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All Bezos' Groveling Didn't Stop Trump's FBI From Raiding a WaPo Reporter's Home Pete Tucker ([link removed])


WaPo: I am The Post’s ‘federal government whisperer.’ It’s been brutal.

Hannah Natanson wrote in the Washington Post (12/24/25 ([link removed]) ) about having "1,169 contacts on Signal, all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories."

Hannah Natanson first came on my radar on Christmas Eve. The Trump administration may also have taken note of the Washington Post reporter that day, if it hadn’t already.

In a moving personal account, Natanson (Washington Post, 12/24/25 ([link removed]) ) recounted what it’s been like to cover a federal workforce under attack from President Donald Trump. Natanson also detailed how her life changed after posting her contact information in a Reddit forum ([link removed]) populated with federal workers last February:

The next day, I woke at sunrise to dozens of messages—the ruling pattern of my mornings ever since. I didn’t know it then, but this year would transform me into what one colleague dubbed “the federal government whisperer.” I would gain a new beat, a new editor and 1,169 contacts on Signal, all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories.

Natanson had been an education reporter ([link removed]) . But now, amid a deluge of scoops coming from her new contacts at three-letter agencies spanning the federal bureaucracy, her remit quickly expanded to “topics I had never covered,” she wrote.

In short order, Natanson became, in the words of the Post (1/14/26 ([link removed]) ), part of the paper’s “most high-profile and sensitive coverage related to government firings, national security and diplomacy.”

A review of the stories Natanson wrote or contributed to over the past year reads like a field guide for (faltering) federal agencies, covering everything from the US Postal Service ([link removed]) (conscripted into Trump's mass deportation efforts) to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration ([link removed]) (doing far less to enforce truck safety rules) to Veterans Affairs ([link removed]) (eliminating tens of thousands of healthcare jobs). And often these agencies left behind a trail of internal documents for the Post to scoop up.

Whether Natanson’s sources were the ones who provided the documents for any particular story is unclear. But for a Trump administration obsessed with leaks, Natanson’s thousand-plus federal worker contacts must have raised a few eyebrows.


** 'Of course they are'
------------------------------------------------------------

Three weeks after Natanson wrote her first-person account (“I Am the Post’s ‘Federal Government Whisperer.’ It’s Been Brutal.”), the Trump administration targeted her.
WaPo: FBI executes search warrant at Washington Post reporter’s home

Attorney General Pam Bondi (Washington Post, 1/14/26 ([link removed]) ): "“This past week, at the request of the Department of War, the Department of Justice and FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”

At around 6 AM last Wednesday, FBI agents raided Natanson’s Virginia home, seizing her work and personal devices—her phone, two laptops and a smartwatch (Washington Post, 1/14/26 ([link removed]) ).

Natanson isn’t accused of wrongdoing, according to the Post (1/14/26 ([link removed]) ), which received a subpoena. Rather, the FBI and the Department of Justice claim that Natanson received classified information from a Pentagon contractor.

But it’s legal for a journalist to receive and report on classified information. (There are very limited exceptions to this protection, but those do not appear to have been met in this instance—New York Times, 1/19/26 ([link removed]) .)

Nevertheless, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth requested ([link removed]) the FBI search Natanson as part of his war on leakers. It’s a bit awkward to point out, but Hegseth has himself shared classified information with a reporter (Atlantic, 3/24/25 ([link removed]) ), as well as, among others, “his wife, brother and personal lawyer” (New York Times, 4/20/25 ([link removed]) ).

Fortunately for Hegseth, he’s unlikely to be pressed on this point, now that he’s replaced the Pentagon press corps with a ragtag group of stenographers (FAIR.org, 9/23/25 ([link removed]) ).

The timing of the Natanson search only raises further questions. It came the week after Natanson’s alleged Pentagon source, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, was charged and put behind bars (CNN, 1/15/26 ([link removed]) ). The Trump administration already had its alleged leaker; by raiding Natanson, it may also get its hands on her extensive contacts.

“Do you honestly think that they’re not going to look at her source list?” asked Felicity Barringer, a former New York Times reporter who in college edited a student newspaper, the Stanford Daily, that was searched by police in 1971 (New York Times, 1/19/26 ([link removed]) ). “Of course they are.”


** ‘An individual at the Washington Post’
------------------------------------------------------------
NYT: By Raiding a Reporter’s Home, Is the F.B.I. Weaponizing National Security?

David Schulz (New York Times, 1/16/26 ([link removed]) ): "The administration may be using the Espionage Act to silence critics by portraying reporters as criminals."

Joining Hegseth in his anti-leak crusade is FBI director Kash Patel, who notably declined to describe Natanson as a journalist in his statement (X, 1/14/26 ([link removed]) ) on the search:

This morning the@FBI ([link removed]) and partners executed a search warrant of an individual at the Washington Post who was found to allegedly be obtaining and reporting classified, sensitive military information from a government contractor—endangering our warfighters and compromising America’s national security.

For his part, Trump appeared to celebrate the arrest of Perez-Lugones. “The leaker has been found and is in jail right now. And that’s the leaker on Venezuela and a very bad leaker,” Trump said ([link removed]) .

