Seth Stern, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s director of advocacy, said in a separate statement that “when the government claims it needs to investigate journalists to protect national security, it really means its own reputational security”.
“The administration’s embarrassment” over the reported security concerns “does not supersede the need for a free and independent press”, Stern’s statement also said...
The main question, according to Crump, is that the group of three friends who traveled with Wells to the island said Wells told them he wanted to stay on the island with a young woman when they left on the afternoon of 4 July. But the young woman has said that Wells got on the boat with the boys.
Crump also said that videos circulating online allegedly show Wells in a heated argument with his friends. The videos could not immediately be verified by Reuters.
Also raising suspicions, according to Crump, is that Wells’s phone was found not with his body, but in the possession of one of the young men who had accompanied him to Horn Island. Wells’s mother tracked it down using Life360, a family-location safety platform, and she said it appears that several social media messages had been deleted from the phone...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/11/mississippi-nolan-wells-death
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/11/trump-administration-scientists-rules
