A judge has granted a request from The Washington Post to prevent the United States government from reviewing materials it seized from one of the newspaper’s reporters.
The temporary order is a small victory for press freedom advocates, who argue that the seizure of materials belonging to reporter Hannah Natanson is a violation of her First Amendment rights, as well as a threat to journalism overall.
Wednesday’s order came from Magistrate Judge William Porter, who bound the federal government not to filter through the seized materials until a hearing could be held on February 6.
That pause, Porter argued, would allow the US Department of Justice to respond to The Washington Post’s complaint.
Natanson is not the subject of a federal investigation. And the US has long-established laws and norms to protect the rights of journalists to report on sensitive topics from whistleblower sources.
But on January 14, the administration of President Donald Trump carried out a search warrant targeting Natanson’s home. Over the past year, she has been reporting on changes to the federal government under Trump, with 1,169 new sources reaching out to her with material.
The Justice Department has argued that the search warrant was necessary to collect information regarding Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, a government contractor who was arrested on January 8 for allegedly removing classified documents.
The sweep of Natanson’s home, however, resulted in the removal of her work computer, her Post-issued cellphone, her personal MacBook Pro, a one-terabyte hard drive, a voice recorder and a Garmin watch.
In court filings opposing the seizure, lawyers argued that Natanson’s electronics contained “years of information about past and current confidential sources and other unpublished newsgathering materials, including those she was using for current reporting”.
“Almost none of the seized data is even potentially responsive to the warrant, which seeks only records received from or relating to a single government contractor,” the complaint argues.
The complaint added that the six devices seized contained many terabytes of data, spanning her journalism career.
“Natanson’s devices contain essentially her entire professional universe: more than 30,000 Post emails from the last year alone,” it says.
The Post has sued the Justice Department for the return of the materials, and that case is slated to be heard before a federal court in Virginia.
“The outrageous seizure of our reporter’s confidential newsgathering materials chills speech, cripples reporting, and inflicts irreparable harm every day the government keeps its hands on these materials,” the newspaper wrote in a statement.
“We have asked the court to order the immediate return of all seized materials and prevent their use. Anything less would license future newsroom raids and normalize censorship by search warrant.”
The Trump administration has faced scrutiny for its combative approach to the media, and critics have accused it of seeking to erode the right to free speech, whether in newspapers or through legal protest.
Trump and his allies, however, have said they remain committed to ferreting out “leakers” in the government who release confidential material to the media.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, for instance, accused Natanson of “reporting classified and illegally leaked information”.
“The leaker is currently behind bars,” she wrote in a social media post, referring to Perez-Lugones.
“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.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed that stance, warning that the Trump administration would reserve the right to pursue legal action against anyone it believed to be engaging in illegal practices.
“The administration is not going to tolerate leaks, especially from within the national security apparatus of the United States government that put our nation’s integrity and our national security at risk, full stop,” she said.
“Legal action will be taken against anyone, whether it’s a member of the press or whether it’s an employee for a federal agency, who breaks the law.”
The First Amendment of the US Constitution declares that the government can make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”.
Over the decades, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government may curtail the media when faced with a “clear and present danger”, but that the burden falls on the authorities to prove such a danger exists.
The Washington Post was involved in one of the cases that upheld that standard, New York Times v United States in 1971.
That case saw the administration of Republican Richard Nixon seek to stop the Times and the Post from publishing classified materials known as the Pentagon Papers – but the Supreme Court determined that their publication amounted to protected speech.