The FBI raid on our reporter's home

0:01Early Wednesday morning, the FBI raided a reporter's home. the home of our colleague, federal government reporter Hannah Naitensen. Raids like this are exceptionally rare. It was part of a national security case focused on a government contractor. That's according to the warrant. And neither Hannah nor The Post are targets of the investigation, The Post has been told. But Hannah has spent the past year covering the Trump administration's efforts to fire federal workers. And she has more than 1 ,000 sources. The raid of her home has now raised alarms for free press advocates and journalists, says Democracy reporter Sarah Ellison.

0:44The people we talked to just saw the FBI search of Hannah Nathanson's home as a really jarring escalation aimed at reporters gathering information on the government. From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Elajeh Izadi. It's Thursday, January 15th. Today, we're going to bring you an excerpt from an interview we did with Hannah last year. She talks about how she became a trusted reporter for federal workers who wanted to alert the public about what was happening inside of the government. But first, I speak with democracy reporter Sarah Ellison. We talk about why the FBI's actions here were so unusual and how journalists are confronting a new reality and trying to bring important stories to light.

1:45Hi, Sarah. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for joining us this morning. I want to start with simply just what happened on Wednesday morning at the home of Hannah Natanson. Sure. Hannah Natanson was at home in Virginia at the time of the search. It was early in the morning, and federal agents searched her home and her devices. They took her phone, two laptops, and a Garmin watch. One of the laptops was her personal computer, and the other was a Washington Post-issued laptop. So these agents arrived at her home with a warrant. What was the warrant about? The warrant said that law enforcement was investigating Aurelio Perez Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has top secret security clearance and has been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and his basement.

2:42That's according to the FBI affidavit. And has he been charged with a crime? He was charged with unlawfully retaining national defense information last Friday. Is there anything else at this stage that we know about any potential connection between Perez Ligoniz and Hannah Nainz? We know from our reporting that he was texting with her at the time that he was apprehended. The Post also received a subpoena Wednesday morning seeking information related to this guy. The subpoena also asked the Post to hand over any communication between the contractor and other employees at the Post. So again, the warrant and the investigation is not accusing Hannah or the Post of any wrongdoing, but it seems like they have been swept up in connection to this investigation into a government contractor.

3:36Yes, and that's often the way that journalists get swept up into these things. Journalists are typically not the target of an investigation, but they are the people who are on the receiving end, or at least alleged to be on the receiving end. And they're essentially sort of brought into these investigations because the whistleblowers or the government employees are allegedly giving them information. So before we just leave what happened in the case of Hannah Naitensen, when you and your colleagues reached out to the FBI for comment, what did you hear back? The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the Bureau's director, Kash Patel, wrote on social media that the alleged leaked information endangered the military.

4:23He wrote, This morning, the FBI and partners executed a search warrant of an individual at the Washington Post who was found to allegedly be obtaining and reporting classified sensitive military information from a government contractor, endangering our warfighters and compromising American national security. You know, I think part of the reason that people, and particularly people who are in the press freedom world, were alarmed in part by this raid is because of what Hannah covers. She covers the federal workforce. And for now, what do we need to know about what her work over the past year has been like?

5:06So Hannah has been covering the federal workforce for the past year, and she's been part of the Post's most high profile and sensitive coverage during Trump's second administration. And in December, she outlined in personal and great detail her account of what it was like doing this work. She talked about how she posted her secure phone number to an online forum for government workers and got more than a thousand sources with federal workers frequently reaching out to her to share their frustrations and just their general accounts of what was happening inside their offices. Yeah, that was the first person piece published by The Washington Post.

5:54So this was public knowledge. People knew the nature of her work. Exactly. I mean, this was published on December 24th of last year, and she went into great detail about what that experience was like and how absorbing it was for her to hear from these people 24-7. Yeah. So broadening out now, I know that the federal government, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, have conducted leak investigations and that this has swept up reporters. What makes this moment so different and unusual? So it's not that unusual for FBI agents to conduct leak investigations. And reporters have been subpoenaed for information pretty regularly.

