Judge should have gone further, press group says
Even without being aware of the PPA, the court did not approve the Natanson warrant right away. Porter’s order said the court rejected the government’s first two requests for a search warrant because they were too broad. The court was “concerned about both the scope of the proposed search warrant and the government’s apparent attempt to collect information about Ms. Natanson’s confidential sources,” he wrote.
The search warrant ultimately approved by the court was limited to information that Natanson received from Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones and information related to Perez-Lugones that could be evidence in the case against him.
“The government expressly alleged that Ms. Natanson received classified information from Mr. Perez-Lugones,” but its search warrant application did not say whether Natanson herself was a target of the criminal investigation, Porter wrote. “The Court learned that Ms. Natanson was not a focus of the investigation only through press reports published the day the warrant was executed,” he wrote.
Porter said the court has to take seriously the government’s claim that the case “involves top secret national security information,” even though the court doesn’t know whether disclosure of the information would cause harm. “The Court takes the government at its word, while acknowledging the well-documented concern that the government has at times overclassified information to avoid embarrassing disclosures rather than to protect genuine secrets,” he wrote.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation said that “Judge Porter was right to treat the seizure as a prior restraint and to limit the government from fishing through the irrelevant data it seized to snoop on reporters,” and right to reprimand prosecutors for the omission in their search warrant application. But the order didn’t go far enough, the foundation said.
“Judge Porter should have required all of Natanson’s materials seized pursuant to the deceptive warrant application to be returned to her,” the group said. “And he should not have credited the administration’s claims that any of the seized materials posed a national security threat without strict proof—as Judge Porter acknowledged, this administration, even more so than others, has a long track record of falsely claiming national security threats to protect itself from embarrassment and further its political agenda. It has earned zero deference from the judiciary on claims of national security threats, particularly when press freedom is at stake.”