Judge Blocks Trump DOJ From Searching WaPo Reporter’s Seized Electronic Devices

AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke

A federal judge issued a ruling Wednesday blocking the Trump administration from searching electronic devices that were seized from the home of Washington Post staff reporter Hannah Natanson.

On Jan. 14, Natanson’s home in Virginia was searched by FBI agents pursuant to a search warrant related to an investigation into into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a Maryland-based system administrator with top-secret clearance who is accused of improperly accessing classified intelligence reports and taking them home. Agents seized Natanson’s cell phone, Garmin smartwatch, and two laptops, one that belongs to the Post and one that is hers.

Post executive editor Matt Murray had denounced the search of a Post reporter’s home and seizure of her devices as an “extraordinary, aggressive action” that was “deeply concerning,” and numerous other journalists publicly voiced strong support for Natanson.

On Wednesday, the Post filed a motion seeking the return of the materials seized from Natanson’s home, or at least barring the government from searching the devices until the issue could be settled in court, arguing that this was an “extraordinary” search that “flouts the First Amendment and ignores federal statutory safeguards for journalists.”

According to the Post, the paper’s attorneys attempted multiple times to negotiate with Trump Department of Justice officials about the seized devices and the feds initially agreed to not “begin a substantive review of the seized data” until the parties’ next meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 20.

At that Jan. 20 meeting, the government again refused to return the materials seized from Natanson’s home, and the Post said it would file a motion, as it did the next day, on Jan. 21. In the Post’s motion, their attorneys told the court that the feds said they “would not refrain from conducting a substantive review” and “would not agree to inform us even when it began.”

“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 about their court filing. “We have asked the court to order the immediate return of all seized materials and prevent their use. Anything less would license future newsroom raids and normalize censorship by search warrant.”

Several hours after the Post’s court filing, U.S. Magistrate Judge William B. Porter ruled in the newspaper’s favor, at least partially, ordering the federal government to refrain from searching Natanson’s electronic devices until the litigation was resolved.

The judge found that the Post and Natanson “demonstrated good cause in their filings to maintain the status quo” until a hearing on the merits could be held, and scheduled such a hearing for early February.

In the Post article about the ruling, justice reporter Perry Stein noted that it was “exceptionally rare for law enforcement officials to conduct searches at reporters’ homes.”

“The law allows a search of a reporter’s home, but federal regulations intended to protect a free press are designed to make it more difficult to use aggressive law enforcement tactics against reporters to obtain the identities of their sources or information,” Stein added.

Porter’s order allows the government to hold on to Natanson’s seized devices, but prohibits it from reviewing them or the data within. The DOJ has until Jan. 28 to submit any responsive pleadings to challenge the Post’s motion.

Notably, as the Post pointed out in its filing, the charges against Perez-Lugones relate to his allegedly retaining classified materials; he has not been accused of illegally leaking those materials to the media.

“The government seized this proverbial haystack in an attempt to locate a needle,” the Post’s motion argued, adding that “almost none” of the materials seized were actually relevant to the search warrant. To the contrary, “the FBI seized Natanson’s newsgathering materials, stored on devices including her Post-issued laptop and cellphone,” which “contain years of information about past and current confidential sources and other unpublished newsgathering materials, including those she was using for current reporting.”

Stein’s article also hinted that the motivation for the search and seizure at Natanson’s home was the government’s desire to silence and chill her reporting on the federal workforce, noting that she “has been a part of The Post’s most high-profile and sensitive coverage related to government firings, national security and diplomacy during the first year of the second Trump administration.”

An article Natanson wrote last month detailed the impact her reporting, including how she had “posted her secure phone number to an online forum for government workers and amassed more than 1,000 sources, with federal workers frequently contacting her to share frustrations and accounts from their offices,” Stein wrote.

In a sworn affidavit submitted with the Post’s motion Wednesday, Natanson wrote that “she typically receives anywhere from dozens to upward of 100 tips from sources per day on Signal,” Stein added, “[b]ut since the seizure, the number of tips has fallen to zero.”

The seizure of Natanson’s devices was a First Amendment violation as an “unconstitutional prior restraint,” the Post argued, citing Natanson’s declaration, because it made it impossible for her to do her job, essentially blocking her speech and making her unable to continue her reporting and publish it.

“Here, the government has commandeered Natanson’s reporting records and tools,” the motion stated, “thereby preventing her from contacting her more than 1,100 sources and receiving their tips, and generally impairing her ability to publish the stories she otherwise would have published but for the raid.”

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press also filed a motion in this case last week, asking the court to make public the affidavit that included the DOJ prosecutors’ arguments to the court about why it was necessary to search Natanson’s home, and other materials related to the granting of the warrant and its execution. That motion is still awaiting a ruling.

Bruce D. Brown, the organization’s president, vociferously criticized the Trump administration in a statement, noting how this was “the first time in U.S. history that the government has searched a reporter’s home in a national security media leak investigation, seizing potentially a vast amount of confidential data and information.”

Such an action “imperils public-interest reporting and will have ramifications far beyond this specific case,” he added. “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.”

This is a breaking news story and has been updated.

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