Comment by chasd00
8 hours ago
“ Agents searched Hannah Natanson’s Virginia home and seized devices in inquiry tied to a classified materials case”
Right underneath the headline. That’s pretty normal for the FBI, assuming they had a search warrant.
8 hours ago
“ Agents searched Hannah Natanson’s Virginia home and seized devices in inquiry tied to a classified materials case”
Right underneath the headline. That’s pretty normal for the FBI, assuming they had a search warrant.
No, this is absolutely not normal as the article clearly states. Reporters are very rarely raided in the US under circumstances like these.
The problem is that "classified materials" means whatever the government wants it to mean in this context. Is there a journalist you want to target for a particular reason? Just accuse them of handling classified information, which they don't ever have to produce to the public because it's "classified".
Here’s a less sensational article. The journalist is not even a target of the investigation, the target is a contractor leaking documents.
“ Natanson was told that she is not a target of the investigation, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
Instead, it appears to be related to an ongoing probe of a government contractor in Maryland.”
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/media/fbi-hannah-natanson-was...
Please don’t be so naive as to think that this administration is above creating a pretext for raiding the home of their real target while claiming it’s about something else. It’s the same thing (minus the raid, plus an indictment) they’re doing to Jerome Powell.
oh you sweet summer child... to see the world with your simple star-spangled eyes...
Trump keeps that kind of stuff in their guest bathroom, cool. Reporter, raid and straight to jail. What a timeline to witness. Elected officials glut preventing them from doing their duty.
Not only that, the word going around is some of the stuff found in the bathroom were far above top secret, including some Q-Clearance level stuff from the DoE.
As in, the US's full knowledge of the technical capacity of Israel's nuclear weapons program, including how we obtained that information. That's now in the hands of the Saudis, Iran, the Chinese, the Russians, etc. And it was found in a fucking bathroom.
Yet nobody seems to care that a Trump-appointed lackey magically (whose husband has credibly been linked to organized crime) found themselves on the case "by chance" and issued a whole bunch of bullshit non-appealable verbal rulings on how and why Donald Trump is innocent.
1 reply →
In some ways this is just desserts after American journalists decided that Julian Assange was not worth defending[1]. Still disheartening to see, since we need robust journalism to keep companies/politicians honest.
[1] https://x.com/washingtonpost/status/1116371239705227265
>, this is absolutely not normal
On what grounds? Just repeating a BS assertion doesn't make it true.
The feds have been abusing journalists like this as long as I've been alive. It's not a lot, it's a trickle of them, maybe one a year or so in recent years. But one raid on one person isn't unprecedented or abnormal in any way. Now if you want to talk about frequency or the minimum size of thorn in side they'll go after it might be a different story. But nobody is saying that.
I might think the behavior is despicable and probably also unlawful, and their "they had classified info" excuse is flimsy BS, but it is unfortunately somewhat normal.
The problem is way, way, way worse, way longer running and way more institutionally entrenched than flabbergastingly moronic "these specific people right here right now did misdeeds" surface level assessment may comfortingly imply.
Right. Lincoln arrested hostile journalists without warrant or trial. FDR sent the FBI to shake down his critics. Going after the press isn’t unprecedented at all. I worry this is another sign that the people behind the administration are moving to a war-time footing and life is going to get a whole lot worse.
Not all bad things are the same. Raiding a reporter's house is very much an abnormal act to have taken place.
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Can you point to other instances of the FBI raiding homes of journalists to investigate leaks? If not, it's hard to make a compelling case that this is "normal"
>Can you point to other instances of the FBI raiding homes of journalists to investigate leaks?
James Burke, the Veritas guy, the ABC News guy, etc.
I think James O’Keeffe was the Project Veritas guy. He had a legally obtained the original of Ashley Biden’s diary. Joe Biden’s daughter. Where in it a page she wrote while in therapy said she had inappropriate showers with her father.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Brown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_(film)
Interestingly enough, that was an event related to classified information with the same newspaper.
> Set in 1971, The Post depicts the true story of attempts by journalists at The Washington Post to publish the infamous Pentagon Papers, a set of classified documents regarding the 20-year involvement of the United States government in the Vietnam War and earlier in French Indochina back to the 1940s.
As others pointed out, the problem with this is that you end up with a government that can target any reporter by claiming they have "classified materials". No need to prove what those materials are (because they are classified). This is how third world countries choke journalists.
In the USA, the claim has to be convincing to a judge, so it’s not quite as arbitrary as you indicate.
In order for ICE to raid homes they need to have a valid warrant signed by a judge, but that doesn't seem to be stopping them in Minneapolis doing warrantless raids.
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Clearly, the bar for it to be convincing seems quite low here
Of course they had a search warrant.
ICE has been knocking down doors and ripping folks from their homes without warrants. Why would the FBI under this administration behave differently?