Mueller's investigation. He was, in particular, denounced by Jeanine Pirro, who was a Fox News host at the time. She and other Trump supporters on Fox called for Sessions's removal, and eventually that happened.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, and as we'll see, Fox News, as a critic and cheerleader of Trump attorneys general, is kind of a theme here.

Matt Gertz: Beginning in 2016 with the presidential election, there was a real cottage industry that started up through the right-wing media. It revolved around figures like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs at Fox. The idea here was to delegitimize the Russia probe and any other investigations into Donald Trump's actions, and to suggest that the real crimes were committed by investigators looking into those actions.

It becomes the kind of architecture that all of these figures use to attack Jeff Sessions. The idea is, obviously, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and all of these other people committed crimes, and thus, the inability to prosecute them is evidence that Sessions himself is either in on it or is incompetent. Of course, this doesn't actually work when it's applied.

In one case, we saw Jeff Sessions did actually assign this Uranium One pseudo-scandal involving Hillary Clinton to a US attorney to look into. There was nothing to it. There was no one to charge. There was no behavior that was criminal. The claim that all of your enemies are criminals, it plays well on Fox News, but it doesn't hold up in a courtroom. That is the problem that Sessions and later Barr and later Bondi and soon Blanche will face.

Micah Loewinger: Let's talk about Bill Barr, because when he came in about a year after Sessions was fired, it seemed like he might be a better fit. At the time, Sean Hannity praised him. He, as you say, urged him to investigate this cabal of deep state actors. Yet he was, like Sessions, ultimately forced out for not politicizing the DOJ enough.

Matt Gertz: Barr comes in, and he actually does really seem to be going to the mat for this theory. He appoints a US attorney to look into it. The problem, though, is that the standards that people on the right set for the criminal behavior was incredibly high. The idea here was that Barack Obama was going to go to jail for this stuff. In fact, what the US Attorney ended up being able to actually prosecute, it was three people that no one has ever heard of. Two of them were found not guilty, and the third was found guilty but didn't even get any jail time. There's just a real disparity between the right-wing media idea of the criminal behavior here and what prosecutors have actually been able to find.

Now, Barr doesn't fall out of favor for this. What happens to him, though, is that Trump got mad at him because there was an investigation into Joe Biden's son, Hunter. Rather than revealing it shortly before the election, as Trump wanted him to do, Barr stuck to the regulations and didn't talk about it.

Micah Loewinger: He also wouldn't say that the 2020 election was rigged.

Matt Gertz: Yes, this was really the last straw. Trump kept trying to get the Justice Department involved to take his side, and Barr wouldn't do it. In fact, Barr publicly came out and said that there had been no evidence seen by the Justice Department of massive election fraud that would have swung the election. Soon after that, Trump put out a social media post saying that Barr was stepping down, and he did so later that month.

Micah Loewinger: It's wild hearing you talk about this. It's making clear to me how little has changed, or rather how many old axes Trump and his media and his allies are grinding to this day.

Matt Gertz: I would say one thing has changed, and that is Trump learned not to allow people like Jeff Sessions or William Barr to run the Justice Department anymore. The trajectory here has been to get people closer and closer to him, pure loyalists who would be willing to do what he told them to do.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. Enter Pam Bondi last year. She comes into the job of attorney general after Trump has campaigned in 2024 explicitly on the idea of seeking retribution. How did that go for her?

Matt Gertz: It went well until it stopped going well, I would say. She did attempt to put forward a bunch of pretextual prosecutions of various Trump foes. There were investigations started against everyone from Democratic members of Congress who said that the military and the intelligence community shouldn't follow illegal orders, to James Comey and Letitia James for their roles in past investigations of Donald Trump, but they just haven't worked out. As time passed and the president's enemies kept not being in jail, he got angrier and angrier with Bondi's handling of the position. Eventually, she was pushed out, and Todd Blanche, who was her deputy, was given the top slot.

