A judge has granted the Washington Post’s request that the United States government be barred from reviewing material seized from one of the newspaper’s reporters.
The temporary order is a small victory for press freedom advocates, who argue that confiscating material owned by reporter Hannah Natanson is a violation of her First Amendment rights, as well as a threat to journalism as a whole.
Recommended stories
3 List of itemsEnd of list
Wednesday’s order came from Magistrate Judge William Porter, who ordered the federal government not to filter through the seized material until a Feb. 6 hearing.
That pause, Porter argued, would allow the US Department of Justice to respond to the Washington Post’s complaint.
Natanson is not the subject of a federal investigation. And the US has long established laws and norms to protect journalists’ rights to report on sensitive topics from whistleblower sources.
But on January 14, President Donald Trump’s administration issued a search warrant targeting Natanson’s home. In the past year, as she has been reporting on changes in the federal government under Trump, 1,169 new sources have reached out to her with material.
The Justice Department has argued that the search warrant was necessary to gather information on Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, a government contractor who was arrested on Jan. 8 on charges of removing classified documents.
However, a search of Natanson’s home led to the removal of her work computer, her post-issued cellphone, her personal MacBook Pro, a terabyte hard drive, a voice recorder, and a Garmin watch.
in court Filed In opposing the seizure, prosecutors argued that Natanson’s electronics contained “information about past and present confidential sources and other unreleased newsgathering material, including the material she was using for current reporting.”
“Almost none of the data seized potentially responds to the warrant, which seeks only records obtained from or related to a single government contractor,” the complaint argues.
The six seized devices contained several terabytes of data spanning her journalism career, the complaint added.
“Natanson’s equipment contains essentially her entire professional universe: more than 30,000 email posts from the past year,” it says.
The Post has sued the Department of Justice to return the material, and the case will be heard in federal court in Virginia.
“Our reporter’s outrageous seizure of confidential newsgathering material chills speech, cripples reporting and causes irreparable harm when the government gets its hands on this material every day,” the newspaper wrote in a statement.
“We ask the court to order the immediate return of all seized materials and prohibit their use. Anything less would license future newsroom raids and normalize censorship through search warrants.”
The Trump administration has faced scrutiny for its combative approach to the media, and critics have accused it of trying to erode the right to free speech in newspapers or through legal protests.
Trump and his allies, however, have said they are committed to rooting out “leakers” in government who release classified material to the media.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, for example, accused Natanson of “reporting classified and illegally leaked information.”
“The leaker is currently in jail,” she wrote on social media PostReferring to Perez-Lugones.
“The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that pose a grave threat to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who serve our country.”
White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt echoed that stance, warning that the Trump administration would reserve the right to take legal action against anyone it believes has engaged in illegal practices.
“The administration will not tolerate leaks, especially from the national security apparatus of the United States government, that threaten the integrity of our country and our national security, period,” she said.
“Legal action will be taken against anyone, whether a member of the press or an employee of a federal agency, who violates the law.”
The First Amendment to the US Constitution declares that the government may make no law “abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.”
Over the decades, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government can curtail the media when there is a “clear and present threat,” but that the burden falls on the authorities to prove that such a threat exists.
The Washington Post was involved in a 1971 case, New York Times v. United States, that upheld the standard.
In that case, Republican Richard Nixon’s administration tried to prevent the Times and Post from publishing classified materials known as the Pentagon Papers — but the Supreme Court ruled their publication amounted to protected speech.