The post asked for an expedited briefing and hearing schedule. Porter ordered the government to file a response by January 28 and scheduled oral arguments for February 6.
Post: “Government refuses to call off search”.
FBI agents reportedly seized Knutson’s phone, a 1TB portable hard drive, a device to record interviews, a Garmin watch, a personal laptop, and a laptop released by The Washington Post. Knutson has said that she has created a contact list of 1,100 current and former government employees and communicates with them in encrypted Signal chats.
The Washington Post and Knutson’s lawyers told the court, “On the day the FBI raided Knutson’s residence, the undersigned counsel contacted the government to advise that the items seized included material protected by the First Amendment and attorney-client privileges.” “The undersigned counsel asked the Government to refrain from reviewing the documents until judicial resolution of the dispute, but the Government refused.”
The filing states that unless a standstill order is issued, “the government will begin an uncontrolled search of a journalist’s work product that violates the First Amendment and attorney-client privilege, ignores federal statutory safeguards for journalists, and jeopardizes the confidence and confidentiality of sources.”
The six devices seized from Knutson “consist of essentially his entire professional universe: more than 30,000 Post emails from the past year alone, confidential information from and about sources (including his sources and his colleagues’ sources), recordings of interviews, notes on story concepts and ideas, drafts of potential stories, communications with colleagues about sources and stories, and the Post’s content management system that contains all articles in progress,” the Post said. “These devices also contained Natanson’s encrypted Signal messaging platform that she used to communicate with her over 1,100 sources. Without her devices, she literally could not contact these sources.”
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