‘Tip of the iceberg’: The FBI search of a reporter’s home has newsrooms bracing for more

By Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — Early on in her tenure as President Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi scrapped a Biden-era policy that banned the Justice Department from pursuing reporters’ phone records and notes while investigating leakers.

The message was unmistakable: Trump-era investigators would welcome a confrontation. And now they have one.

This week, the Justice Department took the extraordinary step of obtaining a search warrant for Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home. FBI agents arrived early on Wednesday and seized Natanson’s phone, two computers and her Garmin watch.

Inside the Washington Post newsroom, the impact was immediate.

Reporters called the search “incredibly disturbing” and unprecedented. Natanson met with Post lawyers and security experts, scrambled to line up her own outside legal counsel, and urged her colleagues to keep reporting.

The line that was crossed

Until now, Gabe Rottman of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said, the Justice Department had “never executed a search warrant at the home of a reporter in a national security leak case.”

But now that the line has been crossed, some journalists and media lawyers expect it will happen again.

Trump allies at the Justice Department have been “itching to do this,” a law enforcement reporter told CNN.

Bondi’s revised policy, which went into effect last May, weakened her predecessor Merrick Garland’s protections for the press and reflected Trump’s personal frustration with leaks.

On Wednesday night, Bondi alleged on Fox News that Natanson’s devices “contain classified material regarding our foreign adversaries, and that’s what we’re looking into now.”

The search warrant said the raid was connected to the case of a Maryland contractor who was charged last week with illegally retaining classified records. The Justice Department alleged that the contractor accessed a top-secret intelligence report related to an unnamed foreign country.

Courts have repeatedly upheld the rights of journalists to obtain and report on leaked documents, even highly classified ones.

But “in modern times, everything about the Espionage Act when it comes to treatment of the press has been based on norms and policy, not law,” national security attorney Mark Zaid told CNN.

Since the Trump administration has “discarded policy norms previously set in place by prior administrations,” he said, “there is every reason to believe that what was just experienced by a Washington Post reporter was just the tip of the iceberg of things to come.”

‘A clear effort to intimidate’

Natanson was one of six Post reporters who published an exclusive story last week about Venezuela, citing secret government documents obtained by the Post.

Natanson also reported extensively on Trump’s overhaul of the federal government, drawing on tips from sources inside federal agencies. She encouraged people to message her on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.

A Post spokesperson declined to comment on whether the Post is taking legal action to try to limit the government’s ability to access Natanson’s work materials.

But the Post’s top editor, Matt Murray, told staffers on Thursday that “the whole company is working in a myriad of ways” to support Natanson and defend the publication’s work.

And an influential First Amendment advocacy group, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has asked a federal judge to unseal the DOJ’s applications to search Natanson’s home.

Because the records are currently sealed, the public has no way “to understand the government’s basis for seeking (and a federal court’s basis for approving) a search with dramatic implications for a free press and the constitutional rights of journalists,” the Reporters Committee’s lawyers wrote in their filing late Wednesday.

Under more ordinary circumstances, federal investigators investigating a leak of government secrets might seek a subpoena for reporters’ records. Past subpoenas have triggered lengthy legal fights.

Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department aggressively pursued leakers and, at times, journalists, secretly seizing phone records from Associated Press reporters and labeling Fox News correspondent James Rosen a potential “co-conspirator” in a leak case. The backlash later led Obama attorney general Eric Holder to tighten Justice Department protections for reporters.

Then, during Trump’s first term, prosecutors covertly pursued internal communications from several major news outlets, including CNN, while hunting for sources.

The outcry over this secret probe led Garland to put new protections in place in 2021.

Xochitl Hinojosa, who ran the Justice Department’s public affairs department back then, wrote on X, “I, personally, had to sign off on any investigative step involving a reporter when I was at DOJ. But there were very strict guidelines: we would not subpoena reporters for their sources. Period.”

Hinojosa, who is now a CNN political commentator, also wrote that the search of Natanson’s home was “a clear effort to intimidate reporters.”

Bondi cast it as a necessary step to protect classified information.

Last year’s revisions to the DOJ policy about seeking reporter records still contained some safeguards for the press.

Bondi wrote in a memo that “investigative techniques relating to newsgathering are an extraordinary measure to be deployed as a last resort when essential to a successful investigation or prosecution.”

Inside the Post newsroom

On Wednesday, Post colleagues gathered around Natanson’s desk in the Washington newsroom, expressing support for her and asking what they could do to help.

Natanson exhorted her colleagues to get back to work, especially because she can’t right now — her devices are in the government’s hands.

“The best thing you can for me,” she told a group of colleagues, is “keep reporting.”

Murray echoed that sentiment during Thursday morning’s editorial meeting. “The best thing to do when people are trying to intimidate you is to not be intimidated — and that’s what we did yesterday,” he said, according to a source who attended.

The Post editorial board has also weighed in, observing that “leaks frustrate every president, but efforts to intimidate or neutralize reporters always fail in the end.”

“Whatever happens,” the editorial board added, “The Post’s important work will continue unabated.”

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Katelyn Polantz contributed reporting.