WASHINGTON — The Washington Post asked a federal court on Wednesday for an order requiring federal authorities to return electronic devices that they seized from a Post reporter's Virginia home last week, accusing the government of trampling on the reporter's free speech rights and legal safeguards for journalists.
A magistrate judge in Alexandria, Virginia, temporarily barred the government from reviewing any material from the devices seized from Post reporter Hannah Natanson's home. The judge also scheduled a Feb. 6 hearing on the newspaper’s request.
Federal agents seized a phone, two laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive and a Garmin smart watch when they searched Natanson's home last Wednesday, according to a court filing. The search was part of an investigation of a Pentagon contractor accused of illegally handling classified information.
“The outrageous seizure of our reporter’s confidential newsgathering materials chills speech, cripples reporting, and inflicts irreparable harm every day the government keeps its hands on these materials," the Post said in a statement.
The seized material spanned years of Natanson's reporting across hundreds of stories, including communications with confidential sources, the Post said. The newspaper asked the court in Virginia to order the immediate return of all seized materials and to bar the government from using any of it.
"Anything less would license future newsroom raids and normalize censorship by search warrant," the Post's court filing says.
The Pentagon contractor, Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, was arrested earlier this month on a charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents. A warrant said the search of Natanson’s home was related to the investigation of Perez-Lugones, the Post reported.
Natanson has been covering Republican President Donald Trump's transformation of the federal government, The Post recently published a piece in which she described gaining hundreds of new sources from the federal workforce, leading one colleague to call her "the federal government whisperer."
Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the search was done at the request of the Defense Department and that the journalist was “obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”
Perez-Lugones, a U.S. Navy veteran who resides in Laurel, Maryland, has not been charged with sharing classified information or accused in court papers of leaking.
The Justice Department has internal guidelines governing its response to news media leaks. In April, Bondi issued new guidelines restoring prosecutors' authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make "unauthorized disclosures" to journalists.
The new guidelines rescinded a policy from Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration that protected journalists from having their phone records secretly seized during leak investigations.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press president Bruce Brown said the unprecedented search of the reporter's home, “imperils public interest reporting and will have ramifications far beyond this specific case.”
“It is critical that the court blocks the government from searching through this material until it can address the profound threat to the First Amendment posed by the raid,” Brown said in a statement Wednesday.
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