The FBI searched a reporter's home, and two judges said the law forbade it

Editor's note: two federal judges held that the Privacy Protection Act bars the government from searching the reporter's protected materials, and one found her First Amendment rights restrained.

On January 14, 2026, FBI agents executed a search warrant at the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson, a Washington Post reporter covering the federal workforce, and seized six devices: two laptops, her phone, a portable drive, a recording device, and a fitness watch. The search arose from the prosecution of Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, a government contractor charged with unlawfully transmitting national defense information to her and with unlawful retention; he pleaded not guilty. Agents told Natanson she was not a target of the investigation. Attorney General Bondi, who had rescinded the previous administration's policy limiting compulsory process against reporters, said the effort was aimed at illegal leaks posing a grave risk to national security. The Justice Department later argued in court that the First Amendment is not a journalist's exception to search warrants.

The Privacy Protection Act of 1980 bars the government from searching or seizing a journalist's work product except in narrow circumstances, including where the journalist is a suspect. On February 24, 2026, Magistrate Judge William Porter issued a 22-page opinion refusing to let the department conduct an unsupervised search. He wrote that the government should retain only material within the warrant and nothing more, and that the filtering should be done by the court, because a filter team's institutional interests are directly at odds with the press-freedom values at stake. He faulted the department for failing to mention the Act in its warrant application, calling the omission a matter of significant concern and saying that had he been told, he might have refused the warrant and directed the government to use a subpoena instead. He found Natanson's First Amendment rights had been restrained and called the government's suggestion that she simply buy new devices and start again unjust and unreasonable. He nonetheless declined to order the devices returned immediately, noting the case involves top-secret information.

The government objected. On May 4, 2026, District Judge Anthony Trenga overruled the objections and affirmed. He wrote that he could not ignore the harassing and chilling effects such a seizure could have on a reporter, and concluded that the Privacy Protection Act bars the government from searching the protected materials seized in this case. He rejected the proposed government filter team and wrote that a compelling national-security interest does not permit the executive to unilaterally sacrifice constitutional rights. The court now leads the review; anything outside the warrant, including Natanson's confidential source material, is to be returned without the FBI seeing it. The federal charges brought against journalists covering a protest are documented at MED-19.