Micah Loewinger: Todd Blanche, you write in a recent piece for Media Matters that his view is that the president, not the country writ large, should be seen as the Justice Department's client. How has he made that position clear?

Matt Gertz: Shortly after he was installed as acting attorney general, we saw the indictment of James Comey, the former FBI director. This is someone who Trump, for years, has raged against for his role in starting the FBI probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The pretext for the charges is this idea that James Comey had threatened the life of President Trump by taking a picture of seashells arranged in the pattern 8647 and posting it on Instagram with a note that was like, "I saw these cool shells on my morning walk." That's it. That's the whole thing, and on that basis, they charged him with federal crimes. That's crazy, and I think Todd Blanche knows that that's crazy, but Trump wanted James Comey indicted, and Todd Blanche provided the indictment that he wanted.

We've seen the appointment of Joe diGenova, who is this fixture in the right-wing media, someone who's been around as a Republican lawyer since the Clinton era. He's been put at the helm of this sprawling "grand conspiracy inquiry" into Trump's political enemies. The idea of this is that all of the investigations that touched on Donald Trump, from the Russia probe to the Mar-a-Lago investigation to the January 6th investigation, are all part of the same grand conspiracy to infringe upon Donald Trump's rights.

This is a way they're getting around the statute of limitations to try to push through some bizarre charges about things that happened back in 2016. This is the sort of thing that you do if you want Donald Trump's approval. You get a person that he's seen a lot on television to helm an effort to prosecute his political enemies.

Micah Loewinger: Since becoming deputy attorney general in late 2024, Blanche, who never really made frequent media appearances before, became a Fox News regular. I know that you've watched many of his appearances. What stood out to you?

Matt Gertz: That he is there, and there so frequently. He's been on at least 23 times on Fox weekday programs since then. He's a big favorite of the top hosts like Sean Hannity.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. You wrote about Todd Blanche's appearance on Sean Hannity's podcast in early June, where the two of them discussed a familiar topic, "the grand conspiracy," as Hannity put it, which he says goes back 11 years, of whether or not you had powerful high-ranking government officials conspiring to take down Donald Trump. If you promise that you're going to turn up evidence of a grand conspiracy and you inevitably don't, aren't you just signing yourself up for failure?

Matt Gertz: I think Blanche recognizes that. During that podcast, he said outright this conspiracy totally happened, but his question was whether they would be able to prove it. He said:

Todd Blanche: We know everything you're talking about is true, but then the next step is, okay, we have a set of laws that you cannot violate. If one's violated, what was it, and then how can I prove it? Even if it looks really bad, we have to have prosecutors who put evidence in. This is, "Oh yes," and we knew it. That's what we're working on now.

Matt Gertz: He is saying that, while he is trying to make this case, it may end up not working out in some way. A lot of this stuff just sounds better in a cable news monologue than it does in a courtroom.

Micah Loewinger: You wrote, "Blanche is the latest resident of the Attorney General's office, but even if he wins a confirmation, he may not be the last of Trump's second term. What won't change is Trump's desire for an Attorney General who will make the DOJ an arm of his will, which means that anyone willing to take the job should be summarily disqualified."

Matt Gertz: I thought what was really interesting about the hearings for Todd Blanche was that, while there was some criticism from Republicans of his work on the Jeffrey Epstein case, his role in the $1.8 billion/fund for purported victims of weaponization of government, there wasn't any critique of that idea that the Attorney General shouldn't be independent from the president. Everyone in the Republican Party seems to have bought into the president's premise that, at least during a Republican administration, the Justice Department should be an extension of the White House, and that, I think, is just very dangerous territory.

Micah Loewinger: I agree with that, and it also seems shortsighted because a Republican may not be in office in two years.

Matt Gertz: Yes, but all of the people who are currently fine with these political prosecutions of Democrats will turn around at that point and decry the politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department. This isn't a consistent position that they have for whether or not the Justice Department is independent. It is simply about gaining and retaining political power, and so it'll switch over remarkably quickly.

