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• The FBI searched the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson on Jan. 14 as part of an investigation into a leak of classified information.
• Experts placed the search in the context of the Post’s history with press freedom issues, including the famous Pentagon Papers case and “Operation Ivy Bells” in the 1980s.
• The press and federal government have long had a combative relationship, but experts described the Trump administration’s actions against journalists as unprecedented and threatening to press freedom.

The FBI’s search of a Washington Post reporter’s home is the latest in a long line of press freedom fights both for the newspaper and the wider industry spanning multiple presidential administrations.

Hannah Natanson, who covers the federal government for the news organization, was at her Virginia home when the FBI executed a search warrant on the property as part of a leak investigation on Jan. 14.  

First Amendment experts condemned the search, describing it as an exceedingly rare action that could cause a chilling effect within the news industry. 

But it’s far from the first time President Donald Trump’s administration has been accused of violating news outlets’ constitutional rights.

Weeks after Trump began his second term in office, the Associated Press sued the administration for banning the outlet from certain White House events over its refusal to use “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico” following Trump’s executive order renaming the body of water.

Months later, both NPR and PBS cited the First Amendment in their respective lawsuits over the Trump administration’s successful effort to revoke their federal funding. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributed federal funding to the outlets, was dissolved in January.

The Pentagon also implemented a new media policy in October saying reporters who “solicit” information not approved for public release could lose their credentials. The New York Times sued over the matter in December, saying the policy was “exactly the type of speech- and press-restrictive scheme that the Supreme Court and D.C. Circuit have recognized violates the First Amendment.”

Such lawsuits and controversies aren’t unique to Trump’s second term.

CNN sued the White House on First Amendment grounds in 2018 after it revoked former reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass following a heated exchange between Acosta and Trump in a news conference. The White House later restored Acosta’s credentials, and the lawsuit was dropped.

PEN America also sued Trump in his official capacity in 2018. The complaint described an alleged “campaign of intimidation against critical reporting” that it said “casts a chill on speech that – even if braved and overcome by diligent and courageous reporters – constitutes an ongoing First Amendment violation.”

But experts said such tensions have reached new heights with the FBI search, which adds to not only the Washington Post’s own history of battling the federal government but that of multiple news organizations going back decades.

What to know about FBI search of reporter’s home

A federal judge granted the Washington Post’s Jan. 21 request to bar the government from reviewing the seized materials – a phone, a Garmin watch, and a work and personal laptop – while litigation continues.

The outlet had previously told USA TODAY the FBI’s seizure of such items “chills speech, cripples reporting and inflicts irreparable harm every day the government keeps its hands on these materials.”

A Department of Justice spokesperson said Aurelio Perez-Lugones, the Pentagon contractor at the center of the leak investigation, was “actively communicating” with Natanson at the time of his arrest and that classified information was found in their exchange.

The department referred USA TODAY to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Jan. 14 X post on the FBI search, which said in part that reporting illegally leaked classified information “pose(s) a grave risk to our Nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”

The department also pointed to Bondi’s Fox News interview on the matter, in which she referenced her revocation of a policy under former President Joe Biden‘s administration that offered greater protection to journalists against government searches.

Bondi, in the interview, said the First Amendment was a “bedrock principle” but rejected notions that the search was unconstitutional. The investigation is “about classified material that could jeopardize lives,” she said.

USA TODAY reached out to the FBI for comment.

The Pentagon Papers

The Washington Post has played a “pretty significant role” in press freedom issues throughout its history, said Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Perhaps the most famous of those fights is the Pentagon Papers case, in which the Supreme Court court ruled the government could not bar the press from publishing information on the war in Vietnam previously unknown to the public.

The New York Times was the first outlet to publish the papers, followed by the Washington Post several days later. Lower courts granted former President Richard Nixon’s administration’s efforts to bar further publication, but those rulings were overturned by the Supreme Court decision.

David Rudenstine, a law professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York and author of the book, “The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case,” noted that the Washington Post’s leadership at the time had accepted the possibility of going to jail for the reporting.

“That’s freedom of the press,” he said. “That’s people standing tall in the name of the First Amendment.”

In his concurring opinion, Justice Hugo Black wrote that the nation’s founders understood the pivotal role a free press plays in democracy, adding that “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in the government.”

“In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly,” Black wrote.

While the ruling granted the press “enormous power,” Rudenstine said the case demonstrates that such power depends on newsroom higher-ups’ willingness to use it.

He juxtaposed Katherine Graham, the Washington Post’s publisher at the time, with the paper’s current owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who did not publicly respond to the FBI search.

Striking a balance between competing objectives

Experts also noted a lesser-known example from the 1980s, in which the paper uncovered information about “Operation Ivy Bells,” a U.S. mission to wiretap Soviet underwater communication cables.

Then-President Ronald Reagan’s administration threatened legal action against news outlets that published certain details about the operation on the grounds that such reporting would jeopardize national security.

The Washington Post’s leaders had conversations with the administration and ultimately published a story that withheld certain potentially compromising details.

“It wasn’t at all caving or pulling back on important principles,” said Cliff Sloan, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who also served as general counsel for the Washington Post Company’s online subsidiary in the early 2000s.

The scrapped details, he said, were not pivotal to the story that eventually published. He described the matter as an example of effective collaboration between the press and the federal government to balance their sometimes competing interests of holding the government accountable and preserving national security.

Concerns over the future of press freedom

Such collaborations seem more unlikely in the current context, experts said.

Among the reasons they offered were the administration’s threat to sue CBS News if it didn’t air a Trump interview in full, the Pentagon’s effort to overhaul the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and the Pentagon’s press policy that led to the vast majority of news outlets losing security access to the building.

But the search of Natanson’s home marked an “opening salvo in a new war on the press,” said Mary-Rose Papandrea, a First Amendment professor at George Washington University.

“Obviously the war is underway already, but this is a new battlefront,” she said.

Clashes with the press aren’t unique to Trump’s presidency, though.

Former President Barack Obama’s administration had a contentious relationship with Fox News, for example. Among the incidents was the administration’s attempt to exclude Fox News from interviewing compensation czar Kenneth Feinberg alongside four other networks in 2009. The White House said it based its decision on “some of [Fox News’] coverage and … the fairness of that coverage.”

The plan was abandoned after the other networks — ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC — refused to participate in the interview if the outlet wasn’t included, Fox News reported.

Rudenstine said Nixon’s administration had a deeply combative relationship with the press but added that such tensions have reached new heights under the Trump administration.

“I’m not trying to minimize what the Nixon administration did, but what the Nixon administration did do falls far short of what the Trump administration is doing,” Rudenstine said.

Rottman similarly said the FBI search marked an “escalation” in the administration’s actions against the press, adding that it was the first time in American history that the Department of Justice, which the FBI falls under, searched a reporter’s home as part of a national security leak investigation.

“I have grave concerns about what the future holds,” Papandrea said. “We’re only one year down and three more to go.”

BrieAnna Frank is a First Amendment reporter at USA TODAY. Reach her at bjfrank@usatoday.com. 

USA TODAY’s coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.