FBI searches Washington Post reporter’s home
By Brian Stelter, Katelyn Polantz, CNN
(CNN) — Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson has spent the past year as a “federal government whisperer,” receiving tips from hundreds of federal workers impacted by President Donald Trump’s transformation of the government.
Early Wednesday morning, FBI agents arrived at Natanson’s home and executed a search warrant. One phone, two computers and a Garmin watch were seized, the Post reported.
The exceedingly unusual raid of a reporters’ home immediately set off alarms among press freedom advocates.
The Post’s top editor, Matt Murray, said the publication was “deeply concerned about the provocative and aggressive nature of the FBI’s actions.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi alleged in a post on X that Natanson was “obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”
FBI Director Kash Patel alleged in a separate statement that “an individual at the Washington Post” obtained and reported “classified, sensitive military information from a government contractor.”
Hours later, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that a “leaker on Venezuela” has “been found and is in jail right now.”
Trump did not specify any connection to the search of the Post reporter’s home. But Natanson’s most recent story, published last week, was about Venezuela. Natanson and five Post colleagues co-authored the story, which cited “government documents obtained by The Washington Post.”
Bondi and Patel’s statements appeared to reference a contractor, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who was arrested last week in Maryland. He was charged with illegally retaining classified documents, according to a federal affidavit. He is scheduled to appear in federal court on Thursday.
‘A tremendous escalation’
It is not a crime in the U.S. for journalists to obtain or report on leaked documents, even when the sources who disclose them face legal exposure.
“Journalists are legally permitted to publish government secrets and the courts have again and again reaffirmed that First Amendment right,” Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders USA, told CNN.
Weimers and other experts said the decision to execute a search warrant and seize Natanson’s devices — rather than seek her records through a court subpoena — was a sharp escalation in the Trump administration’s actions against the news media.
“Searches of newsrooms and journalists are hallmarks of illiberal regimes, and we must ensure that these practices are not normalized here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute.
David McCraw, the top newsroom lawyer at The New York Times, called the FBI search “a stark threat to free press rights” because “actions like this inevitably impede reporters’ ability to gather news in the public interest and as a result make the government less accountable.”
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press president Bruce D. Brown pointed out that “physical searches of reporters’ devices, homes, and belongings are some of the most invasive investigative steps law enforcement can take.”
“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.
But newsroom leaders and media lawyers have feared that the government would resort to this step in Trump’s second term, given the administration’s unrestrained conduct.
The Pentagon contractor
Shortly after news broke about the FBI search, Bondi said it was done “at the request of the Department of War,” using the Trump administration’s preferred name for the Department of Defense.
“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,” Bondi said.
According to the Post’s own story, the warrant Natanson reviewed “said that law enforcement was investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones.”
The Justice Department alleged in court documents that Perez-Lugones, a former Navy official who’s been a government contractor with top security clearance since 2002, searched databases containing classified information in October 2025, accessing a top-secret intelligence report related to an unnamed foreign country.
The FBI alleged that Perez-Lugones took screenshots of parts of that classified report and placed them into a Word document.
The Justice Department also alleged that Perez-Lugones took notes on information in a classified system earlier this month and that investigators found documents marked as secret in his car in Maryland.
Notably, there were no allegations in Perez-Lugones’s charging documents regarding any possible leak to any news outlet.
The pursuit of leakers
On Wednesday, reporters immediately expressed concern about a more sweeping pursuit of leakers. In a column Natanson wrote for the Post last month, she described having 1,169 new Signal contacts from across the federal government — people who “decided to trust me with their stories” about changes and cutbacks at their workplaces.
Signal is an encrypted messaging app, generally considered to be a secure way to communicate with sources. Natanson also described other steps she took to ensure the confidentiality of the people who wanted to confide in her.
But now, a Post reporter told CNN on condition of anonymity, “We’re all scrambling to figure out what additional precautions we need to take.”
A second Post reporter said, “We’re horrified for Hannah, who’s a wonderful reporter, and scared for ourselves, trying to think through how best to further protect sources and secure our reporting and devices.”
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Liam Reilly, Holmes Lybrand and Donald Judd contributed reporting.
