If you want to understand how little the current administration cares about the First Amendment, look no further than a pre-dawn FBI raid on a journalist’s home—conducted in apparent violation of a federal law specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of thing.
Last week, FBI agents showed up at the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seized two phones, two laptops, a Garmin watch, a portable hard drive, and a recording device. Natanson has spent the past year covering the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the federal workforce. She is not accused of any crime. She is not the target of any investigation. The FBI told her as much when they were busy carting away basically all of her devices.
The raid was ostensibly connected to an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor with top-secret clearance who was arrested and charged with illegally retaining classified documents—not leaking them. Again, because this seems to have gotten lost in much of the coverage: Perez-Lugones hasn’t been charged with leaking anything to anyone. Just retaining documents. The government isn’t even alleging—at least not yet—that he gave anything to Natanson or any other journalist. But the DOJ apparently decided that the best way to investigate this guy was to ransack a journalist’s home and vacuum up everything she’s ever worked on.
There’s a law that’s supposed to prevent this. It’s called the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, and it was passed specifically because Congress recognized that letting law enforcement raid journalists to fish for evidence of other people’s crimes has a catastrophic chilling effect on the press. The law bars searches and seizures of journalists’ work product when the journalist isn’t suspected of a crime, with very narrow exceptions that don’t appear to apply here.
Yes, some will argue the government has legitimate interests in protecting classified information—but that interest doesn’t override the Constitution, and it certainly doesn’t justify ignoring a federal statute specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of fishing expedition.
As the Freedom of the Press Foundation put it:
“This is an alarming escalation in the Trump administration’s multipronged war on press freedom. The Department of Justice (and the judge who approved this outrageous warrant) is either ignoring or distorting the Privacy Protection Act, which bars law enforcement from raiding newsrooms and reporters to search for evidence of alleged crimes by others, with very few inapplicable exceptions.
Beyond the PPA, even the DOJ’s own internal guidelines—which Attorney General Pam Bondi already weakened from their Biden-era form back in April based on an outright lie—are supposed to treat searching a journalist’s materials as an absolute last resort, reserved for rare emergencies. Not as Plan A when you want to know who a reporter has been talking to.
There was also an obvious, less constitutionally catastrophic option available. On the same day as the raid, the DOJ issued a grand jury subpoena to the Washington Post seeking substantially the same records. As the Post’s attorneys noted in their court filing:
Nothing prevented the government from issuing a subpoena to Natanson instead of executing a search warrant, which is what, historically, would have been mandated by government policy
That’s how this is supposed to work. You issue a subpoena. The news organization gets the chance to challenge it, to assert privilege, to go to court if necessary. The process allows for the adversarial testing that protects both the government’s legitimate investigative interests and the constitutional rights of a free press. But that process takes time and might result in the government not getting everything it wants.
Also, it’s not as intimidating for journalists.
So instead, they just kicked in the door.
The Post didn’t mince words in its filing seeking the return of Natanson’s devices:
The federal government’s wholesale seizure of a reporter’s confidential newsgathering materials violates the Constitution’s protections for free speech and a free press and should not be allowed to stand. It is a prior restraint and a violation of the reporter’s privilege that flouts the First Amendment and ignores federal statutory safeguards for journalists. The seizure chills speech, cripples reporting, and inflicts irreparable harm every day the government keeps its hands on protected materials. The government cannot meet its heavy burden to justify this intrusion, and it has ignored narrower, lawful alternatives.
And:
The government seized this proverbial haystack in an attempt to locate a needle. The search warrant orders that the government’s search of the seized data “must be limited to all records and information . . . from the time period October 1, 2025, to the present, which constitute records received from or relating to Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones.” … Even the government cannot expect to find many records responsive to the warrant in this ocean of data because its criminal complaint alleges that Perez-Lugones possessed only a small number of documents potentially containing classified or secret information, which he only began collecting three months ago. Meanwhile, Natanson has thousands of communications across her more than 1,100 sources. … And her devices contain years of data about past and current confidential sources and other unpublished materials. … At best, the government has a legitimate interest in only an infinitesimal fraction of the data it has seized.
There is, at least for now, a small piece of good news. On Wednesday, Magistrate Judge William B. Porter granted the Post’s motion for a standstill order, blocking the DOJ from reviewing any of the seized materials until the court authorizes it:
“The government must preserve but must not review any of the materials that law enforcement seized… until the Court authorizes review of the materials by further order,” the magistrate judge wrote.
Oral arguments are scheduled for February 6. So for the moment, the administration shouldn’t be able to rifle through a journalist’s entire professional life looking for evidence against someone else. But the fact that this happened at all—that the FBI executed a pre-dawn raid on a reporter’s home, that a federal judge signed off on the warrant, that the DOJ thought this was an appropriate course of action—tells you everything you need to know about how this administration views the role of the press.
Attorney General Bondi, for her part, initially issued a statement that was, as we’ve now come to expect with this administration, almost comically tone-deaf to the actual concerns at play, while ridiculously belligerent:
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.
Except, again: it’s not illegal for a journalist to receive leaked information and report on it. That’s journalism. The person who leaks may face consequences, but the reporter doesn’t become a criminal by doing their job. The Supreme Court made this clear in the Pentagon Papers case over fifty years ago, when the government tried to stop the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing classified documents about Vietnam. The press won. The principle established then—that the government cannot criminalize the act of receiving and publishing information in the public interest—remains the law today, however inconvenient that might be for an administration that doesn’t like what reporters are writing about it.
What makes this particularly galling is the context. Natanson has been reporting on the Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers—the very story the administration would prefer not be told. As CNN noted, she’s been called the Post’s “federal government whisperer” for her coverage of how DOGE-driven cuts have affected government agencies and the people who work in them.
If you wanted to send a message to journalists covering this administration that they should think twice about cultivating sources, you could hardly do better than raiding one of them at dawn and seizing every electronic device in her home.
This isn’t some abstract concern. Every source who has ever talked to Natanson—about anything—now has to wonder whether their communications are sitting in an FBI evidence locker. Every journalist covering this administration has to wonder if they’re next. That chilling effect is the point.
We’ll find out on February 6th whether the court orders the devices returned and tells the DOJ that the Privacy Protection Act means what it says—or whether we learn that the rules designed to protect press freedom don’t actually apply when the Trump administration really, really wants to know who’s been talking to reporters.
Either way, the damage is already done. The raid happened. The message was sent. And the MAGA world that spent years screaming about censorship and free speech has, once again, made clear that its commitment to those principles extends exactly as far as speech it likes.
