James Madison stood about a foot shorter and was, probably, some 150 lbs lighter than our current chief executive. And “Lil’ Jimmy,” as he assuredly would have been known in our times, understood something that his presidential descendant does not grasp today: the reason we have a First Amendment which carves out specific protections for the press is because, in Madison’s own words, a government that does not allow provide public information about its works is a “prologue to a farce or a tragedy.”
Under the leadership of bug-eyed podcaster Kash Patel, the FBI this morning raided the home of The Washington Post’s reporter Hannah Natanson. They did so as part of an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a now-arrested federal subcontractor accused of leaking classified intelligence reports. The Fibbies seized Natanson’s laptops, phone, and a Garmin smart watch.
The search itself was illegal. No need to take my word for it. The 1980 Privacy Protection Act (PPA) clearly states that it is unlawful for “a government officer or employee, in connection with the investigation or prosecution of a criminal offense, to search for or seize any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication”—except in very specific cases which this raid does not appear to meet.
So that’s bad.
The PPA came in response to concerns from news publications and civil rights organizations after a previous ruling, Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, found that government agencies could issue a search warrant against newsrooms, even if those in the newsroom subject to the warrant were not accused of any crime. It was crafted to protect the press from governmental overreach.
Unfortunately, governmental overreach is our soup of the day. Even more unfortunate, it will be our soup of the day for the foreseeable future.
Madison, known as the “Father of the Constitution,” wrote in 1820 that “Equal laws protecting equal rights are found as they ought to be presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty & love of country.”
While his brain may not have been as big and beautiful as our current president’s, the point he makes holds true: one’s love of country must exist in direct proportion to one’s country’s love of him. When the nation behaves capriciously towards its citizenry, the citizenry will, eventually, rebel.
It is the role of the press to observe both sides and to report on their actions. In the case of the Post’s Natanson, that means covering, as she does, “Trump’s reshaping of the federal government and its effects.”
Whether Perez-Lugones leaked to her, or what he leaked, is unclear at the moment, but it doesn’t matter: a reporter receiving classified material from a whistleblower is not illegal. And, in fact, the FBI informed Natanson that she is not suspected of criminal activity. Which means, by a clear reading of the PPA, the FBI done gone and broken the darn law.
I’m sure Pam Bondi will get right on that.
Meanwhile, the Post’s owner, that tight-shirt-wearing billionaire formerly married to the philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, has yet to weigh in on behalf of his staff. When Nixon’s DOJ came down hard on the paper’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during their Watergate coverage, its then-owner, Katharine Graham, refused to yield, even going so far as to defy a subpoena for the reporters’ notes.
Bezos’s courage does not seem quite so apparent. Perhaps he does not wish to jeopardize the billions in rocketship contracts one of his other companies has procured from the Trump administration. Having already overhauled the Post’s opinion coverage—and its editorial priorities more broadly—to curry favor with the administration, he does not seem inclined to risk even a single dollar for the sake of our pesky First Amendment.
Many have asked, “What’s the point of hoarding billions upon billions of dollars only to shirk from wielding the awesome power those billions afford you?” The answer is as stark as it is obvious: cowardice costs nothing. Except everything.
The nation is well-accustomed to a certain amount of animosity between the powerful and those who report on their activities. Never before, though, has a president waged such a consistent and sustained attack on the press, beginning with his rebranding of the famous French Revolutionary phrase: “ennemi du peuple.”
Stalin used the phrase to describe, among others, the press. So did Lenin. So did Mao. Again, not good.
A reporter’s home getting raided does not rise to the same level of outrage as, say, a mom getting shot three times in the face, but the principle at stake is the same: the right of the people to speak. Even when such speech is odious to the government. Even when such speech is, in the words of the president while attempting to justify the murder of Renee Nicole Good, “disrespectful.”
Maybe a good rule of thumb for assessing a government’s actions is to ask whether they increase or decrease its people’s ability to speak freely? In the case of Good, the question answers itself. In the case of Natanson, the answer is the same. When the government attempts to silence its critics—and this is precisely what the government is trying to do in both cases—it violates all of us.
Madison, our fourth president, not only drafted the Bill of Rights, but he also understood their import in a way that seems to elude our forty-seventh. In fact, he predicted just such a man in Federalist No. 10, writing that, “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”
Our interests have been betrayed. Our rights trampled. Our lives sacrificed. To what end? Maybe you don’t care about a single reporter at a single, failing newspaper. But you should.
The farce is upon us. The tragedy is underway.
