Incident Details
- Date of Incident
- May 16, 2018
- Targets
- The Associated Press
- Legal Orders
-
-
subpoena
for
communications or work product
- May 16, 2018: Pending
- Sept. 27, 2018: Dropped
-
subpoena
for
communications or work product
- Legal Order Target
- Institution
- Legal Order Venue
- Federal
Subpoena/Legal Order
A portion of a subpoena issued to The Associated Press by Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy on May 16, 2018, demanding leaked copies of Broidy’s emails.
Subpoena dropped for documents leaked to Associated Press
The Associated Press was not compelled to turn over leaked copies of Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy’s emails by the time Broidy’s civil suit against the government of Qatar was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction on Sept. 27, 2018.
Broidy had filed suit March 2018 in U.S. District Court in California, accusing Qatar, a public relations firm it had employed and the firm’s CEO of hacking into email accounts and computer servers starting in January 2018. He alleged they had stolen his emails and documents and distributed them to the media.
Broidy cited articles published in multiple outlets at the time about his anti-Qatar work on behalf of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia that appeared to rely on his anonymously leaked emails. Among the publications named were The New York Times, Newsweek, Bloomberg, The Huffington Post and The Associated Press.
“The dissemination of stolen and doctored materials concerning Plaintiffs is ongoing,” Broidy wrote in his complaint.
In May, Broidy’s attorneys subpoenaed the AP for the leaked emails, also demanding any documents that could identify the source of the leak. Shortly thereafter, the AP published an in-depth investigation into Broidy’s work that cited “hundreds of pages of leaked emails.”
Broidy also subpoenaed phone records from the PR firm’s CEO, revealing that he had spoken repeatedly to multiple journalists who then wrote about Broidy. The journalists included Tom LoBianco, co-author of the AP’s May article.
At the time, the AP told Freedom of the Press Foundation, of which the Tracker is a project, that it planned to invoke reporter’s privilege to fight the subpoena.
LoBianco told the Tracker via email in July 2024 that he recalled having to submit notes and documents to the AP to keep on hold, but “I never received any updates, from the AP or from Broidy’s legal team.”
The California district judge entered final judgment on Broidy’s civil suit in September 2018 in favor of the defendants, ruling that the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction over Qatar due to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, and personal jurisdiction over the PR firm and its CEO. The swift end to the suit combined with LoBianco’s recollections indicates that the AP was not forced to hand over the documents.
Broidy subsequently filed a similar suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., against the same public relations firm and CEO. He subpoenaed McClatchy reporter Ben Wieder in 2022 in that case; Wieder filed a motion to quash and the subpoena was ultimately withdrawn.
On May 16, 2018, attorneys for Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy drew up a subpoena for documents from The Associated Press, which demanded that the news organization hand over leaked copies of Broidy’s emails, as well as documents that could identify the source who leaked Broidy’s emails to the AP. On May 22, the AP confirmed that it had received the subpoena and planned to fight it.
The subpoena is part of a civil suit that Broidy filed in federal court in California against the government of Qatar. Broidy has accused Qatar of hacking his emails and then working with a P.R. firm to leak copies of the emails to journalists at the AP and other news organizations.
On May 21, the AP published a deeply-reported investigation into Broidy’s work with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, two nations that have been locked in an escalating diplomatic feud with Qatar for more than a year.
The AP investigation, which was “based on interviews with more than two dozen people and hundreds of pages of leaked emails between” Broidy and a business partner, reported that Broidy had lobbied Trump and other administration to adopt the kind of anti-Qatar foreign policy favored by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and was then rewarded by the UAE government with a lucrative consulting contract.
In the same story, the AP reported that beginning in February 2018, a number of news organizations started to receive “anonymously leaked batches of Broidy’s emails and documents that had apparently been hacked.” And a lawyer for Broidy told the AP that its reporting “is based on fraudulent and fabricated documents obtained from entities with a known agenda to harm Mr. Broidy.”
In the past, both Qatar and the UAE have accused one another of hacking the other, so it’s not surprising that Broidy believes that Qatar is connected to the hack and leak of his emails.
His goal seems to be to use the subpoena to force the AP to turn over documents that implicate Qatar in the leak of his emails, which he can then use as evidence in his civil suit against the Qatari government.
An AP spokeswoman told the Freedom of the Press Foundation that the news outlet plans to fight the subpoena. The AP is expected to invoke reporter’s privilege, which protects journalists and news organizations from being forced by the government to reveal information about its confidential sources.
Lee Wolosky — the attorney at Boies, Schiller & Flexner who drew up the subpoena on Broidy’s behalf — did not respond to a request for comment. But according to Politico, Wolosky argued in a letter accompanying the subpoena that reporter’s privilege should not apply to the AP because the leaked emails were obtained illegally and information about the AP's sources are “crucial to his case.”
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker catalogues press freedom violations in the United States. Email tips to [email protected].
