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On Wednesday morning, the FBI executed a search warrant on a Washington Post reporter’s home as part of a probe into a government worker accused of illegally retaining classified information.
The reporter, Hannah Natanson, has been key to the Post’s coverage of the Trump administration’s federal workforce overhaul. She was present when federal agents searched her home, seizing her personal laptops, phone, and Garmin watch. The Post also received a subpoena Wednesday morning “seeking information related to the same government contractor,” the Post’s Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck reported.
More from the Post:
In an email to The Post’s newsroom, Executive Editor Matt Murray called the search an “extraordinary, aggressive action” that is “deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work.”
Investigators told Natanson that she is not the focus of the probe. The warrant said that law enforcement was investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and his basement, according to an FBI affidavit…
While it is not unusual for FBI agents to conduct leak investigations of reporters who publish sensitive government information, it is highly unusual and aggressive for law enforcement to conduct a search on a reporter’s home.
Press freedom groups decried the search of Natanson’s home. Bruce Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called it “a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”
The NewsGuild also condemned the raid. “The extraordinary decision to execute a search warrant at a journalist’s home should shock and dismay everyone who cares about a free and independent press,” stated The Washington Post Guild, of which Natanson is a member.
Though unusual and aggressive, policy changes under the Trump administration laid the groundwork for such invasions into reporters’ records. In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi followed the Project 2025 playbook and rescinded the Biden-era policy that had protected reporters’ records from search in leak investigations.
Project 2025’s chapter on the intelligence community, Josh Benton wrote in September 2024, “argues that a new Trump administration should be more vigorous in investigating journalists when a government official leaks information to the press.” That chapter’s author, Dustin Carmack — who’s now Meta’s director of public policy — wrote that the Department of Justice “should rescind damaging guidance by Attorney General Merrick Garland that limits investigators’ ability to identify records of unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media.”
When Bondi reversed the guidance, she said searching reporters’ records should be a last resort, after other methods had been exhausted. “The search warrant and seizures appeared to be Natanson’s first interaction with investigators,” the Post reported.
Last month, Natanson wrote a raw personal account of her experience as the Post’s “federal government whisperer,” describing the past year of reporting as “brutal.” Her work led to a staggering 1,169 contacts on Signal, “all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories.” That’s a tall order to keep pace with for any reporter, especially a self-described “Inbox Zero” person. (“When I get sick, my fever dreams fill with little red-circled iPhone app notification badges,” Natanson wrote.)
Natanson also described the precautions she took to protect her sources:
The stories came fast, the tips even faster. I kept worrying: What if I got something wrong? What if I got someone in trouble?
After consulting Post lawyers, I developed what we felt was the safest possible sourcing system. If I planned to use someone in a story, I asked them to send me a picture of their government ID, then tried to forget it. I kept notes from reporting conversations in an encrypted drive, never writing down anyone’s name. To Google-check facts and identities, I used a private browser with no search history. I retitled every Signal chat by agency — “Transportation Employee,” “FDA Reviewer,” “EPA Scientist” — until the app, unable to keep up, stopped accepting new nicknames. (Then I started moving contacts into two-person group chats, which I could still rename.)
I bought a privacy screen for my iPhone and my computer. I carried both with me at all times, even walking between rooms in my house.
In a statement, the Knight First Amendment Institute warned the search of Natanson’s home raises “serious First Amendment concerns.” Executive director Jameel Jaffer called on the Justice Department to “explain publicly why it believes this search was necessary and legally permissible.”
“Searches of newsrooms and journalists are hallmarks of illiberal regimes,” he wrote, “and we must ensure that these practices are not normalized here.”
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