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 information from the Pentagon, according to an FBI affidavit obtained by MS NOW...
The FBI search raised immediate alarm bells from press freedom advocates. 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 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.”
“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.