FBI agents on Wednesday searched a Washington Post reporter’s home as part of a leak investigation into a Pentagon contractor accused of taking home classified information, the US Department of Justice said.
Hannah Natanson, who has been covering US President Donald Trump’s transformation of the federal government, had a phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch seized in the search of her Virginia home, the Post reported.
Natanson has reported extensively on the federal workforce and published an article describing how she gained hundreds of new sources — leading one colleague to call her “the federal government whisperer.”
Photo: Bloomberg
While classified documents investigations are not unusual, the search of a reporter’s home marks an escalation in the government’s efforts to crack down on leaks.
The Post was told that Natanson and the newspaper are not targets of the probe, executive editor Matt Murray said in an e-mail to colleagues.
“Nonetheless, this extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” Murray wrote.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi said the search was done at the request of the US Department of Defense and that the journalist was “obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”
The warrant says the search was related to an investigation into a system engineer and information technology specialist for a government contractor in Maryland who authorities allege took home classified materials, the Post reported.
The worker, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, earlier this month was charged with unlawful retention of national defense information, court papers showed.
Jameel Jaffer — an executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University who has been working on press freedom issues for a decade — said a government raid on a journalist’s home is so unusual he could not remember the last time it happened.
He said it could not help but have a chilling effect on journalism.
“I strongly suspect that the search is meant to deter not just that reporter, but other reporters from pursuing stories that are reliant on government whistle-blowers,” he said. “And it’s also meant to deter whistle-blowers.”
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