F.B.I. agents searched the home of a Washington Post reporter as part of a leak investigation, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s tactics in seeking information from the news media, reported Slate.
It is
exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal
agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law called the Privacy
Protection Act generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work
materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime
related to the materials.
The
Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, had spent the past year covering the
Trump administration’s effort to fire federal workers and redirect much of the
work force toward enforcing his agenda. Many of those employees shared with her
their anger, frustration and fear with the administration’s changes.
A
spokesperson for The Washington Post said on Wednesday that the publication was
reviewing and monitoring the situation. The law enforcement agents seized
laptops, a phone and a smartwatch during their search.
In a
message to staff, Matt Murray, the executive editor of The Post, said neither
Ms. Natanson nor the paper was a focus of the investigation.
“Nonetheless,
this extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound
questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” he
wrote.
Court documents indicate that law enforcement
officials were investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in
Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of
gaining access to and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found
in his lunchbox and basement.
It is
unclear whether the F.B.I. sought other means of obtaining the information it
was seeking from The Post.
According
to the F.B.I. affidavit, Mr. Perez-Lugones’s job meant he had access to
sensitive information. It said he had printed confidential documents that he
was not authorized to search for and took notes this year on a classified
report related to government activity.
The court
papers show investigators suspected Mr. Perez-Lugones in recent months of
illegally mishandling classified information about an unidentified country.
In a
statement on social media, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the search was
executed at the request of the Pentagon to look for evidence at the home of a
journalist “who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked
information from a Pentagon contractor.”
Free
speech experts condemned the move as an aggressive escalation that could
undercut press freedom.
Jameel
Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia
University, pointed to the chilling effect it could have “on legitimate
journalistic activity.”
Bruce D. Brown, the president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the search one of the most invasive steps law enforcement could take. He said federal laws and policies limited searches to the most extreme cases, lest such a step chill the public interest in a free flow of information to the news media beyond the case in question.
“While we
won’t know the government’s arguments about overcoming these very steep hurdles
until the affidavit is made public,” Mr. Brown said, “this is a tremendous
escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the
press.”
In a first-person account of her experience talking to
federal employees, Ms. Natanson quoted some of the messages she would receive.
“I
understand the risks,” one Defense Department worker told her. “But getting the
truth and facts out is so much more important.”
Another
message, by a Justice Department staff member, read, “I’d never thought I’d be
leaking info like this.”
The
Justice Department’s use of a search warrant to obtain a reporter’s material
was treated across party lines as a scandal in 2013. It was revealed that investigators in a
leak case had portrayed a Fox News reporter as a criminal in applying
for a court order to obtain the contents of the reporter’s email account.
Because
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had recently testified to Congress that he
knew of no effort to prosecute reporters in leak investigations, Republicans
accused him of perjury. In response, the Justice Department explained that it
never intended to charge the Fox reporter and had portrayed the reporter as a
criminal to get around the 1980 law.
In the
aftermath, Mr. Holder issued
a policy forbidding the Justice Department from portraying reporters
as criminals to get search warrants for their notes and work materials unless
it truly intended to prosecute them.
In 2021,
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland bolstered that policy after it came to
light that late in President Trump’s first term, the Justice Department sought
the phone and email records of reporters at The Washington Post, The New York
Times and CNN as part of leak investigations. He flatly barred
the use of search warrants and subpoenas to seize reporting materials
or to require reporters to testify about their sources.
Last year,
however, Ms. Bondi rolled back the Garland policy, restoring the ability of
investigators to use search warrants and subpoenas to obtain reporters’
information. She largely
restored the Holder-era policy, including a requirement to exhaust other
means of obtaining evidence first before targeting reporters’ information.
But Ms.
Bondi made a crucial change: She
dropped the constraint Mr. Holder added that barred circumventing the
1980 law by portraying a reporter as a criminal suspect in bad faith.
While Mr.
Holder insisted that he would never allow the Justice Department to prosecute a
reporter for doing his or her job, however, it is not clear whether the Justice
Department under Ms. Bondi has the same view.
A World
War I law called the Espionage Act says it is a crime to disseminate sensitive
information about the national defense without authorization, and on its face
it would seem to apply to journalists who write about matters the government
has deemed classified. But it has been widely considered to be a violation of
the First Amendment to try to apply that law to journalists, and for
generations, the Justice Department did not attempt to do so.
During the
first Trump administration, however, the department breached that barrier
by bringing
Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, for
publishing classified documents leaked to the organization by Chelsea Manning,
a former Army intelligence analyst.
While Mr.
Assange is not a traditional journalist, the charges treated journalistic-style
activities — receiving and disseminating classified information — as something
that could be treated as a crime. In 2024, the Biden administration reached a
plea deal with Mr. Assange on that charge to resolve his case, so its
constitutionality was never tested on appeal.
Mr. Trump
himself was charged under the Espionage Act in 2023 and accused of keeping
classified documents without authorization after he left office and obstructing
government efforts to get them back. Prosecutors had to abandon that case,
along with a separate indictment for his efforts to overturn the results of the
2020 election, after he was re-elected president in 2024.
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