FBI agents searched the home of a Washington Post reporter on Wednesday morning as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.
The Post reported that federal agents seized a phone, two laptops — one work and one personal — and a Garmin watch from reporter Hannah Natanson, who was at her home in Virginia at the time.
The government’s action raised questions about whether Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013, will step in in any way.
CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote in his Reliable Sources newsletter Wednesday morning that several staffers told him “they’re wondering what, if anything, Bezos will do to defend Natanson and the Post from this aggressive government action.”
Natanson covers the federal workforce and has been a part of Post’s “most high-profile and sensitive coverage during the first year of the second Trump administration,” according to the newspaper. But she is not the focus of the probe.
A warrant said that law enforcement is investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and his basement, according to an FBI affidavit.
Natanson wrote a compelling first-person account in December of her time covering the Trump administration and the hundreds of government workers she’d been in contact with as sources.
Bezos’ influence at the Post has come into focus in recent years. In February he shook up the newspaper’s opinion pages by refocusing the section on supporting and defending what he called “two pillars” — personal liberties and free markets.
That action came in the wake of his decision in 2024 to end the newspaper’s tradition of endorsing candidates for president — including a reported spiking of the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. The action cost the Post more than 200,000 digital subscribers and a wave of backlash during the contentious run-up to Trump’s re-election.
After Trump’s re-election, Bezos joined other tech leaders in expressing a willingness to work with the administration. Bezos was among those who attended the presidential inauguration.
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