Micah Loewinger: On and on we go. Matt, thanks for coming on the show.

Matt Gertz: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters.

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Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, previous administrations have issued subpoenas to journalists, so what makes this time different?

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. The legal questions around how and if journalists can be subpoenaed and have their reporting materials revealed to a federal grand jury date back to a 1972 Supreme Court case called Branzburg v. Hayes.

Lee Levine: In that case, the Nixon Justice Department and the J. Edgar Hoover FBI issued a subpoena to Earl Caldwell, who was a reporter for The New York Times.

Micah Loewinger: Lee Levine is a media lawyer and author of the upcoming book In Bad Faith: Earl Caldwell and the Fight for a Free Press. He says the Nixon administration wanted Caldwell to testify about his reporting on the Black Panther Party.

Lee Levine: The real purpose of the subpoena was to disrupt Caldwell's relationship with the Panthers so that he would stop publishing stories that were contrary to the administration's preferred narrative, that the Panthers were a bunch of violence-prone thugs. Caldwell fought the subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court.

Micah Loewinger: That Supreme Court case was titled Branzburg v. Hayes. He was one of three reporters who was trying to fight a subpoena at the time. What was the precedent set by that case?

Lee Levine: The reporters in the case had argued that under the First Amendment, a reporter is protected from being compelled to disclose identities of confidential sources or information received in confidence by a subpoena issued through the government. The court ruled in a 5-4 decision that absent a showing of bad faith on the part of the government, a reporter does not have a First Amendment-based privilege to refuse to testify, at least before a grand jury.

Micah Loewinger: Can you give some examples of when the government has successfully argued that a journalist should testify?

Lee Levine: Sure. Another high-profile case arose out of the criminal investigation into the leak of the identity of a covert CIA agent, allegedly in retaliation for her husband's public writings that contradicted the George W. Bush administration's views about whether Iraq had enriched uranium. Three reporters were subpoenaed in that case: Tim Russert of NBC, Judy Miller of The New York Times, and Matt Cooper of Time magazine.

Russert, who I represented, was able to work out an arrangement whereby the prosecutors did not ask him any questions about what any source told him in confidence. Miller and Cooper, for a time, both refused. They both were held in contempt for refusing. Their contempt citations were upheld by federal courts of appeals. The Supreme Court refused to hear their cases. At that point, Time turned over the information that Cooper had about his sources, and Judy Miller went to jail.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, she spent 85 days in jail before her source essentially gave her permission to go public?

Lee Levine: Yes, her source, who was Scooter Libby, a White House official, gave her a written undertaking that he was no longer holding her to her promise of confidentiality.

Micah Loewinger: Those examples you just cited happened under the Bush administration. Was his DOJ particularly aggressive in its attitude towards journalists?

Lee Levine: I will say, in fairness, the subpoenas in the Miller-Cooper-Russert investigation were not issued by the Bush administration. They were issued by a special prosecutor named Pat Fitzgerald, who was appointed to conduct the investigation because Scooter Libby, the target of the investigation, was a White House official. One of the reasons that those subpoenas were issued, I think, was that Pat Fitzgerald was not subject to the internal Justice Department guidelines that place limitations on the ability of the Justice Department, self-imposed, to issue subpoenas.

That said, the Bush administration did take a much more skeptical view about the worth of a reporter being able to keep a promise to a source. In another case, it subpoenaed to testify in a criminal trial another New York Times reporter, James Risen, who had written a book in which he talked about a bungled CIA plot to provide faulty materials for building a nuclear bomb to Iran. He was subpoenaed to testify at the criminal trial of his source. The government found out who he was anyway, but he was subpoenaed to testify. He fought that all the way up to the Supreme Court and lost again.

Micah Loewinger: Risen was forced to testify and basically ended up giving information that anyone else could have. Why put him through it?

Lee Levine: The cynic would say it was because the administration wanted to secure an appellate ruling that reporters didn't have First Amendment rights to protect confidential sources in the context of federal criminal prosecutions. There had not been a federal appellate court decision rejecting that. In this case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled by a vote of 2-1 that there was no privilege.

