Supreme Court Lets $800/Day Fine Stand for Herridge

Catherine Herridge never covered a criminal case, was never sued herself, and is not a party to the lawsuit that just cost her a Supreme Court fight. She is a reporter who took notes and made a promise to a source. On July 2, 2026, the Supreme Court told her that promise now carries a price tag of $800 a day, and it isn't going away anytime soon.

Key Takeaways

• The Supreme Court denied Catherine Herridge's emergency application on July 2, 2026, leaving in place a $800 per day contempt fine for refusing to name a confidential source, according to CNN and the Washington Post.
• Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the only member of the Court noted as dissenting; he would have granted Herridge's request to pause the fines.
• U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper first held Herridge in civil contempt over her refusal to identify who leaked details of an FBI investigation into scientist Yanping Chen to her in 2017.
• Herridge is not a defendant in the underlying case. Chen sued the FBI and Justice Department, not Herridge, and Herridge was pulled in as a third party witness through civil discovery.
• The United States has no federal shield law, so the reporter's privilege protections that exist in roughly 40 states and Washington, D.C. do not apply in Herridge's federal case.

What Did the Supreme Court Actually Decide?

The justices did not rule on whether Herridge has to reveal her source. They ruled on something narrower and, in practical terms, just as damaging: whether the $800 a day fines could be paused while her broader legal fight continues. The answer was no.

Herridge's emergency application asked the Court to stay the sanctions imposed by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia while an appeal moved forward. The Court denied it in a brief order, with Justice Kavanaugh noted as the lone dissent. No opinion accompanied the denial, so the public doesn't know exactly why eight justices declined to intervene, only that they did. Fox News, Herridge's former employer, called the outcome a threat to "fundamental" First Amendment principles and said it is "reviewing our options to further fight this injustice."

How Did a 2017 Story End in a Contempt Order?

In 2017, while at Fox News, Herridge reported on a years long FBI investigation into Yanping Chen, a naturalized U.S. citizen and founder of a Virginia technical college, over alleged ties to China's military and astronaut program. Chen was investigated for years. She was never criminally charged.

Chen later sued the federal government, not Herridge, arguing that officials had illegally leaked her confidential investigative file to journalists in violation of the Privacy Act. To build that case, Chen's lawyers needed to know who inside the government talked. They subpoenaed Herridge and asked her, under oath, to identify her sources. She declined, citing reporter's privilege. Judge Cooper found that Chen's need to prove the leak outweighed Herridge's claim to protect her sources, held her in contempt, and set the fine running until she complies. The D.C. Circuit upheld that reasoning and, in June 2026, rejected Herridge's bid to pause enforcement, setting up the Supreme Court appeal that just failed.

Why Can a Lawsuit She Isn't Even Part of Force Her to Burn a Source?

This is the part of the story that gets skipped in the headlines, and it's the part that should worry every reporter who has ever promised anonymity. Herridge isn't accused of wrongdoing. She was compelled to testify because a third party's civil case against the government needed her as a witness.

The D.C. Circuit applies a balancing test from Zerilli v. Smith, a 1981 case that recognizes a qualified reporter's privilege under the First Amendment. Courts weigh two questions: is the source's identity central to the case, and has the party seeking it exhausted other ways to get the information. In leak cases brought under the Privacy Act, both questions tend to answer themselves, the leaker's identity is the whole point of the lawsuit, and there's rarely another way to find out who talked. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has warned that this dynamic can turn the privilege into "effectively no privilege at all" whenever a Privacy Act plaintiff goes looking for a government leaker.

Why Doesn't a Shield Law Protect Her?

Because none exists at the federal level. Forty states and the District of Columbia have passed statutory shield laws, and courts in most of the rest recognize some version of reporter's privilege by precedent, but every one of those protections stops at the state courthouse door. Federal court is a different jurisdiction entirely, and Congress has never passed a comparable statute.

The closest attempt, the PRESS Act, passed the House unanimously in 2024. Senator Ron Wyden tried to fast track it through the Senate by unanimous consent that December; Senator Tom Cotton objected, arguing the bill would create a "protected class" of reporters and endanger national security investigations. President Trump publicly urged Republicans to kill it. The bill died with the 118th Congress and was reintroduced in 2025 with bipartisan sponsors, including Wyden, Mike Lee, and Dick Durbin in the Senate. It has not moved since.

What This Means for Journalists and Their Sources Now

The practical lesson of Herridge's case has nothing to do with whether she personally did anything wrong. It's that a reporter can be dragged into a fight she didn't start, in a courtroom she has no control over, and be billed daily for keeping a promise. Any government adjacent lawsuit, a Privacy Act claim, a wrongful termination suit against an agency, a FOIA dispute, can turn a journalist into an involuntary witness the moment a plaintiff's lawyer decides her reporting is the fastest route to a name.

That should change how sources and reporters think about risk. A source doesn't need to worry only about being exposed if their own agency investigates them; they need to worry about being exposed because someone else, in an unrelated case years later, subpoenas the journalist who wrote the story. It's a pressure that compounds a climate in which the FBI has already probed reporters without cause and global press freedom has hit a 25 year low. CPJ's Jose Zamora put it plainly: "Journalists must not be compelled to choose between safeguarding their sources and facing punishment for reporting on matters of public interest." Until Congress passes a federal shield law, that choice remains real, it remains expensive, and as of July 2026, it is still being made one $800 day at a time.