The FBI searched the home of a Washington Post reporter early Wednesday in connection with a criminal case involving a leak of classified information.
Hannah Natanson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, was at her Virginia home when FBI agents executed a search warrant and seized her cellphone, two laptops and a Garmin watch, the Post said.
The search was related to Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a systems engineer in Maryland who holds a top secret security clearance and allegedly leaked classified information from the Pentagon, according to an FBI affidavit obtained by MS NOW.
Perez-Lugones is accused of “unlawful retention of national defense information” in the affidavit, which alleges he transported classified intelligence information without government permission to his home.
Federal agents said Natanson was not part of the criminal investigation, according to the Post. No charges have been filed against Natanson in connection with the case against Perez-Lugones.
Attorney General Pam Bondi accused Natanson of “obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor” in a statement on X on Wednesday.
“The leaker is currently behind bars,” Bondi said. “The Trump Administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our Nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
The Post said Wednesday afternoon that it had received a subpoena in the morning connected to the investigation into the Pentagon contractor.
The Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, said in an email to the newsroom that the search was “deeply concerning” and “raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” the Post reported.
A spokesperson for the Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment by MS NOW.
The incident drew condemnation from press freedom advocates.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), a pro bono legal organization that works to safeguard reporters’ and news organizations’ First Amendment freedoms, called the FBI search “a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”
Natanson began her career at the Post in 2019 as an education reporter, but she became an integral part of the Post’s coverage of the first year of Trump’s second administration. She focused on the dramatic reshaping of the federal government and its broad impact on the federal workforce. She also helped report on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2022 for its coverage of the attack.
In a personal essay published in the Post in December, Natanson described herself as the “federal government whisperer.” She detailed the year she spent speaking to more than 1,000 federal workers who had been personally affected by Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“Almost everything felt urgent,” Natanson said of the hundreds of tips she received from federal workers through the encrypted messaging app Signal. “Many Post pieces broke news the public would never have learned otherwise. Some came from my Signal.”
Bondi in April rolled back a Biden-era policy that prevented officials from searching reporters’ phone records when trying to identify government employees who had provided sensitive information to news outlets.
The search has raised alarm bells. “Physical searches of reporters’ devices, homes and belongings are some of the most invasive investigative steps law enforcement can take,” RCFP president Bruce Brown told MS NOW.
“There are specific federal laws and policies at the Department of Justice that are meant to limit searches to the most extreme cases because they endanger confidential sources far beyond just one investigation and impair public interest reporting in general,” Brown said.
In Trump’s first administration, the Justice Department secretly obtained the phone records of three Washington Post journalists in an attempt to uncover sources related to a story on alleged links between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Trump’s DOJ also obtained 2017 phone and email records from CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr’s work and personal devices.
The incident at Natanson’s home, however, poses even greater concerns, said Gabe Rottman, the vice president of policy and an attorney at RCFP.
“Here we’re talking about FBI agents raiding the home of a reporter and seizing electronic devices, which are going to have information that is even more revelatory of what that reporter is doing,” Rottman said.
The FBI action Wednesday runs the risk of discouraging confidential sources from coming forward to reporters with information that serves the public interest, Rottman said.
The affidavit, he said, “is going to be a key document, because it’s going to be crucial that we understand the government’s legal theory here.”
He added that “there’s a federal law that is supposed to significantly constrain law enforcement’s ability to conduct newsroom searches or to execute search warrants for reporters, for unpublished material or other sensitive newsgathering information.”
The Privacy Protection Act mandates that law enforcement must argue probable cause of a reporter violating the law before a judge to execute search warrants on reporters.
Perez-Lugones appeared in court on Wednesday for an initial detention hearing. He is slated for another hearing in Baltimore on Thursday.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter covering national politics and policy for MS NOW. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at SydneyCarruth.46 or follow her work on X and Bluesky.