Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Wednesday assailed the arrest of independent journalist Don Lemon, the widespread layoffs at the Washington Post and an FBI search of a Post reporter’s home as examples of a strategy to intimidate journalists and, “replace evidence with conspiracy.”
Pelosi, speaking at the Washington Press Club’s congressional dinner in her final term as a lawmaker, cited the episodes as “an affront to press freedom, meant to scare, to chill and to silence.” On the Post’s layoffs, which cut a third of the company and hundreds of journalists, she said it meant that local communities would lack government accountability efforts and that “democracy loses guardians.”
“A free press cannot fulfill its mission if it is starved of the resources it needs to survive. When newsrooms are weakened, our republic is weakened with it,” she said, before quoting The Washington Post’s longtime motto: “because democracy dies in darkness.”
Pelosi’s remarks covered the breadth of assaults on the press during the second Trump administration, including the Pentagon’s guidelines that reporters said hamstrung their ability to do their jobs. The attacks were the latest in a decadeslong effort by the federal government to avoid accountability and impede the press in reporting on national security measures, citing a bill passed in 2000 that President Bill Clinton vetoed after he believed it could chill the press.
“Today, we are again witnessing the actions meant to chill the First Amendment’s most fundamental freedoms,” she said. “Let us be clear: attacks on journalism are attacks on the American people’s right to know, and attempts to undermine a free press or attempts to undermine the Constitution and democracy itself.”
Watch Pelosi’s full remarks here:
