The FBI searched the home of a Washington Post reporter Wednesday as part of an investigation into a government contractor who has been accused of illegally retaining classified materials, The Washington Post confirmed.
The reporter, Hannah Natanson, was at her home in Virginia when the FBI arrived, the newspaper reported. They seized her phone, as well as her work and personal laptops and a Garmin smartwatch, according to the newspaper.
“Investigators told Natanson that she is not the focus of the probe,” the Post reported.
The contractor is Navy veteran Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is a system administrator in Maryland and who has been charged with “unlawful retention of national defense information,” according to a criminal complaint filed Jan. 9 in the U.S. District Court for the District Court of Maryland.
Perez-Lugones, a Miami-born U.S. citizen who “possesses a Top Secret security clearance,” made his first court appearance in the case last Friday, the complaint states.
The FBI has accused Perez-Lugones of searching databases containing classified information without authorization and either printing or taking screenshots of that material, according to the complaint.
That material that Perez-Lugones allegedly began collecting in October is described in the complaint as “related to a foreign country.”
“Perez-Lugones had no need to know and was not authorized to search for, access, view, screenshot, or print any of this information,” the complaint states.
The FBI had been watching Perez-Lugones as recently as last week, doing surveillance of him while he was in a SCIFF, which is a secure room for handling top secret information, the complaint states.
Perez-Lugones was monitored logging in to systems. And the complaint includes a photo of him from January 6, leaving his workplace with a black bag.
Two days later, federal investigators searched Perez-Lugones’ house in Laurel, Maryland and found a document marked “SECRET” in the basement, the complaint states.
“While searching Perez-Lugones’ car, investigators located a lunch box in which a document was marked as SECRET,” the complaint states. “One of more of these documents are related to national defense.”
The criminal complaint against Perez-Lugones does not mention any ties to Natanson.
Natanson, according to the Post, covers the federal workforce.
Dubbed “the federal government whisperer” by her colleagues, Natanson was assigned, in the first months of the Trump Administration, to write stories about Elon Musk and DOGE’s dramatic culling of the government workforce.
A Harvard University grad, Natanson was also part of the Post team that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, according to her official author page.