SCOTUS urged to take up Catherine Herridge case after she was ordered to reveal confidential sources—she's paid fines of $800 per day for not doing so

Fox News has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a case regarding investigative reporter Catherine Herridge and whether reporters should be compelled to disclose confidential sources in civil litigation. The court had previously declined to intervene in the case and issue an emergency injunction, and the case is on its final appeal.

The case centers around a 2017 story that aired on Fox News regarding Yanping Chen, the founder of the University of Management and Technology in Virginia and a naturalized US citizen. Herridge’s reporting revealed Chen’s ties to China, and how she had previously served as a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army. The university had catered to military personnel, and a year after the reporting, the Department of Defense terminated the university from the tuition assistance program on national security grounds. 

The reporting said that Chen had “sought to hide” that she had been a colonel in the PLA and that she had lied on immigration and naturalization forms by stating that she had never been affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.

The Supreme Court petition states that “Nearly all of Herridge’s reporting was based on information obtained from non-government and non-confidential sources.” The reporting had included information that Chen later claimed “had come from government files and thus was subject to the Privacy Act,” including pictures allegedly seized in FBI searches of her home and offices, portions of her immigration forms, and information from FBI memos. 

The petition stated, “Chen’s complaint sought to hold the federal government liable for her lost revenue after DOD terminated funding for UMT ‘on national security grounds.’ Although she did not sue Herridge directly, she sought to pin the blame for her losses on an alleged leak of Privacy Act information to Herridge.” 

In June of 2022, Chen served subpoenas seeking to uncover confidential sources used by Herridge. Herridge was ordered to disclose her sources, and when she declined to identify them during a deposition, the court issued an $800 per day fine, which was upheld by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Herridge told Jonathan Turley that she had to write a check every day from her children’s college funds. She said, “These fines are designed to break you emotionally and professionally. I would walk every day to the mailbox with our oldest son for emotional and moral support.” 

The petition, in urging the court to take up the case, states, “this case goes to the heart of the press’s function in a democracy. At bottom, this dispute involves a clash between a suspected foreign agent’s desire to misuse the Privacy Act to nullify the government’s decision to terminate contracts with her and the public’s interest in being informed about a national security threat.” 

It states that the lower court’s decision in the case “allows the Privacy Act to be weaponized to force reporters to turn over confidential sources in the short run and to undermine the entire enterprise of relying on confidential sources in the long run.”

The petition states that the case presents “important and pressing issues” that have left “lower courts in dire need of guidance.” It added, “The law governing the reporter’s privilege is in disarray. Circuits are deeply divided over whether a federal reporter’s privilege exists at all; if so, what the source of that privilege is; and, irrespective of the source, what must be shown to overcome the privilege.”