Sarbanes-Oxley vs. the free press: how the government used business regulations to strong-arm the media

Reason, Jan, 2006 by John Berlau

BACK IN JUNE, when New Fork Times reporter Judith Miller was about to go to jail on contempt charges for refusing to testify about her anonymous sources, she and the Times had company in legal hot water: Matthew Cooper and his bosses at Time magazine. Both journalists were subpoenaed by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and both were alternately praised as First Amendment heroes and vilified as arrogant media elitists. But on June 9, in a move that took many by surprise, Time Inc. surrendered the magazine's notes to Fitzgerald and revealed its anonymous source in the Valerie Plame/Karl Rove/Joe Wilson/Robert Novak saga.

That much is well-known. What isn't widely understood is the role that may have been played by a law that most people don't associate with free press issues, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in the wake of the Enron scandal, along with related crackdowns on corporations.

Much of the reaction to Cooper's capitulation and Miller's imprisonment contrasted the two news organizations in terms of their editorial gumption. Virtually nothing was said about the growth in prosecutorial power in recent decades, even though a bipartisan journalistic consensus from Salon to The Wall Street Journal's editorial page argued that Fitzgerald had stepped way over the line in his treatment of the news organizations. Amazingly, even as Fitzgerald let Miller languish in jail for months, Time Inc. supplanted him as the villain in many media commentaries.

In taking on Time Inc., Fitzgerald seemed to take a page from New York's anti-corporate crusader of an attorney general, Eliot Spitzer. Fitzgerald came up with novel ways to implicitly and explicitly threaten all of Time's executives and corporate directors with steep fines and/or jail time. He tapped into a populist theme in his courtroom arguments and briefs, arguing that Time's officers and board members could individually be held responsible for the corporate "crime" of withholding documents. "The theory that he cited was, 'How could a board possibly permit violation of a court order?'" says Floyd Abrams, the respected First Amendment attorney who represented Miller as well as Time and Cooper at various points in the case. He certainly suggested there could be criminal sanctions imposed on individuals in senior management if they defied the court order."

On June 28, the day after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the circuit court decision against Time Inc. and to revisit whether the First Amendment gives reporters any privilege to shield sources, Fitzgerald filed a motion specifically asking that Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore be present at the next court hearing. This was necessary, Fitzgerald argued, "so that the CEO can explain to the Court the manner in which Time's officers and/or directors purport to have authorized Time to act contrary to law; and the Court can direct the CEO of Time to comply with this order upon pain of contempt" (emphasis added).

In his arguments, Fitzgerald suggested that Time's officers and directors should face penalties equal to, if not greater than, the penalties Cooper was facing for not surrendering the notes. "Time, as well as its controlling officers, have no legal right to defy a final court order, and an officer failing to take steps to have the corporation comply could be punished by contempt" he said in the motion. In court on June 29, Fitzgerald said to U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan, "I don't know how under any set of circumstances a corporate board could meet and agree to break the law." He also asked Hogan to levy a fine on Time Inc. large enough "to impact on the shareholders to try to coerce them"

Fitzgerald argued for the Court to deal with Time as a company first, saying that this could persuade Cooper to fall in line. "If we deal with Time Inc. first and Time produces the documents which include Mr. Cooper's notes" he said, "I think that might be material, a fact that might aid the rest of Mr. Cooper's situation [and] a fact that may sway Mr. Cooper to follow the Court's order."

Hogan took his advice about going after the corporation first, and things worked out pretty much as Fitzgerald had predicted. Time Inc. surrendered the documents the next day, and a week later Matthew Cooper surrendered his notes fingering his source as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. Cooper justified his decision by saying Rove had given him a new, specific waiver.

No Documents Is Private

How could a prosecutor bring one of the largest and most powerful media organizations in history so completely to heel?

In 2002, with many journalists cheering him on, President Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, one of many new laws that have expanded the list of corporate crimes and ratcheted up criminal penalties to terms longer than some serve for murder. Critics have complained that these laws criminalize risk taking. Fitzgerald's use of anti-corporate rhetoric and new legal precedent shows that can include risk taking by media companies.

Fitzgerald wasn't making his argument against Time in a legal vacuum. In his motion, he cited a 2003 case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that an officer of a Michigan company could be held in contempt of court for the business's lack of compliance with a court order, even though the officer had not been subject to any legal action, such as a lawsuit or indictment, as an individual. Michigan corporate attorney Nathan D. Plantinga warned in 2003 that the case "represents a significant change in the law and new exposure of corporate officers to liability and sanctions"