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Background: FILE – People take photos of the FBI building headquarters in Washington, Aug. 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File). Inset: Catherine Herridge (via CBS affiliate KCAL News/YouTube screengrab).
Veteran reporter Catherine Herridge, formerly of Fox News and CBS, has been held in civil contempt by a federal judge and is poised to face a fine of $800 per day for withholding her sources.
The fine will be stayed pending appeal, according to the order. As of Friday morning, Herridge had not yet appealed.
The source Herridge is protecting is tied to reports she wrote for Fox News in 2017 that revealed how the FBI investigated Chinese American scientist Yanping Chen. Chen was under counterintelligence scrutiny for years and investigated on suspicions that she falsified immigration forms when seeking work for a Chinese astronaut program, according to The Associated Press. Ultimately, Chen never faced any criminal charges and the probe into her life ended. Then, a year later, Herridge published her investigative piece on the scientist and the many curious federal investigations into the University of Management and Technology, a Virginia-based school close to the Pentagon where Chen worked as president.
Chen sued the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security in 2018, alleging the agencies leaked her information to Herridge in violation of the Privacy Act.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., ruled last year that Herridge must sit for a deposition and disclose the identity of her confidential source in her reporting on Chen.
About a year after that ruling, Cooper, a Barack Obama appointee, finally held Herridge in civil contempt on Thursday for failing to comply.
“In August 2023, the Court partially denied journalist Catherine Herridge’s motion to quash a subpoena in this Privacy Act lawsuit, thereby permitting Plaintiff Yanping Chen to depose Herridge regarding the sources for her investigative reports on Chen’s affiliations with the Chinese military. At her deposition the following month, though, Ms. Herridge refused to answer any questions about the identity and intent of her sources,” Cooper wrote. “The question now is whether Herridge should be found in civil contempt for defying the Court’s clear and unambiguous order. After careful consideration, the Court concludes that a finding of civil contempt is warranted.
Herridge, who is represented by former Trump White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin, was recently laid off from CBS News as a part of widespread layoffs at the network.
The order raises significant First Amendment concerns and in Cooper’s order, he acknowledged that “absent a stay, Herridge would have to choose between disclosing her source’s identity — a decision that ‘is by its very nature, irreparable,’ — or face possible financial hardship by racking up potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines in the interim.”
Chen’s own privacy claims may be further denied while Herridge appeals, Cooper explained, but it will be “marginal in comparison to the five years Chen has already spent to suss out the leaker’s identity.”
The federal judge also wrote that he “recognizes there are competing public interests at stake — namely, the First Amendment interest in protecting confidential sources versus a substantial interest in ensuring compliance with court orders and enforcement of the Privacy Act.”
“But given that the question now is only whether to defer contempt sanctions in the interim to ensure that Herridge can litigate her First Amendment claim to the hilt before revealing her sources, the Court finds that the public interest also favors the stay request,” Cooper wrote.
The civil contempt order also forbids Herridge from “accepting any funding from any other persons or entity to pay her contempt sanction.”
“Herridge and many of her colleagues in the journalism community may disagree with that decision and prefer that a different balance be struck, but she is not permitted to flout a federal court’s order with impunity,” Cooper wrote. “Civil contempt is the proper and time-tested remedy to ensure that the Court’s order, and the law underpinning it, are not rendered meaningless.”
