Early on in her tenure as President Trump’s lawyer normal, Pam Bondi scrapped a Biden-era coverage that banned the Justice Department from pursuing reporters’ cellphone data and notes whereas investigating leakers.
The message was unmistakable: Trump-era investigators would welcome a confrontation. And now they’ve one.
This week, the Justice Department took the extraordinary step of acquiring a search warrant for Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home. FBI brokers arrived early on Wednesday and seized Natanson’s cellphone, two computer systems and her Garmin watch.
Inside the Washington Post newsroom, the affect was speedy.
Reporters known as the search “incredibly disturbing” and unprecedented. Natanson met with Post attorneys and safety specialists, scrambled to line up her personal outdoors authorized counsel, and urged her colleagues to maintain reporting.
Until now, Gabe Rottman of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press stated, 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 attorneys anticipate it can occur once more.
Trump allies at the Justice Department have been “itching to do this,” a legislation enforcement reporter informed NCS.
Bondi’s revised coverage, which went into impact final May, weakened her predecessor Merrick Garland’s protections for the press and mirrored Trump’s private frustration with leaks.
On Wednesday night time, Bondi alleged on Fox News that Natanson’s gadgets “contain classified material regarding our foreign adversaries, and that’s what we’re looking into now.”
Courts have repeatedly upheld the rights of journalists to acquire and report on leaked paperwork, even extremely labeled 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,” nationwide safety lawyer Mark Zaid informed NCS.
Since the Trump administration has “discarded policy norms previously set in place by prior administrations,” he stated, “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.”
The search warrant stated the raid was related to the case of a Maryland contractor who was charged final week with illegally retaining labeled data. The Justice Department alleged that the contractor accessed a top-secret intelligence report associated to an unnamed overseas nation.
Natanson was one of six Post reporters who published an exclusive story final week about Venezuela, citing secret authorities paperwork obtained by the Post.
Natanson additionally reported extensively on Trump’s overhaul of the federal authorities, drawing on suggestions from sources inside federal companies. She inspired individuals to message her on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
After the raid at her home, Post reporters talked with one another about whether or not extra steps might be taken to guard confidential sources.
Post government editor Matt Murray stated in a memo to the newsroom that “we are continuing to vigorously defend our journalists and our work.”
A Post spokesperson declined to touch upon whether or not the Post is taking authorized motion to attempt to restrict the authorities’s means to entry Natanson’s work supplies.
Ordinarily, underneath previous administrations, federal investigators would possibly search a subpoena for reporters’ data whereas investigating a potential leak of authorities secrets and techniques. That subpoena would set off a prolonged authorized battle.
Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department aggressively pursued leakers and, at instances, journalists, secretly seizing cellphone data from Associated Press reporters and labeling Fox News correspondent James Rosen a potential “co-conspirator” in a leak case. The backlash later led Obama’s lawyer normal, Eric Holder, to tighten Justice Department protections for reporters.
And throughout Trump’s first time period, prosecutors covertly pursued inside communications from a number of main information shops, together with NCS.
The outcry over this secret probe led Garland to place new protections in place in 2021.
Xochitl Hinojosa, who ran the Justice Department’s public affairs division again 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’s now a NCS political commentator, also said on X that the search of Natanson’s home was “a clear effort to intimidate reporters.”
On Wednesday, Post colleagues gathered round Natanson’s desk in the Washington newsroom, expressing assist for her and asking what they may do to assist.
Natanson exhorted her colleagues to get again to work, particularly as a result of she will’t proper now — her gadgets are in the authorities’s fingers.
“The best thing you can for me,” she informed a group of colleagues, is “keep reporting.”
On Wednesday night, the Post editorial board 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.”