6:40Most of those subpoenas are challenged and the news organization gets involved immediately and then there's a negotiation. What's highly unusual and aggressive in this case is for law enforcement to come to someone's house and conduct a search of everything in their home. So these subpoenas are not what's unusual. It's the way that the government went about this. Raiding a reporter's home is a much more intrusive step that obviates the ability to challenge that raid in court before it happens. And according to our sources, it's exceedingly unusual, if not entirely unprecedented. And I'm curious about the legal protections that journalists have to withstand pressure from the government to give over material and information about potential sources.

7:41There are federal regulations intended to protect a free press, and they're designed to make it difficult to use aggressive law enforcement tactics against reporters. There's a 1980 law called the Privacy Protection Act, and that bars search warrants for reporters' work materials unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to their work. Often there are exceptions for national security. And that's one of the things that has been invoked many times over the years. But it was during the Obama administration when we saw a huge escalation of people who worked for the federal government being charged with a very obscure espionage act.

8:30And it was something that the Obama administration used more than any other previous administration, or I should say all other previous administrations combined. There was really a period during the Obama administration when reporters were pretty surprised and press freedom advocates were concerned about how aggressive the Obama administration was being about going after federal employees who they suspected of leaking information to reporters. And to be clear, is there a law that makes it a crime for a journalist to obtain or publish classified information? No. The U.S. has no law that explicitly makes it a crime for a journalist to obtain or publish classified information.

9:16It's the prosecution of the alleged source, which ropes in the journalists. But as the world has gotten more digital and we've seen the lines between who is a journalist and who isn't a journalist and people like WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange come into public consciousness. And, you know, he was indicted in 2019 under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information. And at the time, First Amendment scholars warned that his case could set a precedent that could be used against journalists. Now, that's not been tested because Assange took a plea deal and the case never went to trial. But a lot of the protections that journalists enjoy are by custom and not necessarily by law.

10:07So historically, the Justice Department doesn't investigate or prosecute reporters who share information that's given to them by confidential sources. But we have seen the appetite for this increase. And the overall atmosphere for reporters has gotten less friendly. Journalists are less popular. And investigative reporters and people who do this sensitive kind of reporting are increasingly on the lookout for this kind of incursion into their work product. Mm-hmm. Sarah, how have legal protections been like under the second Trump administration? Have there been any policies or revisions to departmental guidance of how investigators should treat journalists when thinking about classified information?

11:00Yes. In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded a Biden-era policy that prevented officials from searching reporters' phone records when trying to identify government personnel who have provided sensitive information to reporters. She said in an internal memo at the time that the media should not be afforded such protections. She said that this conduct is illegal and wrong and it must stop. That's according to this internal memo, which our colleagues obtained a copy of. She also eliminated a ban on saying that a reporter is a criminal or part of a criminal investigation in order to get their records.

11:44So we mentioned the 1980 Privacy Protection Act. There is a carve out for that, that if the reporter is a co-conspirator, if the reporter is the target of the investigation, you can access their material. And this happened under the Obama administration, where a Fox News reporter was labeled a co-conspirator in order for the government to get his communications. that's something that Bondi said that the Justice Department would be able to go back to doing. Yeah, I see. Sarah, I know that you and your colleagues have been trying to take the temperature of how all of this is leaving other journalists feeling and journalists who cover really sensitive matters and do rely on sources to give them tips and information that then leads to breaking stories that are in the public interest.

12:39How are journalists digesting these developments and this moment? How are they responding to the FBI raid? A lot of the people we spoke to yesterday described feeling shocked. They thought that this was a sort of, they saw this as a jarring new step towards blocking information that the government doesn't want to get out to the world. We spoke to a number of different reporters. There was a national security reporter who told us that he'd turned off the facial recognition software on his phone. You know, when you look at your phone and it can automatically open. He did that because he thought it would be much easier for investigators to sort of put the phone in front of his face rather than compel him to enter his password.

13:26We talked to a White House reporter who, you know, immediately said that they were going to go back and look at how they manage information from sources. People were consulting their lawyers. They were hearing from, you know, sources who were concerned that these reporters had locked down their information. Because as careful as reporters are, this kind of a warrant, you know, at 6 in the morning with no warning, which is what we understand this warrant to have been, that there was no previous communication with Hannah about coming to her house. It really caused a lot of reporters to think about exactly how they are protecting themselves and their sources because it felt unprecedented.

