Second judge maintains DOJ can’t search data seized from Post reporter

The Justice Department will remain blocked from examining electronic devices seized from a Washington Post reporter, a federal judge in Virginia ruled Monday.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga marks the second time a court in the Eastern District of Virginia has rejected efforts by the Justice Department to sift through a phone, computers, and other devices belonging to Post reporter Hannah Natanson. The FBI seized her belongings in January during an investigation of a government contractor accused of leaking classified material.

The Trump administration had appealed a previous ruling from a magistrate judge, who found that the court — not the Justice Department — should search the devices for information that may be pertinent to the leak investigation and provide it to investigators.

The appeal pinged the litigation to Trenga, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. Trenga once again batted down each of the government’s arguments in his ruling, saying that the prolonged seizure of the devices is preventing a journalist from doing her job and that allowing the court to conduct the search does not impinge on investigators’ abilities to do their work.

The government had argued in court that Justice Department employees — not a judge — are best equipped to conduct a search of data that could contain classified information and that preventing law enforcement from carrying out the search undercuts a core function of the executive branch.

The Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, can appeal this latest decision.

“The Government’s seizure of the entirety of Natanson’s work product, including her active stories, her notes on future investigations, and her background and confidential source material, fundamentally affects Natanson’s ability to publish in the areas she was investigating,” Trenga wrote.

The federal government executed the search of Natanson’s home in Virginia on Jan. 14. They seized two computers, a recorder, a Garmin watch, a phone, and a portable hard drive.

Law enforcement officials said the search was carried out as part of their investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a systems administrator with a top-secret clearance who was indicted in Maryland in January on charges of unlawfully obtaining and sharing classified materials. President Donald Trump has referred to Perez-Lugones as “the leaker” of classified information regarding U.S. actions in Venezuela.

Federal prosecutors say Perez-Lugones exchanged messages with Natanson before his arrest. They acknowledged that only a small portion of the information on the devices seized from Natanson would be relevant to the case against Perez-Lugones.

Perez-Lugones has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

A federal judge in Maryland ordered that Perez-Lugones, who had been in custody since his January arrest, be released pending trial. The judge found he posed little risk of leaking more classified information.

Natanson covers the federal workforce and has been part of the Post’s most high-profile and sensitive coverage related to government firings, national security, and diplomacy during the first year of the second Trump administration. She contributed reporting to a number of recent articles around the United States’ capture of Venezuela’s former leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Hours before Trenga’s ruling, the Post was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Trump’s efforts to overhaul the government and reduce the federal workforce.

This work was primarily led by Natanson, who wrote last year of acting as a “federal government whisperer” and developing more than 1,000 sensitive government sources.

Natanson spoke in the newsroom after the Pulitzer Prizes were announced, thanking government employees “who risked so much to confide in me” and alluding to the ongoing legal battle over her devices. “I want you to know your trust is the highest honor I will ever receive,” she said. “We at the Post are doing everything we can to protect it.”

Natanson and the Post have argued that only a sliver of the information in her devices is pertinent to the case against Perez-Lugones. They said that allowing the government to search the devices could risk the government uncovering sensitive sourcing and reporting information that is not relevant to the investigation.

The government has asserted that it was not seeking to broadly dig through Natanson’s devices. Rather, it said it would conduct a narrow examination with a filter team, which would be responsible for sifting out information that is either protected or not compliant with the parameters of the warrant.

But in his ruling, Trenga sharply rebuked the government for the seizure, writing that he could not “ignore, whether intended or not, the harassing and chilling effects such a seizure could have on a reporter,” in particular one so focused on the executive branch.

Trenga also criticized prosecutors for not mentioning the 1980 Privacy Protection Act when they submitted the application for a warrant to search Natanson’s home and seize her devices — echoing a similar rebuke levied by the magistrate judge.

The Privacy Protection Act, known as the PPA, limits the government’s ability to search and seize journalists’ materials.

It is intended to prevent the criminalization of a reporter gathering information. It says that a journalist’s materials should be seized only if that journalist is suspected of committing a crime with those materials. The law says that a reporter’s possessions can be seized if investigators suspect they contain certain materials related to sensitive national security information.

Prosecutors said they did not mention the law because the government did not believe it applied to the case since investigators were looking for information related to national security.

But Trenga didn’t buy that argument. He said that while some of the seized materials may not be protected by the PPA, much of it is, suggesting that federal law prohibits the Justice Department from seizing the full breadth of Natanson’s materials.

The government’s position “is untenable given the plain language of the PPA, which the Court concludes bars the Government from searching in this particular case the PPA-protected materials that were seized.”