Investigative journalism isn’t what it used to be. Corporate belt-tightening among news organizations has seen to that. But beyond budgetary constraints, successive Democrat administrations have also seen to it.

The worst of the offenders was Barack Obama. Anyone who doubts this need only ask Gary Pruitt, then-CEO of the Associated Press, from whom the Obama administration seized two months of telephone records of reporters and editors back in 2013. Those records, Pruitt noted at the time, “potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities.” In a letter to Obama’s “wingman,” Attorney General Eric Holder, Pruitt added, “We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

Or ask the New York Times’s normally friendly David Sanger, who in 2013 scathingly said of Team Obama, “This is most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”

Those interested in digging more deeply into the Obama administration’s actions against the First Amendment should read the exhaustive report published on October 10, 2013, by former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Other, more dogged investigative journalists, such as Fox News’s James Rosen and CBS News’s Sharyl Attkisson, also had their confidence in a free press shaken by the activities of the “scandal-free” Obama administration.

And this brings us to the latest investigative journalist to get the treatment: Catherine Herridge, formerly of CBS News. The highly acclaimed Herridge, who had previously spent years at Fox News as its chief intelligence correspondent until joining CBS in 2019, had been investigating the Hunter Biden laptop scandal before being fired last week.

That a journalist of Herridge’s credentials would be summarily fired for unknown reasons is odd enough, but Herridge also had her personal files seized by CBS. That’s really odd. As the New York Post reports:

Catherine Herridge — who is in the middle of a First Amendment case being closely watched by journalists nationwide — was among 20 CBS News staffers let go as part of a larger purge of hundreds of employees at parent company Paramount Global.

Her firing had stunned co-workers, but the network’s decision to hold on to her personal materials, along with her work laptop where she may have other confidential info, has left many staffers shaken, according to insiders.

“It’s so extraordinary,” a source familiar with the situation told The Post, noting that the files — which are presumptively now the property of CBS News — most likely contain confidential material from Herridge’s stints at both Fox and CBS.

One can’t help but wonder whether Herridge’s firing has anything to do with CBS’s desire to remain in the good graces of the Biden administration. Might her firing have something to do with the recent and suspicious indictment of a longtime FBI source, Alexander Smirnov, for having allegedly lied to FBI agents about Burisma executives discussing paying Hunter Biden and Joe Biden $5 million each to influence U.S. policy in Ukraine?

Another interesting — although less salacious — theory is being suggested by the New York Post’s Charles Gasparino. As he notes, “Herridge was one of 800 people (including 20 journalists) recently let go from the struggling media conglomerate, owner of CBS, MTV, Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central,” and others. Given this, Gasparino wonders whether Herridge was let go in order to soften the Biden administration’s resistance to a possible mega-merger between CBS’s struggling parent, Paramount, and a larger company such as Comcast, Discovery, Apple, or Amazon.

Who knows. But given Joe Biden’s videotaped confession at having gotten Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, fired for investigating Burisma while his money-for-nothing son, Hunter, was on the company’s board, and given Herridge’s consistent thorn-in-the-side work in covering the Biden administration, we wouldn’t put it past them to play a bit of quid pro quo hardball with CBS.

In any case, word came late yesterday, according to a statement from SAG-AFTRA, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, that some of Herridge’s materials were being returned to her:

SAG-AFTRA is pleased to confirm that earlier today a representative of our union monitored the return of several boxes containing Catherine Herridge’s reporting materials from her CBS News office in Washington D.C. Herridge is currently reviewing the materials.

We welcome CBS News’ reversal which came after SAG-AFTRA’s intervention and widespread media coverage that underscored shared concerns about press freedom and the First Amendment.

The resolution of this matter sends a strong message of protection for basic First Amendment principles. We further hope the public focus now turns to SAG-AFTRA’s continued efforts to support a Press Shield law that provides additional federal protections for journalists and their confidential sources.

This is all well and good, but let’s be realistic: Joe Biden’s intelligence services would’ve had plenty of time to review Herridge’s files and keep everything they wanted, everything that might’ve been inconvenient to the administration’s narrative. But far more critically, they would’ve been able to determine who Herridge’s sources were.

We’ll keep an eye on this.