Incident details
- Date of incident
- April 9, 2026
- Location
- Saint Paul, Minnesota
- Targets
- Don Lemon (Independent)
- Legal orders
-
-
subpoena
for
communications or work product
- April 9, 2026: Pending
- May 27, 2026: Dropped
-
subpoena
for
communications or work product
- Legal order target
- Third-party: YouTube (tech company)
- Legal order venue
- Federal
Subpoena/Legal Order
Don Lemon, at center, in glasses, leaves court after his arraignment in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Feb. 13, 2026. The journalist’s YouTube account was targeted with a grand jury subpoena on April 9.
Independent journalist Don Lemon’s YouTube account was targeted with a grand jury subpoena on April 9, 2026, part of an ongoing Department of Homeland Security investigation into a protest he documented in St. Paul, Minnesota, months earlier. The subpoena was eventually withdrawn in May.
Lemon’s YouTube account information had already been the focus of an April 3 administrative subpoena, a type of legal order that does not require judicial oversight. Google, the parent company of YouTube, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker earlier that it had not complied with the April 3 subpoena.
Both legal orders were part of Lemon’s ongoing prosecution on charges connected to his reporting of the Jan. 18 anti-deportation demonstration, which disrupted a church service.
Journalists Georgia Fort and Junn Bollmann were also indicted on the same charges.
The April 9 subpoena was far more expansive in its requests for information than the April 3 request. According to court filings published in early November, the DHS requested documents showing how Lemon paid for the YouTube account, copies of IDs he may have used to open it and sign-in records, as well as correspondence made through it.
Separate April 14 subpoenas requested the same, more basic subscriber information for both Lemon and Fort’s accounts demanded in the April 3 administrative subpoena.
The batch of new subpoenas came to light through efforts Google began in early May to repudiate the various legal requests and to unseal them to the public. By Sept. 3, the company had filed a motion to unseal, arguing that the First Amendment mandated that the public had a right to access the grand jury proceedings.
On Oct. 28, a federal judge agreed and ordered the subpoenas unsealed and released Nov. 9, revealing that on May 27 the government had dropped the April 9 and 14 subpoenas.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker catalogs press freedom violations in the United States. Email tips to [email protected].
