Press freedom advocates said they feared a federal raid of a Washington Post journalist’s home could chill reporting, following a Wednesday search of Hannah Natanson’s Virginia residence that seized a phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch. The Washington Post said the search was tied to a separate investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified materials, and that Natanson and the newspaper were not targets of that inquiry.
In an email to staff, the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, said a warrant for the raid “was connected to an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials” and that the Post had been told Natanson and the newspaper “are not targets of the investigation.” In a meeting Thursday, Murray told staff members that “the best thing to do when people are trying to intimidate you is not be intimidated — and that’s what we did yesterday,” according to reporting carried by the Associated Press.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said Thursday that it has asked the U.S. District Court in Virginia to unseal the affidavit justifying the search of Natanson’s home. The committee said that, if Attorney General Pam Bondi can describe the justification for searching a reporter’s home on social media, unsealing the justification that the Justice Department provided to the court would not create new harm, according to the committee’s application.
Bondi said the search was done at the request of the Defense Department and characterized it as an effort to address alleged journalistic access to classified, illegally leaked information. She said Natanson was “obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor,” according to the AP report. The Post did not report Natanson as a target, but the advocates’ concern has focused on the broader message that such a raid could send to journalists and potential sources.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said government raids on journalists’ homes are so unusual he could not recall the last time one happened. He warned that the raid “can’t help but have a chilling effect on journalism,” and he said he strongly suspected prosecutors sought to deter not just Natanson but other reporters who rely on government whistleblowers, as well as the whistleblowers themselves.
Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America, said the action “signals a growing assault on independent reporting and undermines the First Amendment.” Richardson and Jaffer said they believed the raid was intended to intimidate, even as the Post said the warrant was not seeking Natanson as a target in the contractor investigation.
Sean Spicer, Trump’s press secretary at the beginning of his first term, said the concerns were premature. Speaking to the AP report, he said if Natanson “did something wrong,” then questions about a chilling effect would be legitimate, but he argued that the raid’s overreach should be questioned if it turns out she “did nothing wrong,” as he put it.
Natanson previously described receiving tips after posting her contact information last February on a forum where government employees were discussing the impact of Trump administration changes to the federal workforce. In a first-person piece the Post published on Christmas Eve, she wrote that the influx of messages intensified quickly, telling readers, “The stories came fast, the tips even faster,” and she described how she was overwhelmed after receiving hundreds of messages on Signal. She also wrote that one woman she was unable to contact later messaged her, asking her not to respond, and said the woman planned to die that weekend, adding that “Trump had unraveled the government, and with it, her life.”
Natanson did not return messages from the Associated Press, and Murray said the raid was “this extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” according to the AP report. Advocates also pointed to a 1917 law making it illegal for journalists to possess classified information, but Jaffer said there were still questions about how that law interacts with First Amendment protections for journalists.
Jaffer said the law’s conflict with First Amendment rights had not always stopped past prosecutions from moving forward, and he cited the example of the New York Times publishing a secret government report on U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1971. In an editorial, the Post said, “It’s the government’s prerogative to pursue leakers of classified material,” while also arguing that “journalists have First Amendment rights to gather and publish such secrets,” and that the newspaper has a history of fighting for those freedoms.
The AP report said the raid arrived amid other actions it described as part of a broader pressure campaign against the news media during the Trump administration, including lawsuits against the New York Times and the BBC. It also described changes to how legacy news organizations access Pentagon locations after they refused to sign on to new rules restricting reporting set by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and it said funding for public broadcasting was curtailed due to Trump’s belief that its news coverage leaned left.
The report also discussed how the Justice Department has revised internal guidelines over time for how it will respond to leaks, including the scope of prosecutors’ tools to pursue people accused of unauthorized disclosures to journalists. In April, Bondi issued new guidelines saying prosecutors would again have authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for officials accused of “unauthorized disclosures,” the AP reported, rescinding a policy from President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration that, according to the report, protected journalists from having their phone records secretly seized.
The warrant described the raid as linked to an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system engineer and information technology specialist for a government contractor in Maryland. The AP report said Perez-Lugones was accused of printing classified and sensitive reports at work and that some materials were found at his Maryland home, and it said he was arrested last week on a charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents. Perez-Lugones made a brief appearance in Baltimore court on Thursday, and his attorney said they were not prepared to proceed with a hearing to determine whether he should remain jailed until a trial.
The AP report identified additional contributions from Associated Press writers Alanna Durkin Richer and Eric Tucker in Washington and Michael Kunzelman in Baltimore.