Eight hours is a long time to spend talking about a newspaper story. It is enough time for the coffee to go cold, lunch to become dinner and somebody’s anger to turn into a plan.
On Friday, July 10, FBI Director Kash Patel and other Justice Department officials met at the White House to discuss New York Times reporting about Donald Trump’s new presidential airplane. The Times says the meeting lasted about eight hours. Afterward, federal agents delivered grand-jury subpoenas to the homes of three Times reporters—Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton and Eric Schmitt—and prosecutors also sought testimony from Tyler Pager and Adam Goldman.¹
Most of us will never protect a classified source or receive a federal subpoena, but we understand what it means when a dispute at work follows someone home. The front door is where children drop backpacks, dogs bark at the UPS driver and the public part of the day is supposed to end. When federal agents arrive there because of something a reporter wrote, the location becomes part of the message.
The story that caused all this involved the Boeing 747-8 donated by Qatar and converted for Trump’s use as a presidential aircraft. The government has already spent roughly $400 million getting it ready. Even gifts can become expensive.¹
This wasn’t a story about the carpeting, the seat cushions or whether Trump liked his new airplane. It was about accepting an extraordinarily valuable gift from a foreign government, spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to make it usable and deciding whether it could safely perform one of the most sensitive jobs in the world. The Times reported that the aircraft lacked some of the security protections carried by the older Air Force One.¹