Micah Loewinger: James Risen's source in his book State of War was a former CIA operative named Jeffrey Sterling. In 2011, Sterling's attorney told The New Yorker's Jane Mayer that Risen was targeted as part of an aggressive campaign by the Obama administration to pursue leakers, similar to the Bush administration. He said, "Attorney General Eric Holder is every bit as aggressive as a prosecutor as John Ashcroft. He just has more friends in the media." Is that true? Is that fair?

Lee Levine: I don't think that's fair, and I say that as someone who represented the Associated Press in a case in which the Holder Justice Department secured, without AP's knowledge, copies of their reporters' phone records. I think that Holder very quickly realized that this was not who he wanted to be and not what he wanted his legacy to be. After that, he did engage in a very good-faith process of revising the Justice Department's internal guidelines to make them even stronger.

Micah Loewinger: The examples that you've raised are troubling, but till now, they've still been relatively rare. Past administrations have claimed that they did some self-policing and that they tended to issue a subpoena only when they exhausted all other options. Can you talk a little bit about these policies?

Lee Levine: Prior to the Nixon administration, there were no policies, and prior to the Nixon administration, there's no real record of reporters ever being subpoenaed by the Justice Department to testify, in criminal proceedings or in grand jury proceedings or anything like that, which is why, when the Nixon Justice Department started doing it to Earl Caldwell and others, there was such an uproar. The response to that uproar was the Justice Department, through Attorney General Mitchell, promulgating, for the first time, guidelines that were supposed to bind the attorneys at the Justice Department and limit substantially their ability to subpoena reporters.

One of the requirements was that the journalists should be the last resort, not the first resort. Those guidelines stayed on the books until 2024. In the Biden administration, Attorney General Garland issued whole new regulations that basically said, "We're getting out of this business. We're not subpoenaing journalists anymore at all."

Micah Loewinger: Wait a second, though. Full disclosure, I was subpoenaed by the Garland administration for my reporting on January 6th, and I ended up having to testify in a federal criminal trial.

Lee Levine: That was in the Biden administration?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, yes. I was not compelled to give up any source. There was no source in my story, nor was I compelled to give up any reporting materials. I was subpoenaed to authenticate evidence, nevertheless.

Lee Levine: This was a huge issue in the Earl Caldwell case, that Caldwell always took the position, and the Times took it as well, that we have no objection to authenticating our reporting. What we object to is doing it behind the closed doors of a grand jury room when nobody knows what we're saying.

Micah Loewinger: Okay. Now, in 2025 and 2026, the Trump administration has basically thrown out the book and has used subpoenaing journalists as a much more common practice. In 2022, when the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, Trump said at a rally:

Donald Trump: You get the information very easily. You tell the reporter who is it, and the reporter will either tell you or not. if the reporter doesn't want to tell you, it's bye-bye, the reporter goes to jail. When the reporter learns that he's going to be married in two days to a certain prisoner that's extremely strong, tough, and mean, he or she will say, "I think I'm going to give you the information. Here's the leaker. Get me the hell out of here."

Lee Levine: It all started with a raid on the home of a Washington Post reporter.

News clip: Guys, good evening. We'll start by saying this is unprecedented: FBI agents raiding the home of Hannah Natanson, a Post reporter, seizing two laptops, her phone, a Garmin watch. Free speech experts I spoke with say this sends a clear message to journalists that is deeply concerning.

Lee Levine: The gone-but-not-forgotten DOGE era, where she was actively soliciting sources in the government who could talk about what was going on in their agencies and departments. She was subject to a raid. The Post was at the same time subpoenaed for documents relating to her reporting. All of that is still in litigation.

