Biden says he won’t be secretly seizing reporters’ telephone information. However what in regards to the subsequent GOP president?

President Joe Biden told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he would ban secret seizures of reporters: “It’s just, just wrong. I won’t let that happen. “And a Justice Department spokesman said after the latest revelation that”Members of the news media have now been informed of such file seizures in any case.

“The seizure of journalists’ phone records is deeply undermining press freedom,” Times editor-in-chief Dean Bacquet said in a statement. “It threatens to silence the sources we depend on to provide the public with essential information about what the government is doing.” He urged the Justice Department to “explain why this action was being taken.” and what steps are being taken to ensure that this does not happen again in the future ”.

The problem is that Biden may ban the practice during his tenure, but a future Republican administration is likely to resume it, along with the other ways the Justice Department abused power under Trump. For example, meddling in a lawsuit on behalf of Rep. Devin Nunes, or trying to confiscate the profits of an exploratory book on Melania Trump, or trying to stand in as Trump’s personal attorney in E. Jean Carroll’s libel suit against him. Time and again, the Justice Department treated Donald Trump’s personal interests as government affairs, while, as we have now learned, we also secretly target communications from reporters on leak investigations.

Donald Trump’s abuses show the importance of putting in place formal guard rails. The United States cannot rely on informal norms. As Trump has shown, they are easy to break, and doing the right thing should not and cannot be left to individual presidents. The need to fix this, however, is one more thing Republicans might call partisan, as we all know that Republicans – especially after seeing Trump’s example – are far more likely to spy on reporters or treat the Department of Justice as a personal attorney. But Trump has hacked into US democracy in this way too, and if there is no permanent solution to the damage he has done, the stage is set for worse and worse.