A person walks into the One Franklin Square Building, home of The Washington Post newspaper, June 21, 2024, in Washington.
Alex Brandon | AP
FBI agents searched a Washington Post reporter’s home on Wednesday as part of a leak investigation involving a Pentagon contractor accused of sharing classified information, the Justice Department said.
Hannah Natanson, who has been covering President Donald Trump’s transformation of the federal government, had a phone and a Garmin watch seized in the search of her Virginia home, the Post reported. Natanson has reported extensively on the federal workforce, and recently she published a piece describing how she gained hundreds of new sources — leading one colleague to call her “the federal government whisperer.”
While classified documents investigations aren’t unusual, the search of a reporter’s home marks an escalation in the government’s efforts to crack down on leaks.
“Leaking classified information puts America’s national security and the safety of our military heroes in serious jeopardy,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X. “President Trump has zero tolerance for it and will continue to aggressively crack down on these illegal acts moving forward.”
An affidavit says the search was related to an investigation into a system administrator in Maryland who authorities allege took home classified reports, the Post reported. The system administrator, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, was charged earlier this month with unlawful retention of national defense information, according to court papers.
Perez-Lugones, who held a top secret security clearance, is accused of printing classified and sensitive reports at work. In a search of his Maryland home and car this month, authorities found documents marked “SECRET,” including one in a lunchbox, according to court papers.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the search was done at the request of the Defense Department and said the journalist was “obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”
Trump’s Republican 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 in a post on X.
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on Wednesday. The Washington Post said Wednesday that it was monitoring and reviewing the situation. An email seeking comment was sent to lawyers for Perez-Lugones.
The Justice Department over the years has developed, and revised, internal guidelines governing how it will respond to news media leaks.
In April, Bondi issued new guidelines saying prosecutors would again have the authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make “unauthorized disclosures” to journalists.
The moves rescinded a policy from President Joe Biden’s Democatic administration that protected journalists from having their phone records secretly seized during leak investigations — a practice long decried by news organizations and press freedom groups.
The aggressive posture in this case stands in contrast to the Justice Department’s approach to the disclosure of sensitive military information via a Signal chat last spring involving senior Trump administration officials. A reporter was mistakenly added to that chat. Bondi indicated publicly at the time that she was disinclined to open an investigation, saying she was confident that the episode had been a mistake.
Bondi also repeated Trump administration talking points that the highly sensitive information in the chat was not classified, though current and former U.S. officials have said the posting of the launch times of aircraft and the times that bombs would be released before those pilots were even in the air would have been classified.