Then, not so long ago, the government issued subpoenas to The Wall Street Journal and to The Post seeking information about their early reporting on the Iran War. We know now that both news organizations filed motions to quash those subpoenas, and then mysteriously, the subpoenas were withdrawn. Now we have the latest example, which is reporters for The New York Times being subpoenaed for information about the sources who provided them with information that they published about the new Air Force One.

Micah Loewinger: As an experienced lawyer in this space, is it fair to say The New York Times will probably successfully fight this?

Lee Levine: It's always dangerous to predict these things, but I think that The Times and their reporters will prevail in the lower courts. Right now, we have a very small sliver of protection for reporters, and that is that the only situation in which a subpoena would violate the First Amendment would be if it was issued other than in good faith.

Micah Loewinger: You're referring to the opinion from Branzburg v. Hayes?

Lee Levine: Yes. The majority opinion was written by Justice White, in which he basically said, in no uncertain terms, that in the normal case, a reporter has no First Amendment-based right to decline to answer questions posed to him or her by a grand jury. The only exception, Justice White said, is if the subpoena were issued "other than in good faith."

Micah Loewinger: How do you go about proving good faith or bad faith on the part of the government when they're coming after journalists with these subpoenas?

Lee Levine: The good news, at least from The Times and its reporters' standpoint here, is that Richard Nixon's undoing was ultimately his efforts to engage in a cover-up. Donald Trump doesn't care about cover-ups. He does everything out in the open. There is this long and detailed record of why these subpoenas are being issued and what the goal is and what the motives are. There's ample ability to make that case.

Micah Loewinger: Lee, of course, The New York Times, with its unlimited money and its elite lawyers, can fight off these types of threats. What does it mean for the rest of the news media that the subpoena is now in play more than ever?

Lee Levine: It kind of depends on how this episode plays out. If the Supreme Court does not ultimately intervene to change the law, this would be a net positive because it would reinforce the message that you can't do what the Trump administration is attempting to accomplish here. On the other hand, till it's totally resolved, it's going to make it difficult for reporters to get sources to come forward. It's going to be difficult for news organizations that have to fight these subpoenas.

Micah Loewinger: How then are you feeling about the state of the First Amendment?

Lee Levine: I have no reason for optimism, other than I can't believe in my bones that this will be allowed to stand, and that the Supreme Court would voluntarily jump into the fray here. I analogize it to Justice Thomas's repeated calls to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan, the key defamation protection that the press enjoys. Despite the fact that he's constantly writing dissents from the court's refusal to take cases asking it to revisit Sullivan, the fact of the matter is that there aren't the votes on the Supreme Court to do that. I'm hopeful that the same will be the case here, that The Times will prevail up through the federal courts of appeals and the Supreme Court won't intervene.

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Micah Loewinger: Let's hope so. Lee, thank you very much.

Lee Levine: You're welcome.

Micah Loewinger: Lee Levine is a media lawyer and author of the upcoming book In Bad Faith: Earl Caldwell and the Fight for a Free Press.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, another case of journalists being silenced for their reporting, but this one involves live cockroaches.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Journalist intimidation doesn't always come in the buttoned-up form of a subpoena from the government. Sometimes it's ripped straight from the stuff of a horror movie, like what happened to Ina and David Steiner, a middle-aged couple living in the small town of Natick, Massachusetts.

The Steiners started selling items on eBay soon after the company launched in the 1990s. They liked turning a profit off yard sale finds and engaging with a growing community of sellers. These were the halcyon days of eBay, which was founded by the ponytailed, Birkenstock-wearing techie Pierre Omidyar, on the premise that people could be trusted to buy and sell things online because people basically do the right thing.

Ina and David decided to launch a newsletter with practical tips for other eBay sellers, like how to photograph items, how to pack them, how to get good shipping prices. This newsletter grew into EcommerceBytes, a full-fledged online trade publication where they published news about eBay and other e-commerce platforms, and also the equivalent of their own YouTube channel before YouTube existed.

Ina Steiner: I'm Ina Steiner for auctionbytes.com. We're here at the Buy Safe seller-organized meet and greet. It's at the beach in Las Vegas. Let's go talk to some people and find out what's going on.

