Bondi Says Reporter’s Home Searched in Pentagon Contractor Probe

Federal agents searched the home of a Washington Post reporter who allegedly obtained and reported on classified information from a Pentagon contractor who is currently in jail, Attorney General Pam Bondi said.

Bondi didn’t name the reporter, who the Washington Post identified as Hannah Natanson. Natanson, who was at her home in Virginia at the time of the search on Wednesday, was told she was not a target of the probe, according to a Washington Post story on the matter.

“This past week, at the request of the Department of War, the Department of Justice and FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor,” Bondi wrote in a post on X Wednesday.

Natanson was involved in reporting in recent weeks on the US government’s seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, but spent most of the past year covering the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size and reach of the federal government. In December, the newspaper published her story about the flood of agency employees who shared sensitive information with her amid firings and program cuts.

Press freedom advocates immediately raised concerns about the search. Bruce Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement that it was “a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”

“There are specific federal laws and policies at the Department of Justice that are meant to limit searches to the most extreme cases because they endanger confidential sources far beyond just one investigation and impair public interest reporting in general,” Brown said.

A spokesperson for the Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Federal agents searched her home and her devices, seizing her phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch. One of the laptops was her personal computer, the other a Washington Post-issued laptop,” according to the story.

According to the Post, the warrant said it was part of an investigation into a systems administrator in Maryland who’s been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and his basement.

--With assistance from Zoe Tillman.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Chris Strohm in Washington at cstrohm1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net

Elizabeth Wasserman, Steve Stroth

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