The Trump administration sought phone records of New York Times journalists’ family members, including a reporter’s mother and two journalists’ spouses, according to a court filing unsealed Monday. The demand marked an escalation in a leak investigation that has already produced grand jury subpoenas for five reporters.

FBI agents delivered the subpoenas to the reporters’ homes on July 10, compelling them to testify before a federal grand jury about the newspaper’s reporting on security problems involving the Qatari-gifted aircraft, according to court filings and the newspaper’s account. The New York Times is seeking to quash the subpoenas in federal court, arguing they violate First Amendment protections for newsgathering. The newspaper has argued in court filings that the subpoenas constitute retaliation for its coverage, a claim the Justice Department has disputed.

The investigation centers on a report about security deficiencies with the plane Trump received as a gift from Qatar. Trump flew to a recent NATO summit in Turkey on the Qatar-provided aircraft but left on the old Air Force One, and the Times reported that security problems with the Qatar plane had led to the switch. The administration has claimed the story revealed sensitive national security information, though Trump himself said the plane needed to be “maxed out.”

James Risen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who in 2015 won a seven-year legal battle against federal demands that he reveal confidential sources for a story about a botched CIA operation, wrote that the investigation’s real target is the newspaper itself. “Whether the case proceeds or not, it is just Trump’s latest excuse to punish reporters and news organizations,” Risen wrote in The Guardian on Wednesday.

Risen drew historical parallels to the post-September 11 era, when government leak investigations began routinely targeting journalists. Before 2003’s Plame case — an episode involving the public disclosure of a CIA officer’s covert identity — government leak investigations “almost never led anywhere” and were “usually quietly dropped by the government without any sources being prosecuted or journalists being subpoenaed,” Risen wrote. The Plame case “set a dangerous precedent by normalizing the aggressive use of leak investigations by the government,” and such investigations became common in the George W. Bush, Obama, and first Trump administrations, he wrote.

Risen also connected the administration’s posture toward the press to the conduct of the Iran war. Trump “has found it nearly impossible to win public support for the war — at least in part because he has refused to tell the press what is going on,” Risen wrote. The Pentagon’s decision to keep reporters away from combat operations has had the effect of preventing the press from offering “a full account of the actions of the US military personnel involved in the war,” he wrote, leaving the public without narratives to engage with.

“Instead, the public has been left to fill in the blanks without much real information,” Risen wrote. “The result is that the Iran war — the first in modern times without any significant press coverage — is the least popular war on record.”

Risen noted that the underlying Times story was routine by Washington standards. The administration’s claims that it revealed damaging national security information were undermined, he wrote, by Trump’s own public comments about the plane. The Justice Department has said it is not targeting reporters but pursuing leakers of classified information.

Risen wrote that his own seven-year fight against the government “made government officials in several administrations more reluctant to subpoena other reporters for more than a decade. It is only because a would-be autocrat is now in the White House that all bets are off.”