Brooke Gladstone: Then in 2019, the Steiners' story goes completely off the rails.

Jenny Carchman: One day, Ina is at her computer and gets a message, a DM from Twitter.

Brooke Gladstone: Jenny Carchman is a documentary filmmaker who captured the Steiners' story in Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal.

Jenny Carchman: It's anonymous. The picture is a skeleton avatar. It's scary, and it has no followers, and it's following no one. A message pops up, and it says, "Ina, what's your problem with eBay? You know that's how we pay rent..."

Brooke Gladstone: That doesn't sound so scary.

Jenny Carchman: No. Later in the day, she gets another one. It says, "HELLO!" An hour later, the next one pops up, "WTF... R U there??" The next one says, "I guess I'm going to have to get your attention another way, bitch." Her inbox to her email suddenly flooded with subscriptions to all kinds of newsletters from escort services, how to sign up for TSA, newsletters about irritable bowel syndrome, pornography.

Brooke Gladstone: It quickly moves into the real world when the Steiners start receiving packages. Oh my God.

Jenny Carchman: Right. The message Ina gets right before things start coming to her home is, "You don't have the balls to talk to me? Stop hiding behind your computer screen, you [inaudible 00:35:23]." The next day, they get a phone call from a company saying they're trying to deliver a wet specimen. David and Ina don't know what a wet specimen is, so they ask, and the person on the other line says it's a fetal pig, and they are really confused and really worried. They call the police. The police come, and as the police are leaving, there's a package at the door. It's a pig mask from the movie Saw.

Brooke Gladstone: It looks much scarier than the masks you see on Halloween.

Jenny Carchman: Correct. It's worn in the movie by a murderer. Now they're really frightened. Then it just keeps escalating from there, and the packages become more and more threatening.

Brooke Gladstone: For instance, a book about surviving the grief of losing your spouse. This is addressed to David. Then a funeral wreath addressed to Ina is dropped on their back porch. David is really upset.

David Steiner: That reinforced my fear that the book had been a message, "You're going to lose your wife."

Brooke Gladstone: Then they get, and now we're headed into grossness, a box of cockroaches. They get a box of live spiders. They get a box of maggots. There was a package, the name on it was David Steiner, but it was deliberately addressed to the next-door neighbors, and it was a box of barely 17 Hustler magazines. This was, I guess, a reputation-destroying ploy.

Jenny Carchman: Whoever was doing this wanted to destroy the Steiners, and it was working.

Brooke Gladstone: They had eight or nine cameras set up all over the house, a system of alarms that would go off at every door, a rig of a laundry cart with baking pans so if someone broke in, they'd hear it. They put golf clubs next to the door to use as weapons. Then they started sleeping in separate bedrooms so that if one was injured, the other could escape.

Jenny Carchman: It's terrifying to think that what is happening to you won't stop. They don't know how to stop it. Nothing is being done because the police are not finding any leads.

Brooke Gladstone: Then people seem to be trailing them in person. They were able to capture a license plate, and finally, they get some answers.

Jenny Carchman: The police get the credit card of the person who rented the car, whose name is Veronica Zea. Ina Googles Veronica Zea. Her LinkedIn comes up, and she is on the security team at eBay, and they are totally shocked. The company that they've spent almost 20 years covering, working with, working alongside their sellers, is doing something to them, and they don't know why.

Brooke Gladstone: They share this information with the police, who are flabbergasted.

Jenny Carchman: They investigate further, and they find names of more people from eBay who are also in Natick, Massachusetts, on the same assignment.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's step back for a second. eBay went public in 1998. It blew past expectations, but by the late aughts and early 2010s, the company was struggling. In 2019, eBay is targeted by Elliott Management, an aggressive group of investors, to say the least.

Jenny Carchman: Elliott Management is an activist investor. Its interest is in going into companies that they can squeeze more value out of if they make some changes, and then selling the companies for a profit.

