type: timeline_event
Federal Magistrate Judge William B. Porter of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a stinging rebuke of the Justice Department on February 20, 2026, reversing course and blocking DOJ attorneys from searching the electronic devices seized from Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson during a January 14 FBI raid. The ruling established that the court itself — not government lawyers — would conduct an independent review of the materials before any could be provided to prosecutors.
Porter expressed frustration that DOJ prosecutors had failed to disclose the Privacy Protection Act when seeking the original search warrant, a significant omission that he said undermined the department's credibility. In his written ruling Porter declared that allowing the government's filter team to search a reporter's work product would be "the equivalent of leaving the government's fox in charge of the Washington Post's henhouse." He further concluded that "the government could not be trusted to conduct a review of the devices on its own" — an extraordinary statement of judicial distrust directed at the nation's top law enforcement agency.
The judge rejected separate requests from both Natanson's lawyers and DOJ attorneys to conduct the device review, insisting the court would assume that responsibility to protect both the criminal investigation's integrity and Natanson's First Amendment rights. "To gather the information the government needs to prosecute its criminal case without authorizing an unrestrained search," Porter wrote, "the court will conduct the review itself."
The ruling represented a significant check on DOJ's press freedom violations but left Natanson's devices — including phones, laptops, a Garmin watch, and portable hard drives containing over a decade of source relationships — still in government custody. Press freedom advocates noted that even a judicial review process exposed confidential source information to a process designed by the government, and that the mere seizure of the devices had already created a chilling effect for potential whistleblowers. The case was widely seen as a direct consequence of AG Bondi's earlier reversal of DOJ policies protecting journalists from newsroom raids.