14:16And how do reporters think about protecting themselves and their sources in general? Like, can you just speak to how that works? I mean, essentially, when reporters promise confidentiality to their sources, they're entering into a verbal contract. And sources, especially at the federal government, really have to trust reporters to keep that information away from the broader world. I mean, it's a huge risk for federal employees to talk to journalists. And journalists are more and more aware of the risks that their sources are taking. The world has changed so much since the days of Woodward and Bernstein and their source, Deep Throat.

15:04Because everything we do is electronic. People use their cell phones. They send emails. We're using electronic calendars. So much of this makes it really possible for our movements to be surveilled, whether you're a reporter or not. And so reporters are becoming really careful and savvy about the ways that they communicate with their sources. And encryption is a key way to do that. Really complicated passwords, changing your passwords. You know, people use burner phones. A burner phone refers to something that is a cell phone that you have that isn't necessarily attached to a particular account and that you can throw away after a certain period of time.

15:49reporters have used computers that were never connected to the internet to take notes on particularly sensitive material and look at particularly sensitive documents. That was something that when the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden shared information with reporters that they went through incredibly rigorous security protocols. So the profession has really been learning how to maintain a source's anonymity and security in this increasingly digital world where everything is so easily tracked. And that's, you know, that's just become a new reality for reporting in the 21st century. And what we found yesterday when we were talking to people was that this raid was a real wake-up call to people who are in this profession, even if you are incredibly careful.

16:50Yeah. Yeah, I'm also left wondering what impact this could have on federal employees and just other people who might want to talk to the press. And what have you heard on that? The chilling effect is something that we talk about a lot, But this is a moment where I talked to reporters who had been caught up in previous investigations from the government. And Ted Brightis, who was a Washington investigations editor for the Associated Press, he had his phone records secretly obtained by the government. And he told us that after that fact became public, people in the national security world wouldn't meet with his reporters.

17:34They were so concerned about their information being exposed. So it's something that really terrifies people who work in the federal government. You can lose your security clearance. If the reporters that you're talking to don't know or are not in control of the information that is being shared with them, it really can send a massive chill through the federal workforce who's concerned about being found out. Everyone thinks they know the risks of this kind of thing. You know, what we heard from people was that it was inevitably something that was going to frighten federal employees and maybe was designed to do that.

18:18Sarah, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me.

18:25Sarah Ellison is a democracy reporter for The Post. After the break, we'll hear from Hannah Naitensen about how she became the federal government whisperer. We'll be right back.

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20:40Since late January, just on Signal alone, not counting folks who have emailed me or called me on my cell phone, I have had 785 federal workers reach out to me. And they're all reaching out to say things like what's going on at their agencies, what's going on with their personal professional lives. That's Washington Post reporter Hannah Naitensen from an interview she recorded with Post Reports in April 2025. Since then, the number of federal workers who've reached out to her, many over the encrypted messaging app Signal, has grown to more than a thousand. So many of them feel like what they're seeing is not normal.

21:18It's breaking the norms of American democracies. It's forcing them to violate the oaths they all swore to the Constitution when they took their jobs for the federal government. We're going to revisit this April conversation Hannah had with co-host Colby Ickowitz. They talked about how Hannah developed so many sources. Here's Colby and Hannah.

21:40I mean, I've been watching your reporting with such awe because as a reporter, to get a tip from someone on the inside of an institution is rare in and of itself. and you've been getting hundreds. I mean, what has it been like for you to be on the receiving end of all of these federal workers' desires to let the public know about what's going on? It's been pretty exhausting. There tend to be big waves of people reaching out when something happens or when I have a story that for whatever reason resonates with a lot of people, then I'll get times it's been as many as like a new person every three minutes.