Brooke Gladstone: Around this time, Jim Baugh enters the picture. He's the head of eBay's security unit.

Jenny Carchman: When Devin Wenig became CEO, Jim Baugh was hired to be Devin Wenig's bodyguard. He worked for Bill Gates, he worked at the Oscars, he protected Joe Biden, he worked for Amazon in other capacities. He had a good reputation.

Brooke Gladstone: Baugh had, I think it's fair to say, some grandiose notions. He was trying to build an elite team that would change the global security landscape. He assigned reports about global conflicts and quizzed his team on subjects like the Middle East. His team was plied with a lot of celebratory wine at the office, which they drank at those times when he didn't move them to tears. He had sex with at least one of those employees. He was also peculiarly obsessed with movies, and he made his employees spend many work hours watching and dissecting particular movie clips.

Jenny Carchman: At a certain point, the team working directly under Baugh is made up of young, very attractive women who are college-educated, but in many cases, this was their first job. They are very impressionable, very eager to please. These movies were shown to inspire loyalty, trust, team building.

Brooke Gladstone: And unquestioning obedience.

Jenny Carchman: Absolutely. He shows a movie like Zero Dark Thirty, where the team is damned if they are going to let anything come between them and their mission.

Zero Dark Thirty clip: We're spending billions of dollars. People are dying. We are still no closer to defeating our enemy. What the [inaudible 00:41:15] have we done about it, huh?

Jenny Carchman: He shows them a clip from Training Day, where Denzel Washington forces Ethan Hawke's character to do drugs in front of him.

Training Day clip: A good narcotics agent should have narcotics in his blood.

Training Day clip: What, are you going to smoke that?

Training Day clip: No, you are.

Brooke Gladstone: An important one is the scene from Full Metal Jacket, a sergeant diminishing his soldiers.

Full Metal Jacket clip: Why is your footlocker unlocked?

Full Metal Jacket clip: Sir, I don't know, sir.

Full Metal Jacket clip: Get down. Well now, let's just see if there's anything missing.

Jenny Carchman: The message was, "You are nothing. Do not get attached to anything. You will serve me." He is going to strip them of anything that they might feel an attachment to that might make them an individual, because then they will be a good soldier.

Brooke Gladstone: 2019, eBay is embattled, targeted by the investors at Elliott Management. Baugh is intensively intimidating and manipulating the young women on his security team, and the Steiners are continuing to report on eBay. What are some of the articles that Ina is writing that really annoyed the top brass?

Jenny Carchman: Ina writes that Devin Wenig, who was then the CEO of eBay, is receiving 152 times more in salary than the average eBay employee. Devin Wenig decided he was going to redo the main building of eBay and build a bar on the campus, a replica of Walker's, a watering hole in Tribeca. He spends a lot of money doing that, and Ina reports about it.

This really irked Devin Wenig. Here he was trying to do something good for his employees, and she's saying maybe spend the money the company's making on something else.

Brooke Gladstone: This tiny trade publication gets under the skin of Devin Wenig, and he and his chief communications officer, Steve Wymer, started sending each other messages grousing about Steiner's reporting. Wymer says, "We are going to crush this lady." Wenig says, "If you're ever going to take her out, now is the time." Wymer loops in Jim Baugh.

I'm going to read some of those because they're gobstopping. Wymer says to Baugh, "I want to see her ashes, as long as it takes, whatever it takes." Baugh responds, "Will take two weeks." Wymer says, "I'll embrace managing any bad fallout. We need to STOP her." Wymer follows up with, "ANYTHING we can do to solve this problem should be explored. Whatever.it.takes.I want her done. Burn her to the ground."

Jenny Carchman: It was shared with executives, including the legal team at eBay, who did not respond, as far as I know. The CEO said, "Take her down." I cannot assume that he meant send them bugs and terrorize them. I do not know that to be true. Whatever he meant, he wanted to harm them in some way.

Brooke Gladstone: It's those messages that launched the stalking campaign, right?