Natanson contributed to the Post’s recent coverage of the US campaign against Venezuela and its former leader, President Nicolás Maduro (New York Times, 1/14/26 ([link removed]) ), including one story (1/9/26 ([link removed]) ) that described "government documents obtained by the Washington Post" that detailed a Vatican attempt to find an alternative to the US abducting Maduro.

“There may be reason to believe that the Washington Post reporter possessed classified information, but that hardly makes her exceptional,” wrote David Schulz (New York Times, 1/16/26 ([link removed]) ), a lawyer specializing in First Amendment litigation:

Using a national security investigation to target the home of a reporter who had made known she was working confidentially with more than 1,000 current or former federal employees to expose wrongdoing raises questions about the government’s actual intent—particularly given the chilling effect the action will have on sources and reporters alike.


** 'Salivating for an opportunity'
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: Attacks on the press? America’s seen this before.

Kathleen Parker (Washington Post, 1/16/26 ([link removed]) ): "This was plainly the work of an increasingly draconian federal government bent on curbing free speech through intimidation."

Back at the Washington Post, Natanson’s colleagues have her back, with columnist Kathleen Parker ([link removed]) (1/16/26 ([link removed]) ) calling the FBI raid “Gestapo-like.” The Post’s top leaders have also offered strong public support for Natanson—with one notable exception.

It's “nauseating and irresponsible to have our owner remain silent given this unprecedented event,” a Post reporter told Status (1/14/26 ([link removed]) ).

Another reporter also called out ([link removed]) Post owner Jeff Bezos, saying, “If there is a moment to stand up for our journalistic values, this would be it.”

But Bezos cares more about his own money and space fantasies ([link removed]) than journalistic principles, or his employees. (Drivers for Amazon, the company Bezos founded, were memorably forced to pee in bottles—BBC, 4/3/21 ([link removed]) .) In order for Amazon and Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, to keep getting billions of public dollars, Bezos needs to stay in Trump’s good graces.

Bezos learned this the hard way in Trump’s first administration, when Trump’s anger over the Post’s coverage of him reportedly led to Amazon losing out on a $10 billion Pentagon contract. (“There was a joke at the time that it didn’t cost Jeff Bezos $250 million to buy the Post, it cost him $10 billion,” Martin Baron, the Post’s former executive editor, told the Financial Times—3/20/25 ([link removed]) .)

To ensure this doesn’t happen again, Bezos has lavished millions of dollars on Trump and his family (FAIR.org, 1/22/25 ([link removed]) ), while also remaking his paper’s opinion page in Trump’s image (FAIR.org, 2/28/25 ([link removed]) ). But not even this level of groveling was sufficient to stop Trump from sending FBI agents to a Post reporter’s home.

“This administration is salivating for an opportunity to incarcerate journalists,” said Baron (Washington Post, 1/15/26 ([link removed]) ). “Things are going to get far worse.”


** In the same boat
------------------------------------------------------------
Extra!: Obama's DoJ Targets Whistleblowers

Extra! (9/11): "Information given to the media might potentially fall into the hands of the nation’s citizens—thus posing a threat to the continued existence of unaccountable government."

The Trump administration's raid on Natanson's home is the latest escalation in a history of government attacks on whistleblowing—attacks that have grown to target not just whistleblowers, but the journalists they leak to as well.

George W. Bush used subpoenas against journalists ([link removed]) who covered the secret NSA wiretapping program. Barack Obama ramped up arrests ([link removed]) and indictments of whistleblowers—most notably Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who served over seven years in prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks that revealed US human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan (Extra!, 9/11 ([link removed]) ; FAIR.org, 8/27/13 ([link removed]) ).

The first Trump administration then took the unprecedented step of indicting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, the first time any administration had targeted journalists directly for publishing government leaks (FAIR.org, 10/15/20 ([link removed]) ). Rather than drop the charges, the Biden administration negotiated a guilty plea from Assange for obtaining and publishing classified documents from Manning (FAIR.org, 6/6/24 ([link removed]) ).

As successive administrations took us down the road to where we are now, too many of the heavy hitters of US corporate journalism have stayed silent—or even cheered the legal pursuit of people like Manning and Assange, who some outlets went out of their way to insist weren't really journalists (FAIR.org, 5/19/17 ([link removed]) , 6/5/19 ([link removed]) ).

Today, too many are likewise silent on Natanson. Vocal opposition to the FBI raid has mostly come from individual journalists on X—mostly colleagues at the Post (Mediaite, 1/14/26 ([link removed]) )—not in the opinion pages of major newspapers or on TV. Notable exceptions came from the Baltimore Sun editorial board (1/19/26 ([link removed]) ), former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson in the Boston Globe (1/17/26 ([link removed]) ) and the hosts of ABC's The View (1/15/26 ([link removed]) ). The New York Times editorial board (1/17/26 ([link removed]) ) mentioned the raid in passing in a lengthy piece
about Trump's vengeful use of law enforcement.

If media hope to thwart Trump's project of making criticism of his government illegal (FAIR.org, 10/3/25 ([link removed]) ), more solidarity is needed.
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