A judge on Tuesday denied the Justice Department’s request to search a Washington Post reporter’s electronics for sensitive documents as part of its investigation into national security leaks.
As previously reported, the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter who obtained classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.
Feds executed a search warrant at the Alexandria, Virginia, home of WaPo reporter Hannah Natanson last month as part of an investigation into a Maryland system administrator who has a top security clearance.
The contractor who stashed the classified documents at his home, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, is currently in jail.
FBI agents reportedly found classified intelligence reports in Perez-Lugones’ lunchbox and basement.
Rubio said the Pentagon contractor leaked the Maduro capture plans.
The US Army’s Delta Force captured Maduro last month. The leaked plans could have put the special operators in harm’s way.
On Tuesday, a federal magistrate judge rejected the Justice Department’s request to search Natanson’s electronics.
“Accordingly, the Court rejects the government’s request to conduct an unsupervised, wholesale search of all Movants’ seized data using a government filter team. To gather the information the government needs to prosecute its criminal case without authorizing an unrestrained search and violating Movants’ First Amendment and attorney-client privileges, the Court will conduct the review itself,” judge William Porter wrote.
“No easy remedy exists here. Movants’ First Amendment rights have been restrained. The government seized all of Ms. Natanson’s work product, documentary material, and devices, terminating her access to the confidential sources she developed and to all the tools she needs as a working journalist. The government’s proposed remedy—that she simply buy a new phone and laptop, set up new accounts, and start from scratch—is unjust and unreasonable,” the judge wrote.
The Washington Post reported:
A federal judge in Virginia rejected the Justice Department’s request to search through a Washington Post reporter’s electronic devices as part of a national security leak investigation, ruling that the court would instead be responsible for conducting the search.
The Tuesday ruling suggested that Magistrate Judge William Porter did not trust the government to conduct a narrow search of the devices and feared that such an examination could risk exposing more than 1,000 of the reporter’s government sources to the Justice Department.
“Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product — most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources — is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” Porter wrote.
Porter also sharply criticized prosecutors for not briefing him in their search warrant application on a federal law that protects reporters against searches in many situations: the Privacy Protection Act of 1980. Their failure to inform him about the law before he approved the warrant in the case “has seriously undermined the Court’s confidence in the government’s disclosures in this proceeding,” he wrote.
Breaking news: A judge rejected the Justice Department’s request to search through a Post reporter’s electronic devices as part of a national security leak investigation, ruling that the court would instead be responsible for conducting the search. https://t.co/isL1gzwvkG
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 24, 2026
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