You may recall that both the Washington Post and New York Times knew about the military’s plans to arrest of Maduro and his wife shortly before the January 3 raid. Both papers declined to use the story.
President Trump told reporters on Wednesday, “And another piece of information that I think is very important is that a leaker has been found and is in jail right now.
“And that’s the leaker on Venezuela. We had a very bad leaker. There could be some others. We’re hot on their trail but the leaker has been found and the leaker’s in jail and will probably be in jail for a long time.”
So how did the press handle the news?
The Jeff Bezos Post initially reported, “FBI executes search warrant at Washington Post reporter’s home.
“The reporter, Hannah Natanson, covers the federal workforce and has been part of The Post’s most high-profile and sensitive coverage of the first year of the second Trump administration.”
The story began:
The FBI executed a search warrant Wednesday morning at a Washington Post reporter’s home as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.
The reporter, Hannah Natanson, was at her home in Virginia at the time of the search. Federal agents searched her home and her devices, seizing her phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch. One of the laptops was her personal computer, the other a Post-issued laptop.
The Post also received a subpoena Wednesday morning seeking information related to the same government contractor, according to a person familiar with the law enforcement action. The subpoena asked the Post to hand over any communications between the contractor and other employees.
It is exceptionally rare for law enforcement officials to conduct searches at reporters’ homes. Federal regulations intended to protect a free press are designed to make it difficult to use aggressive law enforcement tactics against reporters to obtain the identities of their sources or information.
The Post left out the part where the leaker was Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who was charged last week under the Espionage Act.
Later versions of the story acknowledged his existence by saying, “Investigators told Natanson that she is not the focus of the probe. The warrant said that law enforcement was 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.”
The bigger story is the arrest of a spy, not a reporter’s home being searched, but the media insists that readers be malinformed.
F.B.I. Searches Home of Washington Post Journalist in a Leak Investigation
It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home.
Not until Paragraph 7 did NYT finally get to the real story.
Court documents indicate that law enforcement officials were investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of gaining access to and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and basement.
According to the F.B.I. affidavit, Mr. Perez-Lugones’s job meant he had access to sensitive information. It said he had printed confidential documents that he was not authorized to search for and took notes this year on a classified report related to government activity.
The court papers show investigators suspected Mr. Perez-Lugones in recent months of illegally mishandling classified information about an unidentified country.
In a statement on social media, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the search was executed at the request of the Pentagon to look for evidence at the home of a journalist “who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”
The Justice Department regulation on the use of search warrants and subpoenas in leak inquiries says the information sought must be “essential” and the government must have first made “all reasonable attempts” to obtain it from alternative sources.
Surely both newspapers knew who leaked the story that they declined to publish, but they spun the real news as ohmigosh, the FBI raided the home of a reporter (exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point).
Why didn’t the reporter cooperate with the investigation? If journalists are essential to the democracy (the USA is actually a constitutional republic) why are they not good citizens who work with the police?
Remember the Raid on Mar-a-Lago that the Bezos Post cheered? If a former president cannot have classified information in his home, why can a current reporter?
The investigation is legitimate. Obama had General Petraeus investigated and he pleaded guilty in 2015 to mishandling classified material. He paid a $100,000 fine to avoid prison.
Most of the rest of the media outlets in DC clutched their pearls over raiding the reporter’s home, WMAR in Baltimore went straight to the news, “Maryland U.S. Navy Vet turned contractor accused of stealing secret national defense information.”
The story began:
A U.S. Navy Veteran turned federal government contractor is accused of stealing secret classified national defense information.
Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones was granted top security clearance as a systems engineer and information technology specialist for a federal government contractor based out of Annapolis Junction located near the border of Anne Arundel and Howard Counties.
The FBI alleges in charging documents that on at least four occasions between October 28, 2025 and January 7, 2026, Perez-Lugones accessed and viewed classified intelligence reports related to a foreign country without any prior authorization.
Agents say they have evidence proving Perez-Lugones printed out and took screenshots of secret documents, before taking them to his home in Laurel, Maryland.
No mention was made of the reporter’s butt hurt.
After the raid, the Bezos Post didn’t bother to tell its own staff what really happened.
Matt Murray, executive editor of the Washington Post, sent a dispatch to his staff:
Early this morning, FBI agents showed up unannounced at the doorstep of our colleague Hannah Natanson, searched her home, and proceeded to seize her electronic devices.
According to the government warrant, the raid was in connection with an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. We are told Hannah, and The Post, are not a target.
Nonetheless, this extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work. The Washington Post has a long history of zealous support for robust press freedoms. The entire institution stands by those freedoms and our work.
We have been in close touch with Hannah, with authorities and with legal counsel and will keep you updated as we learn more. In the meantime, the best thing all of us can do is to continue to vigorously exercise those freedoms as we do every day.
Matt
When the FBI raided a former president’s home, the Washington Post cheered. I asked Grok, “Did the Washington Post object to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago?”
The reply was “No, the Washington Post did not object to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. In fact, its coverage and editorial positions generally supported the action as a legitimate, court-authorized step in an investigation into the mishandling of classified documents, while criticizing Republican rhetoric in response as disturbing and dangerous and hypocritical.”
Civil liberties for me, not thee.
On August 8, 2022, NYT reported:
F.B.I. Searches Trump’s Florida Home, Signaling Escalation of Inquiries
The focus appeared to be on material that the former president had brought to Mar-a-Lago when he left the White House.
NYT and other journalists covering the caper thought nothing about the consequences of Biden setting the precedence of raiding the home of a former president and potential opponent to Biden’s re-election.
This was in sharp contrast to the media’s campaign to impeach Trump for daring to ask the newly elected Ukraine president—Zelensky—to investigate Burisma, the briber of Biden’s cokehead son.
But the bottom line here is an FBI raid on Trump is good, while an FBI raid on a newspaper reporter’s home is awful.
Deservedly, trust in the media is at an all-time low.
But Hannah Natanson should take heart. The raid on Mar-a-Lago did not deter President Trump. It backfired. Three days after the raid, David Brooks of NYT wrote, “Did the F.B.I. Just Re-elect Donald Trump?”
Brooks wrote, “America absolutely needs to punish those who commit crimes. On the other hand, America absolutely needs to make sure that Trump does not get another term as president. What do we do if the former makes the latter more likely? I have no clue how to get out of this potential conflict between our legal and political realities.
“We’re living in a crisis of legitimacy, during which distrust of established power is so virulent that actions by elite actors tend to backfire, no matter how well founded they are.
“My impression is that the F.B.I. had legitimate reasons to do what it did. My guess is it will find some damning documents that will do nothing to weaken Trump’s support. I’m also convinced that, at least for now, it has unintentionally improved Trump’s re-election chances. It has unintentionally made life harder for Trump’s potential primary challengers and motivated his base.”
Hannah Natanson may not be old enough to run until 2032, but according to David Brooks, the FBI elected her president! Kamala and Hillary will be so jealous.
As for Jeff Bezos, maybe next time he’ll speak out against injustice no matter how badly he wants the victim to be imprisoned.
Aurelio Perez-Lugones, huh? Perhaps it should be asked why someone named Aurelio Perez-Lugones had access to classified information in the first place.