Keystone Kash Patel’s FBI searched the home of a Washington Post reporter who has been digging into the Trump administration on Wednesday.
Washington, D.C., native Hannah Natanson, described as the Post’s “federal government whisperer,” was in her Alexandria, Virginia, home at the time of the raid.
During the search, the 29-year-old’s devices were checked, and FBI agents seized a phone, a Garmin watch, two laptops, her personal computer, and one belonging to the Jeff Bezos-owned newspaper.
The Washington Post reported that the sweep of the Harvard graduate’s house and the seizure of her devices followed the paper’s investigation into “a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.” Natanson was reportedly told she was not the focus of the investigation.
Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed the raid took place in an X post not long after news broke in the media. She said the move was prompted by the Defense Department and executed by the Department of Justice and the FBI. Bondi said Natanson “was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”
The statement continued: “The leaker is currently behind bars. I am proud to work alongside Secretary Hegseth on this effort. The Trump Administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our Nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
Patel added in a separate post: “This morning the @FBI and partners executed a search warrant of an individual at the Washington Post who was found to allegedly be obtaining and reporting classified, sensitive military information from a government contractor - endangering our warfighters and compromising America’s national security. The alleged leaker was arrested this week and is in custody. As this is an ongoing investigation, we will have no further comment."
According to an FBI affidavit, the warrant said law enforcement was investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a Maryland-based systems administrator with a top secret security clearance, who is accused of improperly accessing classified intelligence reports and removing them from secure facilities, with documents later found in his lunchbox and basement.
Patel’s tenure as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been marked by high-profile gaffes. Patel, whom the Daily Beast has nicknamed “Keystone Kash” for his bungling performance, was criticized for rushing to social media to tout his agency’s work on tracking down a person of interest in the Charlie Kirk shooting prematurely.
After the shooting, Patel reportedly refused to get off a plane without an FBI raid jacket and ended up wearing one nabbed from a female officer. He reportedly decorated it with patches from other agents.
A scathing 115-page report compiled by a national alliance of retired and active-duty FBI special agents and analysts declared that Patel is “in over his head” and leading a “chronically under-performing” agency paralyzed by fear and plummeting morale.
Trump has a particular vendetta against the Post. Before he was elected in 2024, he warned the paper “ought to clean up their act.”
However, in March last year, Trump effusively praised billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ makeover of the paper after its coverage became kinder to him. “A guy like Bezos, I’ve gotten to know him, and I think he’s trying to do a real job,” Trump said. “Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with The Washington Post, and that wasn’t happening before.”
The praise came just weeks after Bezos, who attended the president’s inauguration last January and whose company donated $1 million to his inaugural fund, satisfied the new administration by announcing that the Post‘s opinion section would focus on “free markets and personal liberties,” two traditional conservative values that the mogul claimed were “underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.”
In October 2024, just weeks before the presidential election, Bezos had killed the Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.
The newspaper has continued its critical coverage of the Trump administration, however. Natanson’s biography on the Post site says that she covers “Trump’s reshaping of the federal government and its effects.”
Natanson wrote a tell-all first-person piece about the rigors of her work on Christmas Eve. She said her fiancé appealed to her to stop fielding late-night calls and texts from federal workers “who wanted to tell me how President Donald Trump was rewriting their workplace policies, firing their colleagues or transforming their agency’s missions.”
“You’ve got to stop,” he said, according to Natanson. “Stop answering them.”
The Daily Beast contacted the FBI and Natanson for comment. The FBI referred the Beast to Patel’s X post.
