(CNN) — President Donald Trump personally pushed the Justice Department to issue subpoenas to reporters covering the war in Iran in an effort to flush out their sources, according to officials familiar with the matter.

He delivered the message on a sticky note — the word “Treason” in Sharpie — placed atop a stack of printed articles he handed to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a White House meeting, the officials said.

After Blanche received the packet, the department issued several subpoenas, including to The Wall Street Journal, which first revealed the probes. One official told CNN the Justice Department’s National Security Division was already preparing to look at some of the stories’ sources but Trump’s stack accelerated the effort.

A source told CNN the investigation is aimed at identifying government employees who leaked information and not the reporters themselves.

Still, the subpoenas mark one of the administration’s most aggressive attempts to root out leaks about national security or the administration.

Trump, who has complained about leaks of classified information to reporters since his first term in office, has been especially furious when his private comments or details of his briefings related to the Iran war have been made public, according to several people familiar with his response.

The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A few months into Trump’s second term, former Attorney General Pam Bondi revised Justice Department policy to let federal investigators, in certain cases, seek reporters’ phone records, notes or testimony via court orders, warrants or subpoenas. The move, which made it easier for investigators to try to identify sources, reversed a yearslong ban imposed after revelations that Attorney General William Barr had secretly sought reporters’ emails during Trump’s first term.

Last month — just one day after the president fired Bondi — Trump publicly threatened to send an unspecified reporter to jail as part of a hunt for the “leaker” behind reports of an injured Air Force officer missing within Iran. The service member evaded Iranian forces for more than a day before being rescued by American forces.

But outlets reported about a manhunt for the officer while it was ongoing, which the administration said threatened his safety. The stack of articles that Trump handed to Blanche were about those rescue operations, sources said.

After Trump’s threat, Blanche said the Justice Department “will always investigate” leaks involving classified information, especially those that put US service members at risk.

“And we will investigate if it means sending a subpoena to the reporter,” he said. “That’s exactly what we should do, and that’s exactly what we will be doing.”

The department’s investigations appear to go beyond that single operation. The Wall Street Journal said Monday that it received a grand jury subpoena for reporters’ records tied to an article published five days before the war began. The article was about Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine and others at the Pentagon who warned the president about the risks of an extended military campaign against Iran.

“The government’s subpoenas to The Wall Street Journal and our reporters represent an attack on constitutionally protected newsgathering,” a spokesperson for Dow Jones, which publishes The Journal, said in a statement to CNN. “We will vigorously oppose this effort to stifle and intimidate essential reporting.”

In addition to The Journal, other news outlets have also received subpoenas in recent months, a person at one of the news outlets said on condition of anonymity. But some of the news organizations have chosen not to comment on the matter for the time being.

The-CNN-Wire
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