After the New York Times reported that Trump's new Qatari-gifted Air Force One lacked defensive systems carried by the plane it replaced, the administration moved against the reporting itself.
According to the Times, the White House instructed FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate the leak behind the story. Patel abruptly canceled a trip to Chicago, where he had planned to see his girlfriend and visit an FBI field office, and was called to the White House. There, the paper reported, he spent roughly eight hours on Friday, July 10, running the investigation from the White House rather than FBI headquarters, which the Times called “a major departure from historical practice,” and briefed senior administration officials on it. One person said Patel “had his own concerns about the type of information publicly disclosed about the plane.” AP separately confirmed, through a person familiar with the discussions, that Patel and other Justice Department officials met at the White House that Friday about the matter. FBI spokesman Ben Williamson said Patel and White House officials met “to brief an ongoing matter” and called “other speculative reporting regarding the nature of the meeting” “absolutely false.”
That night, grand jury subpoenas were issued to Times journalists Tyler Pager, Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton and Eric Schmitt, ordering them to testify in Manhattan; federal agents delivered some at reporters' homes. NBC News reported that three were ultimately served. Before publication, a senior FBI official had asked the Times to hold the story and to disclose its sources, which the paper refused. The Justice Department said, “reporters are not the targets, those leaking classified information are.”
Update (October 2, 2026): The Times moved to quash the subpoenas on July 15, calling them “brought in bad faith to punish The Times for its coverage.” The Justice Department also told the paper it had subpoenaed phone providers for several journalists' phone and text records, and prosecutors later acknowledged they had obtained records tied to reporters' relatives, including a spouse and one reporter's mother, which they called an error. On July 23, after U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian repeatedly asked why reporter subpoenas had come first rather than last, the Justice Department agreed to withdraw them. A department spokesperson accused the judge of threatening sanctions and blocking the grand jury from “core evidence in a national security investigation” (see The Secret Service Told Trump Not to Fly His Qatari-Gifted Air Force One Out of a War Zone, Because It Lacks the Old Plane's Defenses and Trump Told a New York Times Reporter on Air Force One That His Iran War Reporting Was 'Sort of Treasonous').
Correction (October 2, 2026): The entry was dated July 11, the day of the first wire reports; the White House meeting and the subpoenas were on Friday, July 10, and the date has been changed. The FBI spokesman's statement has been quoted more fully.