“The FBI’s raid of a journalist’s home was the product of decades of backsliding”

Yesterday, FBI agents raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson and seized her computers and phone, ransacking her possessions in violation of the Privacy Act and threatening press freedom. The raid is another reminder of the lengths the Trump administration is willing to go to trample on the First Amendment in pursuit of political goals.

Defending Rights & Dissent has been vocal in our condemnation of the raid. Policy Director Chip Gibbons and Freedom of the Press Foundation Director of Advocacy Seth Stern have an op-ed in The Guardian on how we got here – the policies and practices that paved the way for law enforcement to barge into Natanson’s home. 

“The normalization of invading newsrooms, in violation of federal law and based on the flimsiest of pretexts, has now spread to the highest levels of the federal government (assuming prosecutors followed their own guidelines, the Natanson raid should have been approved by Pam Bondi, the attorney general, herself).

Combined with the decades-long attack on whistleblowers and national security journalists under a law that treats them no different from enemy spies, it’s a deadly weapon to be wielded against the free press, especially by a president who muses about journalists being beaten, jailed, and even raped in prison.”

We also joined a coalition of 31 press-freedom and civil-liberties groups to publish a joint statement condemning the raid. The statement calls for strengthened press-freedom protections under law and stricter oversight of the government.

“Government invasion into a reporter’s home and the seizure of journalistic materials is exactly the kind of scenario our First Amendment was conceived to protect against,” reads the statement, whose signers also include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press Action, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the National Association of Black Journalists, the News Guild-CWA, PEN America and Reporters Without Borders. “Our First Amendment protects freedom of the press — including journalistic publication of leaked government secrets — as well as freedom for the public to access such information.”

The groups urge lawmakers to call Attorney General Bondi before Congress, reintroduce and pass the PRESS Act and reform the Espionage Act to explicitly protect journalists and whistleblowers from prosecution. The groups also call on Congress to introduce a resolution that confirms that the First Amendment protects everyone’s right to record the public activities of law enforcement. 

The joint statement — including the full list of signing organizations — is available online and below.