The Trump administration was dealt another blow in court this week, according to NBC News, with a judge blocking the Justice Department from further action in the "outrageous" case of a journalist's seized phone, and further accusing the administration of misleading him about the law to get the original warrant.
Last month, Washington Post reporter Hanna Natanson's phone was seized by the FBI, thanks to a search warrant approved by U.S. Magistrate Judge William B. Porter. The government claimed that her phone was taken as part of an investigation into the alleged retention of classified materials by a Navy employee who had been in contact with her. The Post decried the move as an unnecessarily aggressive move against a journalist.
"The outrageous seizure of our reporter’s confidential newsgathering materials chills speech, cripples reporting, and inflicts irreparable harm every day the government keeps its hands on these materials," the paper said in a statement last month.
Ruling on Tuesday, Porter rescinded the Trump administration's authority to further examine data pulled from the phone, and said that a judicial review of the data would be conducted to see what was taken. The judge expressed "genuine hope" that the phone had only been examined for the reasons given by the government, and not "to gather evidence of a crime in a single case, not to collect information about confidential sources from a reporter who has published articles critical of the administration."
Furthermore, Porter tore into the government's lawyers for allegedly misleading him about the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, which, according to NBC News, "is a federal law that prohibits the government from searching for or seizing any work product possessed by journalists." While accepting responsibility on his own part for not knowing about the law when issuing the original search warrant, he nevertheless ripped the government for not bringing it up to him at any point, arguing that officials "from the highest levels of the DOJ" had opportunities to do so.
“None of them did,” Porter wrote in his ruling. “In its day-to-day workings, this Court affords government attorneys a presumption of regularity, including by assuming that federal prosecutors have satisfied their obligation to disclose controlling and relevant authority. The government’s conduct has disturbed that baseline posture of deference.”
During a hearing last week on the matter, Porter asked attorneys for the DOJ, "Did you not know, or did you not tell me?" He called the failure to bring it up "convenient," and added that he found it "hard to believe this law did not apply" to Natanson's case.
In a statement following this new ruling, the Post celebrated Porter's decision as a win for the First Amendment.
"We applaud the court’s recognition of core First Amendment protections and its rejection of the government’s expansionist arguments for searching Hannah Natanson’s devices and work materials in their entirety and placing itself in charge of determining their relevance," the statement read.