22:22And the thing about it is just given what these people are going through and given the newsiness of this moment, I always feel like I have to respond to every person. And I do eventually respond to every person. Unfortunately, I'm also somewhat OCD and inbox zero. So there were a couple weeks and weekends where I would fall asleep at about 11 p.m. trying to respond to people on signal and then wake up at 6 a.m. and keep responding to people on signal. and my fiance was not happy with me for a little bit there. But at this point, I have a system to process the tips and I've got a much better handle on it now.

23:00But for a bit there, it was kind of crazy. Yeah, how do you even choose like what tips to follow versus, you know, which are just, you may be just someone who needs to vent? Well, I mean, it's usually apparent from the message if they're just in a really awful position personally or if it's news. People who just want to vent, I always try to make time for that. And sometimes it's just as much as like they don't even need to get on the phone. They just want to hear back from someone saying, I hear you. I'm sorry this happened. And that's what I say. And then sometimes some of them end up in stories.

23:36And sometimes they just want to keep chatting. And so I've just done that for them. That's a lot to take on. It's been somewhat intense at times, but it feels like a public service, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. How do you think you became kind of the federal government worker whisperer? Well, I can tell you exactly. Before all this started, I covered education. And I had a tip. I think it was related to the education department. And I noticed this Reddit sub forum called Our Fed News, where there are at this point, I think half a million federal workers in there. There weren't quite as many when this all started.

24:13But I just very early, I think it was January 23rd, 25th, not too long after the administration started, I just posted this sort of vague question relating to this one tip. And I listed my and a colleague's names, emails, and signals. And it took off. And I got a bunch of outreach from that, from feds. And then I sort of realized how valuable of a sourcing element this was. And once these people had taken the risk to speak to me, I felt like I wanted to tell them that I, apart from the individual sources, like I wanted the people in this Reddit subforum to know that I was not just mining them.

24:52I was actually writing news that was relevant to their lives because people were brave enough to talk to me. So I started this practice of posting my stories in there with gift links and my contact information again. And that has just built and built. And so I've had several posts go like very viral. And at this point, a lot of people just know who I am from Reddit. That's incredible. I was thinking because all of these people are reaching out to you on Signal, and obviously Signal was in the news recently for a journalist getting added to a Signal chat and being privy to war plans. Has the fact that all these federal government employees are reaching out to a reporter on Signal, has that created any kind of security risk for the federal government?

25:35I mean, I would say the security risk that I and I hear from federal workers and I hear from experts is not so much the idea that people are reaching out on Signal, which is sort of a secure encrypted messaging app. The number of people who are being let go or fired, especially really young, talented people who worked maybe in more sensitive areas, that's more what's been flagged to me as a security concern, because those are the exact kind of people that foreign countries would want to target. That's always been true. Like if they want to get information about the inner workings of the federal government, disaffected ex-federal workers are a great target.

26:15And you got a lot of them right now. Oh, that's so interesting. Also, the way that Doge is handling what they're doing. So often it comes to how they're handling federal data, which they're diving deep into many different federal databases. And I have a story coming about this, but in many cases trying to merge them or pass the data through different places quite swiftly and without following normal security protocols. So that, to experts, is also creating a big security risk because anytime data is in transit, it becomes more accessible. And if you don't follow the sort of staid typical procedures that have guided the federal government until now, you have a much higher risk of getting hacked.

26:54But the doge and the Trump administration attitude with everything is to move fast, fire people fast, don't care who they are, get rid of whole offices fast. It doesn't matter if you're getting rid of an office that was integral to our safety as a country. So I'd say that's the bigger concern I've heard. Signal, I'd say that's not the biggest security risk that has been flagged to me.

27:21Hannah Naitensen covers the federal government for The Post. She spoke with co-host Colby Ickiewicz in April 2025. That's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. Today's episode was produced by Renny Svernofsky. It was edited by Dennis Funk with help from Martine Powers. It was mixed by Sam Baer. The April 23rd, 2025 episode was produced and mixed by Ted Muldoon and edited by Peter Bresnan. If you want to show your support for the show, consider subscribing to The Washington Post. Not only is this a great way to help us continue to do this work, But you can now get access to Washington Post podcasts ad-free and Apple Podcasts.

28:04Subscribe in Apple Podcasts or by following the link in our show notes. I'm Elahe Izadi. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from The Washington Post.