FBI Searches Home Of Washington Post Reporter As Part Of Classified Documents Investigation
The FBI searched the home of a journalist at The Washington Post as part of an investigation into potential disclosure of classified information.
The New York Times first reported on the search of the home of Hannah Natanson, who has been covering the upheaval as the Trump administration has fired federal workers. A Post spokesperson said that the publication is reviewing and monitoring the situation.
An FBI spokesperson did not immediately returned a request for comment.
Natanson recently wrote of her experiences covering the federal workforce in a story headlined, “I am the Post’s ‘federal government whisperer.’ It’s been brutal.” The story recounted how she had been inundated with tips.
She wrote, “The stories came fast, the tips even faster. I kept worrying: What if I got something wrong? What if I got someone in trouble?”
She added, “After consulting Post lawyers, I developed what we felt was the safest possible sourcing system. If I planned to use someone in a story, I asked them to send me a picture of their government ID, then tried to forget it. I kept notes from reporting conversations in an encrypted drive, never writing down anyone’s name. To Google-check facts and identities, I used a private browser with no search history. I retitled every Signal chat by agency — ‘Transportation Employee,’ ‘FDA Reviewer,’ ‘EPA Scientist’ — until the app, unable to keep up, stopped accepting new nicknames. (Then I started moving contacts into two-person group chats, which I could still rename.)”
More to come.
