[sanderjd]

> There is a duty/obligation on the U.S. federal government to protect freedom of the press, especially if the organs of a state government act to violate it.

But you seem to be commenting as if the U.S. federal government has already failed to uphold this duty. But that makes no sense because this just happened. Now that this is widespread national news, there is very little chance that these criminals get to walk away from this. These people are all going down, whether on state or federal charges (or both). But it will take months or years, because that's how long it takes.

There is almost certainly a story here about how it requires widespread news attention to get something like this sorted out, but once there is widespread news attention, the jig is up.