The Washington Post demanded in a court filing Wednesday that federal law enforcement officials return electronic devices the government seized from a staff reporter’s home last week, writing that the extraordinary search “flouts the First Amendment and ignores federal statutory safeguards for journalists.”
Federal agents executed a search warrant on Jan. 14 at the Virginia home of reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing two phones, two laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive and a Garmin watch.
It is exceptionally rare for law enforcement officials to conduct searches at reporters’ homes. The law allows a search of a reporter’s home, 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 or information.
This is The Post’s first public court filing in response to the seizure. In the filing, Post lawyers 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 attorneys said they would be filing a request in court. According to Post attorneys, the federal officials refused to refrain from reviewing the materials until the litigation is settled. But government officials said that it was still processing the data from Natanson’s electronics and had not yet started reviewing it.
“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 warrant that federal agents obtained for the search said it was executed as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. A Justice Department official said that the contractor — Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance — 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.
The filing Wednesday said that “almost none” of the seized materials were relevant to the search warrant. Instead, the filing said, “the FBI seized Natanson’s newsgathering materials, stored on devices including her Post-issued laptop and cellphone,” which “contain years of information about past and current confidential sources and other unpublished newsgathering materials, including those she was using for current reporting.”
“The government seized this proverbial haystack in an attempt to locate a needle,” the filing said.
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.
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.
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