Politico reporter Josh Gerstein reports the Supreme Court is leaving Fox News journalist Catherine Herridge to suffer exorbitant daily fines or reveal her source for a story.
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After a ruling from lower courts against her favor, Herridge turned to the justices to decide the fate of her First Amendment argument. But in a Thursday ruling, Gerstein reports the court declined her request without explanation. The extremely short, two-paragraph order did note, however, that Justice Brett Kavanaugh would have granted Herridge’s request.
Herridge faces contempt charges from a Washington, D.C., judge in a case brought against the federal government by Yanping Chen, who claims officials violated the Privacy Act by disclosing records about her compiled in an FBI investigation. Fox News, where Herridge worked at the time, published information from the records.
Chen argued that leaks about the probe damaged her reputation, and she sued several federal agencies over the disclosures. As part of that lawsuit, she filed a subpoena to Herridge to try to force her to disclose her source, but Herridge refused. Chen also sued the FBI, DOJ, Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security in 2018 for monetary damages — as well as an admission of wrongdoing — from the government over its violation of the Privacy Act.
After Chen’s depositions failed to reveal the leaker, she turned her lawyers loose on Fox News and Herridge.
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Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper ordered Herridge to pay a $800-a-day fine for her defiance of the subpoena, but he delayed enforcement of the fine to allow Herridge time to appeal. However, now that Herridge has lost her appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court, Chen’s lawyers could ask a judge to make the $800 daily fine even bigger to pressure her to deliver the goods.
In earlier appeals, Judge Greg Katsas, a Trump appointee, and Judge Harry Edwards, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, both sounded unconvinced of Herridge’s legal argument that Cooper should have balanced the public interest in news reporting against Chen’s desire to be compensated for damage to her reputation, according to Politico.
After the DC Circuit Court declined to stay the ruling last month, Fox News told AlterNet in a statement that, “The D.C. Circuit’s refusal to pause these crippling fines while a petition is actively being prepared for the United States Supreme Court is deeply troubling.”
“As we have maintained, forcing a journalist to expose a confidential source strikes at the very heart of the First Amendment and sends a chilling message to newsrooms in their ability to hold the powerful accountable,” the company added.
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