FBI Probed 100 Journalists Without Cause, Watchdog Finds

On January 15, 2026, FBI agents knocked on the door of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson and walked out with her phone, two computers, and a Garmin watch. Natanson was not under investigation. She was not accused of any crime. Agents were pursuing a government contractor suspected of leaking classified information — and Natanson had apparently been in contact with him, as reporters covering national security often are. That distinction, between source and suspect, has historically mattered enormously in American press law. Under the current administration, it is mattering less.

Key Takeaways

• A February 2026 GAO report found that the FBI opened approximately 100 assessments against news media members between 2018 and 2024, requiring no evidence of wrongdoing to initiate.
• "Assessment authority" allows FBI agents to conduct physical surveillance, recruit confidential human sources, and issue grand jury subpoenas for electronic communications — all without a court order.
• Roughly 20% of these investigations remained open for more than 180 days, per the GAO finding.
• Attorney General Pam Bondi's April 2025 DOJ guidelines explicitly permit subpoenas and search warrants against journalists in leak investigations, reversing a decade of restraint.
• The PRESS Act, a federal shield law that would bar such searches, has passed the House twice but has not been enacted by the Senate.

What "Assessment Authority" Means

The FBI's assessment authority derives from the 2008 Attorney General Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations. Under those rules, agents do not need a factual predicate — no tip, no evidence, no reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing — to open an assessment. They need only an "authorized purpose," a standard so elastic that oversight bodies have struggled to define its outer limits.

What agents can do under an assessment is not trivial. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented the full toolkit: physical surveillance without a court order, recruitment of confidential human informants, and — critically for journalists — grand jury subpoenas for electronic communications. That last authority means an agent conducting an assessment of a reporter can demand email records from a provider like Google without any judicial sign-off and without the journalist necessarily knowing.

The authority was designed to allow preliminary information gathering before deciding whether to open a full investigation. In practice, it has become a mechanism for sustained scrutiny of reporters, clergy, and elected officials.

What the GAO Found

The Government Accountability Office's report, completed in January 2026 and released the following month, reviewed FBI assessments between 2018 and 2024. Among roughly 127,000 total assessments opened across all categories, the report identified a subset designated as "Sensitive Investigative Matters" — cases involving constitutionally protected activity that warrant heightened oversight.

In that subset: approximately 100 assessments targeted news media members. Around 180 were opened against religious organizations. Roughly 550 involved public officials. About 50 had an academic nexus. Combined, more than 880 investigations touched groups receiving explicit First Amendment protections — opened without any predicate evidence of wrongdoing. About 20% of these stayed open longer than 180 days.

Perhaps most damaging to public confidence: the GAO concluded that the FBI likely undercounts its own noncompliance because the bureau "relies on staff self-reporting and infrequent audits" to catch policy violations. There is no external mechanism to verify that assessment policies are being followed. The watchdog recommended strengthening that oversight. The bureau had not implemented the changes as of the report's release.

The Pattern of Escalation

The Natanson search did not emerge from a vacuum. In May 2023, FBI agents raided the home of independent journalist Tim Burke, seizing computers and phones. Three months later, local police in Kansas raided the offices of the Marion County Record and the home of its co-owner. These cases form a line, and the trajectory runs upward.

What changed at the federal level in 2025 made that line steeper. In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued new DOJ guidelines explicitly permitting investigators to use subpoenas and search warrants against journalists in leak investigations "as a last resort when essential." The 2015 Holder guidelines had effectively closed that pathway after the James Rosen controversy. Bondi's policy reopened it, with procedural guardrails that critics describe as insufficient to prevent abuse.

The Natanson search came nine months after Bondi's policy change. The Privacy Protection Act of 1980 typically prohibits government searches of journalists' work materials unless the journalist is the target of the investigation. Legal experts noted that Natanson faced no accusations, raising questions about whether the search was lawful at all.

Why Email Is a Key Risk Surface

The assessment authority's reach into electronic communications is not theoretical. Grand jury subpoenas issued under assessment authority can compel email providers to hand over content and metadata — who a reporter emailed, when, from which device, from which IP address. For a journalist protecting a source, that metadata can be as identifying as the email itself. A subpoena to Google for a reporter's Gmail account does not require the reporter to be notified, and the provider is typically barred from disclosing the request.

As our article on FISA 702 and email surveillance details, federal surveillance authorities treat stored email communications as accessible with far lower legal bars than a telephone wiretap. The combination of assessment authority and these email access rules creates a surveillance exposure most journalists are not accounting for in their OPSEC posture.

Inbox metadata — who you correspond with, how frequently, at what times — is itself a source identification tool. Tracking pixels add another layer: when a sender embeds a read receipt in an email, it records exactly when, where, and on what device you opened the message. For journalists receiving emails from sources, that signal can reveal contact patterns that undermine source protection. See what your email metadata reveals for the full picture.

What Journalists Can Do

The legal landscape offers limited protection right now. The PRESS Act, which passed the House unanimously in 2024, would bar federal agencies from compelling journalists to identify sources and would restrict government access to reporters' digital records held by third parties. It has not passed the Senate; a single objection from Senator Tom Cotton blocked it in December 2024, and no vote has been scheduled since.

Practical steps matter more than they used to. The Committee to Protect Journalists recommends compartmentalizing source communications away from primary accounts — dedicated email addresses, Signal for sensitive conversations, and encrypted email providers for material that must travel by email. For Gmail specifically, configuring accounts to use end to end encryption significantly raises the cost of content access, even if metadata remains reachable.

Blocking email tracking pixels is a small but meaningful layer. When a government official or an intelligence-adjacent contact sends you an email, the read receipt that fires when you open it discloses your IP address, your client, and your timestamp. Removing that signal — with a tool like Gblock — is an incremental OPSEC step that costs nothing and eliminates one source of passive surveillance.

The GAO report found 100 news media assessments over six years — roughly one new journalist investigation opened every three weeks, without anyone needing a reason. Combined with the Bondi guidelines and the absence of a federal shield law, the current environment for source protection is measurably worse than it was in 2022. Treating email as a surveillance surface is no longer paranoia. For journalists, it is professional hygiene.