The FBI’s Search of a Washington Post Reporter’s Home Crosses a Dangerous Line | Analysis

When news broke on Wednesday that the FBI had searched Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, there was a “constellation of reactions” inside the paper’s newsroom, according to one staffer.

Some Post employees were nervous, others angry. But the majority, the staffer said, had “questions about what are the practices that we all need to adopt in a world where the Trump administration can come take our computers.”

In conversations with TheWrap, Post journalists and First Amendment experts expressed alarm over the government taking the extremely rare step of executing a search warrant at a reporter’s home, a sign the Trump administration will bypass traditional ways of dealing with reporters in leak investigations and potentially stifle legitimate newsgathering.

And even more worrying, if federal agents will storm into a journalist’s home and seize devices, can an arrest be far behind?

Coming on the heels of “other efforts to squelch freedom of the press,” said veteran First Amendment attorney Ted Boutrous, the search of Natanson’s Virginia home looks like an “effort to shield the government from scrutiny through brute force.”

During his first year in office, President Donald Trump has personally sued the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and BBC; attacked journalists, including numerous female reporters; and overhauled the White House Press pool. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, enacted press restrictionsthat prompted dozens of media outlets, including the Times, the Post, Associated Press, CNN and Fox News, to give up their credentials and exit the building. Others have sued over the revoking of press privileges.

But searching a reporter’s home, and seizing their devices, takes the administration’s assault on the press to a new and dangerous level.

“This extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” Post executive editor Matt Murray told staff Wednesday in a memo. Though Natanson isn’t the target of the probe, which centers on a government contractor accused of accessing and taking classified documents, agents reportedly seized her phone, a Garmin watch, and two laptops, one personal and one issued by the Post.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have subpoenaed journalists’ records in leak investigations, which, while troubling, still provides the opportunity to respond by legal means, potentially fighting back or narrowing a request.

However, entering with a search warrant is not only “unusual,” says George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, but “unnecessary” given the more established practice of seeking documents through the courts. “You can’t help but think that it is meant to intimidate other journalists from getting involved in these areas,” he told TheWrap.

Natanson had established herself as the Post’s “federal government whisperer,” as she put it an revelatory first-person piece last month about her dogged reporting on the Trump administration remaking the federal government and slashing its workforce — and the toll it took on her personally. Since taking on this critical beat last year, Natanson recalled amassing the contacts of 1,169 current and former federal employees “who decided to trust me with their stories.”

“There’s great concern and alarm, both for Hannah individually and our reporting generally,” a second Post staffer told TheWrap. “She has been a star for us, stepping up bigtime after the departure of a lot of other writers through buyouts. She is both careful with sources and generous with colleagues.”

“Our reporters have dominated coverage of the second Trump administration – in large part because of the deep connection between the publication and the Washington area’s federal workforce,” a third Post reported said. “All eyes are now on company management and our owner [Jeff Bezos] to step up and aggressively defend Hannah and take a strong stance that we won’t be intimidated by the government.”

Bezos, the Amazon founder and executive chair, was once seen as a savior of paper, but his stewardship has come under increased scrutiny in recent years amid concerns that he’s tilting the paper — or at least its opinion pages — in a more rightward direction. He hired Will Lewis, a former top executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., as the Post’s publisher in 2023, and in the final weeks of the 2024 election, the paper spiked its endorsement of Kamala Harris. Bezos sat behind Trump at his inauguration last year, along with other tech and business moguls, and the Post reshaped its opinion section to advocate for free markets and personal liberties.

Murray said in his memo that “the Washington Post has a long history of zealous support for robust press freedoms” and the “entire institution stands by those freedoms and our work.”

In a separate memo on Wednesday evening, Murray said that “what we have seen today reinforces the always-present need for proper source and reporting practices as we talk about in trainings and as Hannah has demonstrated.” Murray added, “We are working to schedule some refresher sessions for early next week.”

Several Post colleagues praised Natanson on social media throughout the day and took issue with the FBI’s “incredibly disturbing” action.

Inside the newsroom, colleagues discussed other ways to support her, such as organizing a DoorDash gift certificate, in an effort to “make her feel valued and appreciated on a day when she’s under such judicial and national scrutiny,” the first staffer said.

The search warrant executed on the Post report also drew rebukes among competitors. David McCraw, deputy general counsel for the New York Times, said in a statement that that “raiding the home of a journalist and seizing her electronic devices are deeply concerning and portray a stark threat to free press rights in this country.”

“Reporting and newsgathering enjoy protection under the U.S. Constitution,” McGraw added. “Law enforcement intimidation like this imperils the transparency provided by independent media.”

The Trump administration defended its methods on Wednesday. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the request to search Natanson’s house came from the Defense Department and the DOJ and FBI executed a search warrant. She didn’t name Natanson, but said the Post journalist “was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”

And FBI director Kash Patel similarly saidthe Post reporter “was found to allegedly be obtaining and reporting classified, sensitive military information from a government contractor — endangering our warfighters and compromising America’s national security.”

To be clear: there is nothing illegal about a reporter obtaining and reporting on classified information.

Neither official named the contractor, who has been identified in news reports as Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator accused of accessing and obtaining classified intelligence documents. A DOJ official told TheWrap that “the focus should be” on the contractor, who the department said “was actively communicating with the reporter on his mobile device, and in this chat, there was classified information.”

As the Post noted in its story, “the criminal complaint filed against Perez-Lugones does not accuse him of leaking classified information he is alleged to have taken.” The Post also received a subpoena Wednesday related to the contractor, the paper reported.

Last year, Bondi rescinded a Biden-era policy protecting journalists in leak investigations, noting that the new policy “contemplates the use of subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants to compel production of information and testimony by and relating to members of the news media.”

Still, she noted, “members of the news media are presumptively entitled to advance notice of such investigative activities, subpoenas are to be narrowly drawn, and warrants must include protocols designed to limit the scope of intrusion into potentially protected materials or newsgathering activities.”

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, said in a statement Wednesday that Bondi “has weakened guidelines that were intended to protect the freedom of the press, but there are still important legal limits, including constitutional ones, on the government’s authority to use subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants to obtain information from journalists.”

Boutrous, who has represented journalists like Jim Acosta and Brian Karem during the first Trump administration, and is serving as counsel for the Times in its suit against the Pentagon, told TheWrap that the search of Natanson’s home is “truly an over-the-top intrusion on newsgathering and freedom of the press under the First Amendment.”

He pointed to Congress’ passage of the Privacy Protection Act in 1980, which provided additional protections to journalists in the wake of the Stanford Daily losing a Supreme Court case two years earlier after its newsroom was searched. The act, Boutrous said, “creates extraordinary hurdles and makes it unlawful for search warrants to be executed except in extremely narrow circumstances.”

Given what’s currently known, Boutrous doesn’t believe this search meets the criteria. “So it is very, very troubling,” he said.

It is indeed, and underscores the persistent challenges journalists have faced covering Trump as we enter the second year of his second term. Even as he has made himself more accessible than previous presidents, such as inviting Times reporters into the Oval Office last week for a two-hour sit-down, Trump has also shown a frightening willingness to control, intimidate and bully those who rely on freedom of the press.

Corbin Bolies contributed reporting

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