There was an important ruling last week by Magistrate Judge William B. Porter of the Eastern District of Virginia in favor of the press regarding the handling of files and materials taken in a search of the home of a Washington Post reporter.
Judge Porter ruled against the Trump Administration in what he called an “unsupervised, wholesale” search of the files of Hannah Natanson, who covers the federal government for The Post.
Instead, the court itself will conduct the review in camera.
In his opinion, Judge Porter chastized the Trump Administration for searching Natanson’s home without additional protections for the journalist’s interests in privileged sources. This has been a long-standing objection of the press to the Justice Department, which maintains that its own “filter teams” can review the files and materials relevant to their investigation and then hand them over to prosecution teams.
The Justice Department was investigating a Maryland government contractor, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who has been indicted on charges of transmitting and retaining classified national defense information.
Judge Porter chastized the government for failing to mention a 1980 law, the Privacy Protection Act, in seeking a search warrant of Ms. Natanson’s home. The PPA mandates that a search for reporting materials “shall be unlawful” unless there is probable cause that the reporter committed certain crimes to which the materials relate. In a prior hearing, Judge Porter asked pointedly, “How could you miss it? How could you think it doesn’t apply?”
Judge Porter ruled that “[a]llowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product — most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources — is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of The Washington Post’s henhouse.”
The court indicated that the search was too broad and was insufficiently protective of the journalistic interests in the case, noting that the government has a “legitimate interest in only an infinitesimal fraction of the data it has seized.”
The court said it would issue new guidelines for reviewing the material. It is a significant victory for the press.
Here is the opinion: IN THE MATTER OF THE SEARCH OF THE REAL PROPERTY AND PREMISES OF HANNAH NATANSON
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