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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
A federal judge in Virginia today imposed significant restrictions on the government’s ability to search materials seized from Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson during the raid of her home last month. Magistrate Judge William Porter also made clear his displeasure with prosecutors’ omission of any mention of the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 — which prohibits searches of reporters’ materials in most circumstances — from their warrant application.
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) previously filed a complaint with the Virginia State Bar against prosecutor Gordon Kromberg over the omission of the PPA, but the bar responded that it was up to the judge to determine whether the warrant application was misleading.
The following can be attributed to FPF Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern:
“The government’s alarming raid of Natanson’s home and seizure of terabytes of data stopped countless important stories from being told, both by Natanson herself and the news outlets that likely hesitated to publish important leaks after seeing what happened to her.
“Judge Porter was right to treat the seizure as a prior restraint and to limit the government from fishing through the irrelevant data it seized to snoop on reporters. He is also right to reprimand prosecutor Gordon Kromberg and his team for failing to disclose the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 — a law that severely limits the kinds of raids that Natanson endured — in their search warrant application. He should go a step further and sanction prosecutors for that willful omission, and Virginia’s State Bar should reopen and investigate Freedom of the Press Foundation’s ethics complaint against Kromberg.
“That said, today’s order didn’t go far enough. Judge Porter should have required all of Natanson’s materials seized pursuant to the deceptive warrant application to be returned to her. And he should not have credited the administration’s claims that any of the seized materials posed a national security threat without strict proof — as Judge Porter acknowledged, this administration, even more so than others, has a long track record of falsely claiming national security threats to protect itself from embarrassment and further its political agenda. It has earned zero deference from the judiciary on claims of national security threats, particularly when press freedom is at stake.”
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