FBI searches home of Washington Post journalist in leak probe

ERIC LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Washington Post building in Washington in June 2024. FBI agents conducted a search at the home of a Washington Post reporter today.

FBI agents searched the home of a Washington Post reporter today as part of a leak investigation, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s tactics in seeking information from the news media.

It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law called the Privacy Protection Act generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to them.

The reporter, Hannah Natanson, has spent the past year covering the Trump administration’s effort to fire federal workers and redirect much of the workforce to enforcing his agenda. Many of those employees shared with her their anger, frustration and fear with the administration’s changes.

A spokesperson for the Post said today that the publication was reviewing and monitoring the situation. An article in the Post said investigators told Natanson that she is not the focus of the investigation. Law enforcement seized laptops, a phone and a smartwatch during their search.

The paper reported that the search warrant and related FBI affidavit indicated that law enforcement was investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of gaining access to and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and his basement.

It is unclear whether the FBI sought other means of obtaining the information it was seeking from the Post.

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According to the affidavit, Perez-Lugones’ job meant he had access to sensitive information. It said he printed confidential documents that he was not authorized to search for and earlier this year took notes on a classified report related to government activity.

The court papers show investigators suspected Perez-Lugone of illegally mishandling classified information about an unidentified foreign country.

In a statement posted on social media, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the search was executed at the request of the Pentagon, to look for evidence at the home of a journalist “who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”

Free speech experts condemned the move as an aggressive escalation that could undercut press freedom.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, pointed to the chilling effect it could have “on legitimate journalistic activity.”

“There are important limits on the government’s authority to carry out searches that implicate First Amendment activity,” Jaffer said.

Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the search one of the most invasive steps law enforcement could take. He pointed to federal laws and policies meant to limit searches to the most extreme cases, lest such a step chill the public interest in a free flow of information to the news media beyond the case in question.

“While we won’t know the government’s arguments about overcoming these very steep hurdles until the affidavit is made public, this is a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press,” he said.

In a first-person account of her experience talking to federal employees, Natanson quoted some of the messages she received from them.

“I understand the risks,” one Defense Department worker told her. “But getting the truth and facts out is so much more important.”

Natanson also wrote that someone she described as a Justice Department staff member wrote, “I’d never thought I’d be leaking info like this.”

The Justice Department’s use of a search warrant to get a reporter’s material was treated across party lines as a scandal in 2013, when it was revealed that investigators in a leak case had portrayed a Fox News reporter as a criminal in an application for a court order to obtain the contents of the reporter’s email account.

Because Attorney General Eric Holder had recently testified to Congress that he knew of no effort to prosecute reporters in leak investigations, Republicans accused him of perjury. In response, the Justice Department explained that it never intended to charge the Fox reporter and had portrayed him as a criminal in order to get around the 1980 law.

As part of the fallout from that episode, Holder issued a policy forbidding the Justice Department from portraying reporters as criminals to get search warrants for their notes and work materials unless it truly intended to prosecute them.

In 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland bolstered that policy after it came to light that late in Trump’s first term, the Justice Department sought the phone and email records of reporters at the Post, The New York Times and CNN as part of leak investigations. He flatly barred the use of search warrants and subpoenas to seize reporting materials or require reporters to testify about sources.

Last year, however, Bondi rolled back the Garland policy, restoring the ability of investigators to use search warrants and subpoenas for reporters’ information. She largely restored the Holder-era policy, including a requirement to exhaust other means of obtaining evidence first before targeting reporters’ information.

But Bondi made a crucial change: She dropped the constraint he added in response to uproar over the Fox News search warrant that barred circumventing the 1980 law by portraying a reporter as a criminal suspect in bad faith.

While Holder insisted that he would never allow the Justice Department to prosecute a reporter for doing his or her job, however, it is not clear whether the Bondi Justice Department has the same view.

A World War I law called the Espionage Act says it is a crime to disseminate sensitive information about the national defense without authorization and on its face would seem to apply to journalists who write about matters the government has deemed classified. But it has widely considered to be a violation of the First Amendment to try to apply that law to journalists, and the Justice Department for generations did not attempt to do so.

During the first Trump administration, however, the department breached that barrier by bringing Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, for publishing classified documents leaked to the organization by Chelsea Manning, a former army intelligence analyst.

While Assange is not a traditional journalist, the charges treated journalistic-style activities action — receiving and disseminating classified information — as something that could be treated as a crime. In 2024, the Biden administration reached a plea deal with him on that charge to resolve his case, so its constitutionality was never tested on appeal.

Trump himself was charged under the Espionage Act in 2023 for keeping classified documents without authorization after he left office and obstructing government efforts to get them back. Prosecutors had to abandon that case, along with a separate indictment for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, after he was reelected president in 2024.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2026 The New York Times Company

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