A federal judge in Virginia scolded Justice Department attorneys on Friday for not mentioning the 1980 Privacy Protection Act when they submitted their application for a warrant to search a Washington Post reporter’s home and seize her devices.
The Privacy Protection Act limits the government’s ability to search and seize journalists’ materials.
“Did you not tell me intentionally or did you not know,” Magistrate Judge William Porter asked.
The testy exchange unfolded in the middle of a hearing to determine whether the government should be permitted to search through the devices seized from Post reporter Hannah Natanson — or whether the government must return those devices to Natanson without an extensive search.
The judge appeared inclined to find a middle ground that would allow the court to do a search of the devices on behalf of the government — and then hand information relevant to the search warrant over to prosecutors. This would prevent the government from having potentially unfettered access to Natanson’s devices, which The Post said the reporter has used to communicate with roughly 1,200 confidential sources.
“I have a pretty good sense of what I’m going to do here,” Porter said, adding that he wanted to spend some more time thoroughly considering his options before making a ruling. He scheduled another hearing for March 4 and said he expects to issue his ruling before then.
Friday’s hearing marked the first time that prosecutors and attorneys for The Post have met in court since the unprecedented Jan. 14 search of Natanson’s home in Virginia. Federal agents seized a phone, two laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive and a Garmin watch. Law enforcement officials said the search was part of their investigation into government contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a systems administrator with top secret clearance who was indicted in Maryland last month on charges of unlawfully obtaining and sharing classified materials.
The discussion of the Privacy Protection Act reflected the tense moment of the nearly hour-long hearing in the Alexandria, Virginia, federal courthouse. Porter said he was particularly frustrated because he had spent two days going back and forth with the government in January before he approved the warrant. He said he rejected multiple versions of the warrant requests before settling on a relatively narrow warrant to seize information on Natanson’s devices pertaining to her communications with the government contractor.
The 1980 act is intended to prevent the criminalization of a reporter gathering information. It says that a journalist’s materials should be seized only if that journalist is suspected of committing a crime with those materials. The law says that a reporter’s possessions can be seized if investigators suspect they contain certain materials related to sensitive national security information.
Justice Department trial attorney Christian Dibblee apologized to the judge and said he could not answer the questions about why the government had not discussed that law because he was not involved in the submission of the warrant. Another prosecutor who submitted the warrant — Gordon Kromberg, a veteran attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia — chimed in and said he did not mention the law because he does not believe it applied to the case.
Porter suggested that whether or not the law applied in this instance, prosecutors should have included it in the application so that the judge could determine its relevance.
“That’s minimizing it,” Porter told the government trial attorney when he said he understood the judge’s frustration.
It is exceptionally rare for law enforcement officials to search reporters’ homes to further cases in which the journalist is not a target. The law allows such searches under some circumstances, 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 Post and Natanson’s attorneys have decried the search as one that “flouts the First Amendment and ignores federal statutory safeguards for journalists.” They have demanded that the government return the devices so Natanson can continue reporting and said that “almost none” of the materials on the devices are relevant to the case against the contractor.
Attorneys for The Post and Natanson argued in court that the seizures have prevented Natanson from doing her job because she cannot publish material without her devices and sources. They also said that the government’s seizure could have a chilling effect on future government sources who may want to speak out about their workplaces to reporters.
“It is not about one reporter and one journalist — it has to do with confidential sources,” an attorney for The Post, Simon Latcovich, told the judge.
The Justice Department attorneys conceded that they seized more materials from Natanson than is relevant to the search warrant. But they said that’s a standard reality in such searches. The government planned to set up a filter team to sift through the materials and then hand over only relevant information to the investigators, the prosecutors said.
“The government takes seriously that you did not authorize a fishing expedition,” Dibblee told Porter.
Perez-Lugones pleaded not guilty last month to counts of retaining and sharing sensitive national security information. The Justice Department has said that Perez-Lugones had been messaging Natanson shortly before his arrest.
Natanson covers the federal workforce and has been 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. She contributed reporting to a number of recent articles around the United States’ capture of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.
In December, Natanson wrote a first-person account about her experience covering the federal workforce as the Trump administration created upheaval across the 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 a declaration to the court last month that she typically receives anywhere from dozens to upward of 100 tips from sources per day on Signal. Since the seizure, the number of tips has fallen to zero.
Prosecutors also served The 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.
Porter said at the hearing that he took issue with the framing of the search as unprecedented because it was executed at a journalist’s home. He noted that Natanson wrote in her first-person essay that she often works from home, which would make it a logical place to execute a search warrant.
“I think that’s an inflammatory fact,” Porter said.
Attorneys for The Post and Natanson repeatedly suggested that the government’s search was an overreach because agents seized all of her devices, which comprised the entirety of her reporting materials. Porter asked multiple times whether there was an alternative way the government could have conducted its search since the materials are stored together on electronic devices — and not, for example, on individual pages or notebooks.
“I still haven’t heard some alternative way that you think this could have been done,” Porter said to the attorneys.
Jeremy Roebuck contributed to this report.
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