FBI Says Reporter They Raided 'Misled Investigators'

The FBI claims that Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, who they targeted in a raid, “misled investigators," and that justifies the government’s decision to seek a search warrant rather than a subpoena. 

On January 14, the FBI seized Natanson’s electronic devices as part of an Espionage Act prosecution against Pentagon contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones. 

A week later, the U.S. District Court in the District of Virginia granted the Post’s motion to halt “review” of devices that agents took in the raid while the court considers whether to order the government to return Natanson and the Post’s property.

Court filings reveal new information related to the seizure of electronics, which press freedom groups condemned as an extraordinary attack on investigative journalism. 

FBI assistant director Roman Rozhavsky recalled in a declaration [PDF] that the FBI took “Natanson’s laptop, a silver MacBook Pro with a black case, and Natanson’s cell phone, an Apple iPhone 13.” They were found in the upstairs of her home, “along with a Handy branded audio recording device and a Seagate portable hard drive.” 

“The iPhone was found powered on, sitting on a charging stand with a cable, and a notification visible on its display indicated the iPhone was in ‘Lockdown’ mode,” Rozhavsky noted. 

Natanson’s personal laptop, voice recorder, and terabyte hard drive were all powered off. But her work laptop, a silver MacBook Pro, was “powered on inside a red backpack in the kitchen.” It had “Touch ID” enabled so FBI agents approached Natanson and instructed her to unlock the laptop. (The search warrant authorized agents to force her to open any biometrically locked devices.)

“The FBI assisted Natanson with applying her right index finger to the fingerprint reader which immediately unlocked the laptop,” according to Rozhavsky. “As the FBI left the front of her residence, Natanson asked, ‘what laptop is that?’” 

When the FBI processed Natanson’s devices, the bureau was unable to “extract” any data from her iPhone because it was in “Lockdown Mode.” (Apple designed this mode to help users protect against “sophisticated cyber attacks” by limiting the phone’s functions.) 

Rozhavsky said, “Similarly, the personal MacBook Pro could not be imaged yet.” The FBI also could not obtain a “full physical image” of her work MacBook Pro because her user profile lacked administrative privileges. 

However, through her work laptop, the FBI was able to access several Signal chat messages that were set for auto-deletion. Agents took “photographs, and where necessary, audio/video recording of the contents of the various conversations.” (Rozhavsky claims only messages and attachments received on or after October 1, 2025, were photographed and recorded.) 

The Post believes [PDF] that the FBI must return “non-responsive data” that is protected under the Privacy Protection Act. But the government insists that the “Privacy Protection Act does not provide a basis to return the devices now (or ever)” [PDF].

Furthermore, the government says that it has taken the step of segregating First Amendment- and Privacy Protection Act-related information, even though that is not required. It has asked the court to “dissolve” the standstill order and deny the Post’s request that asks the court to search Natanson’s electronics and determine which materials are relevant to Perez-Lugones’ prosecution. 

“That approach is unwarranted as the Government intends to design a filter protocol to ensure that privileged materials are shielded while also protecting classified information and segregating materials within the scope of the warrant,” the government argues. 

Finally, the Post told the court that the Justice Department should have issued a grand jury subpoena to Natanson the same way it issued a similar subpoena to the Post on the day of the FBI raid. (The subpoena that the Post received allegedly sought “the same items as those particularized in the search warrant—records of communications with Perez-Lugones and records received from him.”)

To justify the decision to seek a search warrant instead of a subpoena, the government maintains that Natanson could not have been trusted to preserve documents and separate “classified information” and other evidence relevant to Perez-Lugones’ case. 

“As the Rozhavsky Declaration explains,” the government stated, “Natanson misled investigators about the devices that were seized. She misrepresented to officers that the devices could not be unlocked with biometrics, possibly in order to prevent the Government from reviewing materials within the scope of the search warrant. The record confirms the correctness of the Government’s choice to proceed with a search warrant.”

However, there is no evidence that Natanson ever acted in bad faith. She did not use biometrics to lock any of her personal devices and says that she did not remember the fact that her work laptop had a biometric login enabled. 

“When FBI agents asked me to use biometrics to log in to the laptop, I did not expect that a biometric login would unlock the device because the laptop’s fingerprint reader previously did not work for me and my regular practice was to use passwords,” according to Natanson [PDF].

Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg signed off on the search warrant, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation submitted a "disciplinary complaint" to the Virginia State Bar for his role in the illegal seizure of a journalist's work product.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) has pointed out, “Only a fraction of the information the Department seized is even imaginably relevant to its stated basis for [the raid]: the leak investigation of a government contractor who has already been identified, charged, and arrested.”

“But unless this Court acts, federal agents apparently intend to rummage through their haul—freely examining unrelated newsgathering material and doing irreparable damage to the confidentiality on which effective reporting depends—as soon as this litigation concludes," RCFP adds. "Sources whose communications with Natanson have nothing to do with the [Justice] Department’s probe, but whose disclosures may well have angered the [Trump] Administration, face an imminent risk of exposure to those same officials.”

The fact is, the Justice Department did not need to seize Natanson’s devices to stop a government contractor from leaking more information. They had Perez-Lugones in custody when they raided Natanson’s home, and he was no longer sharing information with a journalist. 

FBI took Natanson’s electronics because they had a pretext for that seizure, and President Donald Trump’s administration did not like that over a thousand sources were messaging Natanson with information about the administration. 

Officials felt the need to send a message to all of Natanson’s sources that they could be fired, or worse, face prosecution like Perez-Lugones. In the process, they destroyed a journalist’s ability to do her job, and that was just an added bonus for them.