On Wednesday, the home of a Washington Post journalist was raided by FBI agents who were ostensibly carrying out a search warrant to find evidence relating to a case involving classified documents.
Post reporter Hannah Natanson, whose reporting focuses extensively on the consequences of President Donald Trump’s attempts to fire workers and dismantle entire government agencies, was at her home when federal investigators arrived. Agents seized her electronic devices, including her phone and laptop computers, and searched her entire home as part of the raid.
Natanson has been told she is not the subject of an investigation herself, but that the search was related to the recent arrest of a government contractor named Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who has been charged with “unlawful retention of national defense information,” per court records. Notably, court documents do not allege Perez-Lugones had any connections to journalists, nor that he shared with anyone the classified documents he’s alleged to have taken.
It’s extremely rare for investigations, including those relating to classified documents, to be conducted at reporters’ homes, even if said documents had been shared with them — typically, those kinds of cases are handled by examining phone records or emails belonging to the journalists, if searches are to happen at all.
“There are important limits on the government’s authority to carry out searches that implicate First Amendment activity,” said Jameel Jaffer with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, speaking to The New York Times about the search at Natanson’s home.
In April, the Trump administration rescinded a Biden-era policy that forbade Department of Justice (DOJ) investigators from searching reporters’ phones when trying to identify government leakers.
The search involving Natanson’s home and her electronic devices is “intensely concerning” and may result in a chilling effect on future reporting, Jaffer added.
Other critics have suggested that creating a chilling effect was the entire point of the search.
“Hannah Natanson is an exceptional reporter and should never have been subjected to this type of extraordinary intimidation tactic,” Lauren Harper, chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote in a post on Bluesky. “We have few details now, but it’s hard to interpret this as anything other than an attempt to squash the freedom of the press.”
“DOJ has occasionally claimed that it needs to search reporters’ records to find the source of a security leak. But that’s pretty obviously not what they were doing when they searched the Post reporter’s house,” Reuters crime and justice reporter Brad Heath noted. “They arrested a suspect days ago, after more or less catching him in the act.”
“Seizing a journalist’s devices is not a neutral investigative step,” journalist Dean Blundell wrote in a Substack post. “Phones and laptops are not just hardware — they are maps of confidential sources, communication trails, and reporting notes. They contain the identities of people who spoke only because they believed the press could protect them.”
“This move tells every journalist covering national security: your work can now put your home under federal search,” Blundell added. “It tells every source: talking to a reporter may expose you. And it tells the public: the state is willing to cross lines it once claimed were sacred.”
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