Jenny Carchman: Yes. Suddenly, the wheels start turning, and Veronica Zea is the young woman whose first job was at eBay, other than working at an amusement park. She wants to please Baugh more than anything because she wants to be a manager, a full-time employee.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, as soon as they find out that this is linked to eBay, the local Natick police bring in the FBI.

Jenny Carchman: The FBI escalates it to the Attorney General's office in Massachusetts.

Brooke Gladstone: Then what happens?

Jenny Carchman: Andrew Lelling was the [US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts] at the time. He decides they're going to bring charges against Jim Baugh and the six people who worked in his unit who carried out the plan. They all take a plea. The four men and one woman serve in prison. Jim Baugh goes to prison for 57 months. He's now free. Veronica and Stephanie Stockwell, another young woman, they received both two years of probation with one year in home confinement, and they are felons for the rest of their lives. [Lelling] decided not to prosecute eBay or the executives who were involved.

Brooke Gladstone: Despite all of the explicit words in the messages.

Jenny Carchman: He says that is just how executives talk.

Brooke Gladstone: It's locker room talk. Is that what you're saying?

Jenny Carchman: It is locker room talk. eBay received a deferred prosecution, which means that they pay a fine, but not to the Steiners, that goes to the government, and that they're kind of under surveillance for three years, and then that would be dropped.

Brooke Gladstone: Of course, Wenig went on to poverty and despair.

Jenny Carchman: Wenig received a severance fee of $57 million. He exited shortly before this case became public. Steve Wymer went on to run the Boys & Girls Club of Silicon Valley.

Brooke Gladstone: Isn't that nice? What's Wenig doing now?

Jenny Carchman: Devin Wenig is on the board of General Motors, and he's also the head of an AI company that is supposed to help journalists do their work.

Brooke Gladstone: What have the Steiners gotten so far from eBay?

Jenny Carchman: The Steiners received a letter apology.

Brooke Gladstone: How are they doing mentally?

Jenny Carchman: The stalking campaign didn't stop them reporting, but boy, has it changed their life forever. They suffer extreme emotional consequences. They vetted me for a year before they would agree to let me make this film because they thought I was working for eBay. They don't trust anyone. They don't have the windows open when you go to their house.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you think the story tells us about our current political situation, where journalists are facing subpoenas simply for reporting facts?

Jenny Carchman: What happened to the Steiners is crazy and terrible and wild, but really, what happened is the CEO of a company wanted their reporting to somehow stop.

Brooke Gladstone: It's not about boxes of cockroaches or pig fetuses. It's about the fact that the executives thought they had the right to do it.

Jenny Carchman: That enough intimidation would cause enough of a chilling effect that the Steiners would stop what they're doing. I see this administration doing that same very thing to reporters because sending subpoenas to the door of a reporter is to say, "What you're doing is not going to be allowed."

Brooke Gladstone: It might as well be a pig fetus.

Jenny Carchman: It might as well be a box of maggots.

Brooke Gladstone: Jenny, thank you very much.

Jenny Carchman: You're so welcome.

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Brooke Gladstone: Jenny Carchman is the director of Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal, which is available to stream now on Amazon Prime. We reached out to eBay and to the executives. We didn't hear back before our deadline, but they did provide statements that were included in the film.

Steve Wymer's comment through his lawyer read, "At no time did Mr. Wymer have knowledge of illegal conduct of any kind. If he had, he would have actively worked to stop it." The statement provided to the film by Devin Wenig reads, "These outrageous and unacceptable actions against the Steiners were orchestrated by a troubled and rogue employee without my knowledge. I would never condone such behavior, which does not represent my values or those of the company I led for many years. Had I been aware of what was going on, I would have stopped it immediately."

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Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang, with help from Ella Walsh. Travis Mannon is our video producer.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering help from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

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Correction: In this interview we originally called Andrew Lelling the Attorney General of Massachusetts. This is incorrect. He was the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. It has been corrected in the transcript.

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