The Trump administration has surprised Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, in its legal pursuit of Tim Burke, a Florida journalist who exposed Kanye West’s unaired antisemitic remarks.
“It is bizarre that an administration that claims to prioritize fighting Jew-hatred insists on keeping on life support the previous administration’s prosecution of a journalist, who exposed a major public figure’s antisemitism to the world,” Stern told JNS.
“Prosecutorial discretion exists for cases like this,” he told JNS. “Burke should be thanked for his public service, but he’s instead had to deal with three years and counting of lawfare.”
“Whose battle is the administration fighting here?” Stern said. “Kanye West’s? Tucker Carlson’s?” (JNS sought comment from the U.S. Justice Department.)
A federal grand jury returned a new indictment against Burke weeks after the U.S. Justice Department moved to abandon its appeal over dismissed wiretapping charges.
The 13-count indictment, filed Oct. 8 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, charges Burke with conspiracy, six counts of unauthorized computer access, five counts of intercepting electronic communications and one count of disclosing an illegally intercepted communication.
Burke was arrested in 2024 after publishing unused portions of Carlson’s interview with West—a performer with a long history of Jew-hatred and who goes by “Ye”—on Carlson’s then eponymous Fox News show. (Carlson, who now has an independent show, has been widely accused of making antisemitic statements and hosting anti-Jewish guests.)
On Carlson’s show, West repeated antisemitic conspiracy theories. Burke claimed to have found the clips on public websites used by the news agency for uploading live streams.
Prosecutors now claim that Burke intercepted streams through a system “that was not configured so that the communication was readily accessible to the general public” and that he lacked consent to intercept them.
They allege that he and Marco Gaudino, of Washington state and who is identified as a conspirator, used other people’s log-in credentials without authorization to access a server and video-streaming service used by broadcasters.
