The interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia has sent letters to several leading medical journals asking for information about their editorial practices. The letters began arriving at medical journals around the country over the last few weeks. "It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications … are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates," wrote Edward R. Martin Jr., the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, in a letter to the journal CHEST. "It's pretty unprecedented," says J.T. Morris, a lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group. He says the First Amendment protects medical journals. "Who knows? We've seen this administration take all sorts of action that doesn't have a legal basis and it hasn't stopped them," Morris says. "And so there's always a concern that the federal government and its officials like Ed Martin will step outside and abuse their authority and try to use the legal process and abuse the court system into compelling scientific journals and medical professionals and anybody else they disagree with into silence."
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