A Virginia federal judge delivered a sharp rebuke to the Justice Department on Tuesday, refusing to let prosecutors search through a Washington Post reporter’s seized electronics and taking control of the operation himself.
Magistrate Judge William Porter didn’t mince words over the handing over of devices to government investigators.
“Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product — most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources — is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” Porter wrote, according to The Washington Post.
The judge feared Trump’s Justice Department couldn’t be trusted to conduct a narrow search without exposing more than 1,000 of reporter Hannah Natanson’s confidential sources.
The decision represented a major victory for the newspaper and Natanson after federal agents conducted an unprecedented January raid on her Virginia home, seizing phones, laptops, a recorder, hard drive, and even a Garmin watch. Law enforcement claimed the search targeted a government contractor suspected of leaking classified information.
Porter also torched prosecutors for withholding critical information about the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, a law shielding journalists from exactly this type of search. He said the prosecutors “seriously undermined the Court’s confidence in the government’s disclosures in this proceeding.”
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