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Early on a Monday morning in May of 2023, Tim Burke, an independent** **journalist, awoke to the sound of FBI agents screaming his name and blinding lights flooding through the front door. His mind went straight to preventing the officers from shooting Jelly, the foster dog he and his wife had just taken in, who was barking up a storm. During the incident, per the US Press Freedom Tracker, the FBI took four cellphones, nine computers, seven storage devices, and four notebooks from Burke’s home after he had posted two unaired clips from Fox News’s *Tucker Carlson Tonight *without permission. The FBI alleged that the footage had been obtained illegally. “They seized an entire operating newsroom,” Burke said.

Burke was taken back to that experience on Wednesday morning, when the FBI executed a search warrant on the home of a Washington Post reporter named Hannah Natanson, seizing her phone, a personal laptop, a company-issued laptop, and a Garmin watch. The Post has reported that Natanson, who has been covering Trump’s impact on the federal workforce, is not the focus of the probe. The administration has said it is investigating a Maryland-based government contractor accused of taking home classified intelligence reports—and who, at the time of his arrest, may have been messaging Natanson. The Post was also subpoenaed for information relating to the contractor.

The warrant approving the search of Natanson’s home hasn’t been made public, and related judicial records remain sealed. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed an application Wednesday night asking the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to issue an order unsealing the search warrant and any related judicial records. In emails and a meeting following the FBI search, Matt Murray, the executive editor of the Post, called the FBI’s actions “deeply concerning” and said that the newsroom has been in close touch with legal counsel. As of now, there has been no indication that the Post plans to file litigation over this event. Natanson, the Post, and Jeff Bezos, its owner, didn’t respond to questions.

“You don’t just get over the federal government banging on your door at six in the morning,” Burke said of the Natanson case. Two years later, much of his equipment remains in the FBI’s possession. “That is like a trauma that you carry—that we will carry with us the rest of our lives.”

Journalists who have been targeted by government searches or surveillance said the Natanson incident reflects an alarming escalation of the Trump White House’s hostility toward the media. Press freedom experts said her situation is unprecedented—and possibly illegal under the Privacy Protect Act of 1980, which protects journalists from government searches and seizures in connection with the investigation or prosecution of criminal offenses. “The Justice Department has never executed a search warrant at the home of a reporter in a national-security-leak case in US history,” Gabe Rottman, the vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said.

Rottman compared the Natanson matter with a 2010 episode in which the Obama administration issued a search warrant for the emails of James Rosen, then a Fox reporter, after accusing him of acting as a “coconspirator” with a source regarding a government leak. Rottman pointed out that, in the Rosen case, “the universe of information was smaller than what we’re talking about here,” given that the raid took place in Natanson’s home and involved the seizure of several electronic devices. “Her newsgathering, reporting, and/or interactions with confidential sources is significantly larger than what you saw in the James Rosen case.”

When asked for comment, the FBI pointed to a post on X by Kash Patel, the director of the bureau. The Department of Justice and White House sent a post on X by Pam Bondi, the attorney general, in response to requests for comment. Apple and HP, the makers of the computers the Post issues to reporters, according to a source in the newsroom, didn’t respond to questions about their policy on cooperating with the government to aid in accessing reporters’ devices.

The idea of the government compelling a journalist to hand over materials related to a national security leak is troubling under any circumstance. But in the Natanson case, the Trump administration could have pursued a more conventional approach: issuing a subpoena** **to Natanson, which wouldn’t have required her to turn over her devices and the potentially sensitive information they contain, including the names of sources.

In 2008, the George W. Bush administration subpoenaed James Risen, then a New York Times national security reporter, to reveal his sources in relation to a government investigation involving Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer charged with leaking details to him about a failed operation in Iran. Risen refused to comply, and his case would eventually land before the Obama administration, which refiled the subpoena only to eventually back down in 2015. The Obama administration holds the record for the highest number of leak prosecutions in history, prosecuting individuals under the Espionage Act. Yet Risen, who faced threats of prison time, believes the Trump administration “is definitely much worse on press freedom than anyone else.”

Risen, now a senior national security correspondent at The Intercept, told me that, by tradition, the government is supposed to exhaust all alternatives to obtaining a subpoena, starting with contacting the reporter and their newsroom. In the Natanson case, he said, the fact that there were “no discussions, no negotiations, no public subpoena—just a secret raid” signals a “terrible escalation” and represents “an outrageous attempt to destroy American press freedom.”

Clayton Weimers, the executive director of the US branch of Reporters Without Borders, who has compiled a timeline of Trump’s attacks on press freedom, agrees. Under Trump, there is “a concerted effort to weaken press freedom, to weaken the Fourth Estate,” he said. “And that is just not comparable to disagreements we had when the Obama or the Biden administrations acted inappropriately, which, at the time, we called out and pushed back against.”

During her investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, Julie Brown, a reporter at the* Miami Herald*, knew the Department of Justice was surveilling her; she was, after all, looking into whether the department had reopened an investigation into Epstein. But she was shocked to find her name among the thousands of Epstein-related photos, emails, and court documents recently released by the DOJ as the only unredacted part of a flight record from 2019. When she asked the department for an explanation, she was told it was because she bought the plane ticket (for reporting purposes) for a victim of Epstein’s whom the DOJ was tracking.

Brown found Natanson’s case particularly concerning because the Trump administration could choose to go after just about any journalist in America by claiming it suspected them of receiving confidential information. “My concern is that the administration is using this as a mechanism just to either harass or try to intimidate journalists,” she said. “They’re treating us like the enemy.”

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**Riddhi Setty is a Delacorte fellow at CJR. **