The FBI searched the home of a Washington Post reporter Wednesday as part of an investigation into a government contractor who has been accused of illegally retaining classified materials, the newspaper confirmed.
The reporter, Hannah Natanson, was at her home in Virginia when the FBI arrived, the newspaper reported. It seized her phone, as well as her work and personal laptops and a Garmin smartwatch, according to the newspaper.
"Investigators told Natanson that she is not the focus of the probe," the Post reported.
The contractor is Navy veteran Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is a system administrator in Maryland and who has been charged with “unlawful retention of national defense information,” according to a criminal complaint filed Jan. 9 in U.S. District Court for Maryland.
Perez-Lugones, a Miami-born U.S. citizen who "possesses a Top Secret security clearance," made his first court appearance in the case Friday, the complaint says.
The FBI has accused Perez-Lugones of searching databases containing classified information without authorization and either printing or taking screenshots of that material, according to the complaint.
The complaint describes the material Perez-Lugones is alleged to have begun collecting in October as "related to a foreign country."
“Perez-Lugones had no need to know and was not authorized to search for, access, view, screenshot, or print any of this information,” the complaint says.
Two federal law enforcement officials said the country in question is Venezuela.
Perez-Lugones faces a detention hearing Thursday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to determine whether he will remain behind bars pending trial.
In a written statement to the court, the government said Perez-Lugones "poses a danger to the community" and should remain in custody.
"Agents seized documents containing national defense information from the Defendant’s car and home," it said. "However, the Government cannot seize everything in his head."
The FBI had been watching Perez-Lugones as recently as last week, conducting surveillance of him while he was in a SCIF, which is a secure room for handling top secret information, the complaint says.
Perez-Lugones was monitored logging in to systems. And the complaint includes a photo of him on Jan. 6 leaving his workplace with a black bag.
Two days later, federal investigators searched Perez-Lugones' house in Laurel, Maryland, and found a document marked "SECRET" in the basement, the complaint says.
"While searching Perez-Lugones' car, investigators located a lunch box in which a document was marked as SECRET," the complaint says. "One of more of these documents are related to national defense."
The criminal complaint does not mention any ties to Natanson.
But Attorney General Pam Bondi said on X that the Defense Department requested the search "at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor."
There was no immediate response from The Washington Post to Bondi's claim.
Ahead of a signing ceremony in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Donald Trump told reporters that “the leaker on Venezuela” has been found and is in jail. He did not name the person, nor did he provide any context for the remark.
Matt Murray, the executive editor of the Post, sent an email to the newsroom Wednesday addressing what had happened.
“This extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” Murray wrote, according to a copy of the email obtained by NBC News. He also said the Post was not a target of the investigation.
The Washington Post Guild, which represents unionized workers at the newspaper, said on social media it was "appalled by federal law enforcement’s search and seizure of reporter Hannah Natanson’s property and personal devices."
Former top Justice Department spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said on X that the FBI searched the reporter's home to uncover her sources.
"There were protections in place to stop this from happening in the last admin and Bondi rescinded those regs," said Hinojosa, who worked for the Justice Department during the Biden administration. "The reporter is NOT the 'leaker'."
Last April, the Justice Department ended the policy that former Attorney General Merrick Garland put in place restricting subpoenas of reporters.
Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the FBI search "a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press."
The Society of Professional Journalists said in a statement: "This kind of aggressive law enforcement action against a journalist — particularly one engaged in reporting on the federal workforce — has a chilling effect not only on reporters, but on the sources who rely on them to expose wrongdoing and inform the public."
Natanson covers the embattled federal workforce.
Dubbed “the federal government whisperer” by her colleagues, Natanson was assigned, in the first months of the Trump administration, to write stories about Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s dramatic culling of the government workforce.
Natanson, a Harvard University grad, was also part of the Post team that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, according to her official author page.
