Press group says judge should have gone further
Despite not being aware of the PPA, the court did not immediately approve the Knutson warrant. Porter’s order states that the court rejected the government’s first two requests for search warrants because they were too broad. “The Court was concerned about both the scope of the proposed search warrant and the Government’s apparent effort to gather information about Ms. Natanson’s confidential sources,” he wrote.
The search warrant ultimately approved by the court was limited to information Knutson obtained from Aurelio Luis Pérez-Lugones and information related to Pérez-Lugones that might be evidence in the case against him.
“The Government clearly alleged that Ms. Natanson received classified information from Mr. Pérez-Lugones,” Porter wrote, “but its search warrant application did not state whether Natanson herself was the target of a criminal investigation.” “The court learned that Ms. Knutson was not the focus of the investigation through press reports published on the day the warrant was executed,” he wrote.
Porter said the court would have to take seriously the government’s claim that the case “involves highly classified national security information”, even though the court could not know whether disclosing the information would cause harm. “The Court takes the government at its word, while also acknowledging the well-documented concern that the government has at times exaggerated information to avoid embarrassing disclosures rather than protect actual secrets,” he wrote.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation said that “Judge Porter was right to treat the seizures as prior sanctions and limit the government from fishing through irrelevant data seized to spy on journalists,” and that prosecutors were right to be reprimanded for omissions in their search warrant application. But the order did not go far enough, the foundation said.
“Judge Porter should have required all of Knutson’s materials seized under the fraudulent warrant application to be returned to him,” the group said. “And they should not have given credit to the administration’s claims that any of the materials seized posed a national security threat without hard evidence – as Judge Porter acknowledged, this administration, even compared to others, has a long track record of falsely claiming national security threats to save itself embarrassment and advance its political agenda. It has earned zero respect from the judiciary on claims of national security threats, especially when the press Freedom is at stake.”
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