Appeals Court Says Justice Department’s Demand for Journalists’ LinkedIn Records Went Too Far

A unanimous federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the Justice Department went too far in demanding 18 months of journalists’ LinkedIn records in a national security leak investigation, ordering a lower court to narrow the order and warning that the sweep threatened confidential sources far beyond the case at hand.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, Virginia, said the government’s demand was “substantially overbroad” and sent the case back to a district judge to draw the orders “more narrowly”. The ruling is a setback for the Trump administration’s leak investigation, and a significant win for press-freedom advocates.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote the opinion. He was joined by Judge James Andrew Wynn, appointed by President Barack Obama, and Judge Nicole G. Berner, appointed by President Joe Biden.

What the government sought

Prosecutors were investigating the disclosure of classified information about a top-secret American military operation overseas, after an unidentified news organisation published a report about it. The Justice Department obtained orders under the Stored Communications Act requiring LinkedIn to hand over the journalists’ metadata records — a log of who they communicated with on the platform, but not the content of their messages.

The demand covered an 18-month period and about 1,900 LinkedIn interactions involving six journalists. The targeted reporters published nearly 1,000 articles during that time, and the court noted that fewer than 5% of them had anything to do with the subject of the investigation.

LinkedIn challenged the orders in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia in November 2025. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Hanes ruled in favour of the Trump administration in June, and LinkedIn appealed to the Fourth Circuit.

The Justice Department also obtained a separate order barring LinkedIn from telling the journalists, their employer or anyone else about the demand for at least a year.

Why the court said no

The panel accepted that the government has a legitimate interest in finding the source of a leak of classified information, and it rejected LinkedIn’s request to quash the orders entirely. Wilkinson wrote that the federal government is “entitled to discovery to the full extent permitted by law” and even to a “broad disclosure order”.

But the judges drew a line at a demand with no meaningful limit. “The administration cannot seek records ‘carte blanche’,” Wilkinson wrote. The court said that while the order “may catch sources relevant to the government’s investigation, it will also inevitably sweep in every other confidential source with whom the targeted journalists spoke.”

In the court’s words, the demand would “deal a damaging blow to First Amendment freedoms”. The judges warned that exposing journalists’ confidential sources unrelated to the investigation could undermine independent reporting and public accountability, because sources who speak to reporters in confidence would have reason to stay silent.

The panel also told the lower court to revisit the secrecy order that kept LinkedIn from alerting the journalists about the demand.

The case so far

The dispute has unfolded largely out of public view. The news outlet and the journalists involved have not been identified in the public court record, according to the Associated Press, and the precise military operation at the centre of the leak has not been named in the published opinion.

The case reached the appeals court after LinkedIn challenged both the disclosure orders and the nondisclosure order. The Fourth Circuit affirmed the disclosure orders in part, reversed them in part and remanded the case, with instructions to narrow them. The case is docketed as No. 26-4303.

The ruling lands in a year of escalating friction between the administration and the press. Trump’s $10 billion defamation case against the BBC was allowed to proceed by a Florida judge this week, and the Supreme Court weighed a separate question of agency power this week. The administration has pursued leak investigations aggressively, while news organisations have argued that broad demands for reporters’ records chill the sources on which accountability reporting depends.

What happens next

The case now returns to Judge Hanes, who must decide how far to narrow the disclosure order and whether LinkedIn may tell the journalists about the demand. The government may also seek further review, though no such move had been announced as of Wednesday.

For the journalists involved, the ruling does not end the investigation. Prosecutors may still obtain records, but only within limits the district court must now define — and only for material that bears on the leak itself, not for 18 months of contacts with sources who had nothing to do with it.

Further reading:

• whistleblowers say the Interior Department is destroying records
• the Washington Sun reported
• the American Quorum reported