Government officials may not examine electronic devices seized from a Washington Post reporter until litigation stemming from the search of her home is settled, a federal judge in Virginia ruled Wednesday.
The ruling from U.S. Magistrate Judge William B. Porter was issued hours after The Post demanded in a court filingthat federal law enforcement officials return the electronic devices the government seized from staff reporter Hannah Natanson’s home last week. The extraordinary search “flouts the First Amendment and ignores federal statutory safeguards for journalists,” The Post told the court.
Federal agents executed a search warrant on Jan. 14 at Natanson’s home in Virginia, seizing a phone, two laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive and a Garmin watch. Law enforcement officials said the search was part of an investigation into a government contractor who is accused of unlawfully obtaining classified materials.
In his brief order, Porter wrote that The Post and Natanson had “demonstrated good cause in their filings to maintain the status quo” and would not allow the government to access Natanson’s data until he is able to fully review and rule on the matter. He ordered the government to respond to The Post’s filing by Jan. 28 and scheduled a hearing early next month.
It is exceptionally rare for law enforcement officials to conduct searches at reporters’ homes. The law allows such searches, but federal regulations intended to protect a free press are designed to make it more difficult to use aggressive law enforcement tactics against reporters to obtain the identities of their sources.
The search marked the first time the government has raided a journalist’s home as part of a national security leak investigation, First Amendment advocacy groups have noted.
“The outrageous seizure of our reporter’s confidential newsgathering materials chills speech, cripples reporting, and inflicts irreparable harm every day the government keeps its hands on these materials,” The Post said in a statement. “We have asked the court to order the immediate return of all seized materials and prevent their use. Anything less would license future newsroom raids and normalize censorship by search warrant.”
The filing was The Post’s first court action in response to the seizure. In it, Post attorneys said they conferred multiple times with federal officials about the seized data, and the government agreed that it would not “begin a substantive review of the seized data” until the parties met again on Jan. 20.
On Jan. 20, they met again, and when the government rejected a proposal to return the materials, The Post’s attorneys said they would be filing a request in court.
According to Post attorneys, the federal officials appeared to take an increasingly combative approach, citing directives from “unnamed more senior officials,” and refused to refrain from reviewing the materials until the litigation was settled. The Post attorneys from the law firm Williams & Connolly noted that in other cases, federal officials voluntarily have held off on reviewing materials pending a court hearing.
The government officials said they were still processing the data from Natanson’s electronic devices and had not started reviewing it. They also said, according to the court filing, that they “would not refrain from conducting a substantive review” and “would not agree to inform us even when it began.”
The Post’s filing had requested that the judge hold a hearing on an expedited schedule and prohibit the government from reading through Natanson’s materials until the litigation is settled. Porter granted the motion and said that for now the government could keep the seized materials, but was prohibited from reviewing them.
The warrant that federal agents obtained for the search said it was executed as part of an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance. A Justice Department official said the suspect was messaging Natanson when he was arrested earlier this month. Perez-Lugones has been charged with retaining classified materials but has not been accused in court of illegally leaking materials to the media.
President Donald Trump, in an apparent reference to Perez-Lugones, said after the case became public that a person alleged to have leaked information about Venezuela had been arrested.
In a personal declaration accompanying the court filings, Natanson said that she had communicated with Perez-Lugones via Signal — an encrypted messaging app — and phone.
The U.S. has no law that explicitly makes it a crime for a journalist to obtain or publish classified information. In 2019, when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was indicted under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information, First Amendment scholars warned that his case could set a precedent that could be used against journalists. That issue was never tested in court because Assange and the government reached a plea deal in 2024.
The filing Wednesday said that the electronic devices the government seized from Natanson “contain years of information about past and current confidential sources and other unpublished newsgathering materials, including those she was using for current reporting.”
The seized materials cover “essentially her entire professional universe,” and “almost none” of the information is relevant to the search warrant, the filing said.
“The government seized this proverbial haystack in an attempt to locate a needle,” the filing said.
Prosecutors also served The Washington Post with a subpoena seeking information related to the same government contractor. The subpoena asked The Post to hand over any communications between the contractor and other employees.
Natanson covers the federal workforce and has been a part of The Post’s most high-profile and sensitive coverage related to government firings, national security and diplomacy during the first year of the second Trump administration. Her most recent articles included in-depth reporting on topics as disparate as Venezuela and Social Security.
In December, Natanson wrote a first-person account about her experience covering the workforce as the Trump administration created upheaval across the federal government. She detailed how she posted her secure phone number to an online forum for government workers and amassed more than 1,000 sources, with federal workers frequently contacting her to share frustrations and accounts from their offices.
Natanson wrote in her declaration Wednesday that she typically receives anywhere from dozens to upward of 100 tips from sources per day on Signal. But since the seizure, the number of tips has fallen to zero.
In its filings, The Post argues that the government’s search violates the First Amendment and is an “unconstitutional prior restraint” because, by seizing Natanson’s devices, it has rendered her incapable of effectively doing her job. The seizure, they said, amounts to blocking her speech before she is able to publish it.
“Here, the government has commandeered Natanson’s reporting records and tools, thereby preventing her from contacting her more than 1,100 sources and receiving their tips, and generally impairing her ability to publish the stories she otherwise would have published but for the raid,” the filing states.
Last week, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press requested that the court make public materials related to the search warrant of Natanson’s home. Those materials would include the affidavit, which would be prosecutors’ explanation to a judge about why a search of Natanson’s home was necessary.
A judge has not yet ruled on that request.
“This is the first time in U.S. history that the government has searched a reporter’s home in a national security media leak investigation, seizing potentially a vast amount of confidential data and information,” said Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
“The move imperils public-interest reporting and will have ramifications far beyond this specific case,” he said. “It is critical that the court blocks the government from searching through this material until it can address the profound threat to the First Amendment posed by the raid.”
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