The U. S. Justice Department fought a secret legal battle to obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters in a hunt for their sources during the last weeks of the Trump administration and continuing under President Joe Biden, a top lawyer for the newspaper said Friday night. While the Trump administration never informed the Times about the effort, the Biden administration continued waging the fight this year, telling a handful of top Times executives about it but imposing a gag order to shield it from public view, said the lawyer, David McCraw, who called the move unprecedented. The gag order prevented the executives from disclosing the government’s efforts to seize the records even to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, and other newsroom leaders.