By Devan Cole, CNN
(CNN) — The Justice Department may not search through the contents of several devices investigators seized from a Washington Post reporter earlier this year as part of a probe into leaked classified documents, a federal judge in Virginia ruled Tuesday.
The decision from Magistrate Judge William Porter is a remarkable turn of events some six weeks after he first gave the government permission to raid the reporter’s home to seize a phone, two computers and a Garmin watch.
In a 22-page ruling laying bare the judge’s concerns that investigators would use the search warrant he approved to peer into parts of the reporter’s data that are unrelated to the leak investigation, Porter said that giving them carte blanche to rummage through all of the data it seized “when probable cause exists for only a narrow subset … would authorize an unlawful general warrant.”
“Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well-chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product — most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources — is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” he wrote.
Porter rejected separate requests from the reporter, Hannah Natanson, and prosecutors to look through the devices and filter out information that is not subject to the search warrant, instead tasking the court with that responsibility.
“To gather the information the government needs to prosecute its criminal case without authorizing an unrestrained search … the court will conduct the review itself,” he wrote.
CNN has previously reported that Natanson is not under investigation. But her communications with a government contractor who was charged with illegally leaking classified information are what led prosecutors to ask Porter to approve a search warrant for her Virginia home earlier this year.
The contractor, Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, pleaded not guilty late last month to five counts of unlawfully transmitting national defense information to Natanson through an encrypted messaging application and a single count of unlawfully retaining the defense information.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
The-CNN-Wire
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