The Supreme Court on Thursday denied former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge's emergency appeal to halt an $800-a-day contempt fine, leaving the veteran investigative journalist facing mounting financial penalties for refusing to identify the confidential sources behind her 2017 reporting on a Chinese American scientist. Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh supported granting the stay.
The decision marks the end of Herridge's last available emergency avenue and raises hard questions about the cost of protecting sources in an era when the federal government itself may be the party that broke the law. The case pits two principles that conservatives should care about, press freedom and government accountability, against each other in uncomfortable ways.
In 2017, Herridge published a series for Fox News examining Yanping Chen, a Chinese American scientist who founded a professional school in Virginia. The reports explored Chen's alleged ties to the Chinese military and raised questions about whether her school was being used to help Beijing gather information about American servicemembers.
The stories drew on materials that, as the Associated Press reported, included snippets of an FBI document summarizing an interview, personal photographs, information from Chen's immigration and naturalization forms, and content from an internal FBI PowerPoint presentation. All of it was private government material, the kind of information the Privacy Act exists to protect.
The FBI had investigated Chen for six years. That probe never resulted in charges. But the media coverage, built on leaked government files, brought consequences Chen says were devastating: hate mail and death threats.
In 2018, Chen filed a Privacy Act lawsuit against the FBI and the Justice Department, alleging federal officials unlawfully disclosed her private information. To prove her case, her lawyers needed to know who inside the government handed those files to a reporter. That question led them to Herridge.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., ordered Herridge to answer questions about her sources during a deposition. When she sat for the interview under oath, she declined to identify who gave her the leaked materials.
Judge Cooper ruled that Chen's need to identify the leaker overcame Herridge's right to shield her source. He held Herridge in civil contempt and imposed the $800-per-day fine.
An appeals court panel upheld the order. Herridge then filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts issued a short-term hold on the fine while the justices considered the appeal, a procedural step that reflects the Court's handling of its increasingly active emergency docket.
On Thursday, the full Court denied the stay. Kavanaugh alone noted his support for granting it.
What makes this case genuinely difficult, rather than a clean left-right fight, is that both sides have a point grounded in principles conservatives value.
Chen's attorney, Andrew Phillips, framed the matter in terms any law-and-order conservative should recognize:
"Dr. Chen, like any other American citizen, is entitled to discover the identity of the federal official(s) who abused their access to an American's private information and leaked it to cause her harm. That type of corrupt, unlawful conduct is exactly what the Privacy Act was designed to address."
He's right that a federal employee who leaks a citizen's private immigration records, personal photographs, and internal investigative documents to the press has committed an act the law specifically forbids. The FBI spent six years investigating Chen and came up empty. Then someone inside the government handed her files to a reporter anyway. That is the kind of bureaucratic abuse of power that should concern anyone who believes in limited, accountable government.
But Herridge's position also rests on bedrock. Fox News Media issued a statement expressing deep disappointment in the Court's decision:
"Protecting the confidentiality of journalistic sourcing and the integrity of the newsgathering process is fundamental to a free and functioning democracy. While we are deeply disappointed by the Court's decision, our commitment to defending these critical First Amendment principles remains unwavering and we will be reviewing our options to further fight this injustice."
Fox News said it would review its options to continue the fight, though the company did not specify what those options might be. Herridge's own attorneys did not respond to the AP's request for comment.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press weighed in through its president, Bruce Brown, who warned about the broader chilling effect. The First Amendment implications extend well beyond this single case.
"Journalists facing contempt should not have to muster large payments to the court while they seek to vindicate First Amendment rights. And forcing them to betray source confidences always has a harmful impact on the free flow of information to the public."
Step back from the legal mechanics and the picture gets clearer. A federal employee, someone with access to the FBI's investigative files, took a private citizen's personal records and leaked them to the press. That citizen was never charged with a crime. She was investigated for six years and cleared. But the leak ensured the damage was done before any verdict could vindicate her.
Now the only person being fined $800 a day is the reporter. The leaker remains unidentified. The FBI and Justice Department, named as defendants in Chen's lawsuit, have apparently not produced the leaker's identity through their own internal processes. Chen's lawyers told the court they had exhausted other means of identifying the source, which is how they ended up deposing Herridge in the first place.
That sequence should trouble anyone who pays taxes to fund federal law enforcement. The government investigated a woman for half a decade, found nothing, and someone inside the apparatus leaked her private records to the media. When the victim sued, the government couldn't, or wouldn't, identify which of its own employees broke the law. So the court turned to the journalist instead.
Herridge, who previously reported for both Fox News and CBS News before becoming an independent journalist, is now the one absorbing the financial punishment. The Supreme Court's refusal to intervene means that fine continues to accrue with no end date in sight.
Several important questions remain open. The full case name and docket number for Chen's underlying lawsuit were not specified in available reporting. It is unclear whether Herridge has paid any portion of the fine or when exactly the accrual began. The New York Post reported that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had separately refused to stay its mandate while Herridge prepared a petition for Supreme Court review, another procedural defeat in what has become a yearslong legal grind.
No other Supreme Court justice besides Kavanaugh was reported as writing separately about the denial. The Court's decision to let the fine stand came without elaboration, as is typical for emergency-docket denials.
The current status of Chen's Privacy Act lawsuit against the FBI and Justice Department also remains unclear from available reporting. Whether the government has made any effort to identify the leaker through internal channels, disciplinary proceedings, inspector general investigations, or other mechanisms, is not addressed.
And that silence may be the most telling detail of all. The federal government has vast resources to investigate its own employees. It can audit access logs, review email records, and trace document handling chains. If the FBI and DOJ wanted to find the person who leaked Chen's private files, they have tools far more powerful than a civil deposition of a journalist.
The Court's growing pattern of declining to take up contested cases leaves lower-court rulings in place and the underlying legal questions unresolved for future journalists and future plaintiffs alike.
Catherine Herridge did what investigative reporters do: she received information from a source and published it. Whether that reporting served the public interest or unfairly harmed an innocent woman is a legitimate debate. But the person who broke the law, the federal employee who violated the Privacy Act by leaking Chen's private records, faces no known consequences.
Yanping Chen endured a six-year investigation that produced no charges, then watched her personal information splashed across national media. She has every right to demand accountability.
The accountability she deserves, however, should come from the institution that failed her, the federal government that couldn't secure its own files and now can't, or won't, name the employee responsible. Instead, the system has settled on fining a journalist $800 a day, and the highest court in the land has declined to stop it.
When the government breaks the law and the only person who pays is the reporter who covered it, something has gone sideways, and it isn't the First Amendment.
