This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 14 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
As the Trump administration continues its immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz delivered a remarkable straight-to-camera address to the people of his state.
“Fellow Minnesotans, what’s happening in Minnesota right now defies belief. News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities,” he said Wednesday evening.
Given everything else this administration is doing right now, it is reasonable to think this is exactly what it looks like.
“They’re pulling over people indiscriminately, including U.S. citizens, and demanding to see their papers,” Walz continued. “At grocery stores, at bus stops, even at our schools, they’re breaking windows, dragging pregnant women down the street, just plain, grabbing Minnesotans and shoving them into unmarked vans, kidnapping innocent people with no warning and no due process.”
According to the governor, “this stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement” long ago and is, instead, “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”
These kinds of warnings feel more urgent and more necessary every day now. Because every single day we wake up to something — a piece of news that reminds us of countries we do not want to be like.
Wednesday’s news was that Donald Trump’s FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson. They searched her home, seized her laptops, her phone and her smartwatch.
We don’t know exactly what was on those devices, or the scope of the warrant the FBI used to seize them. But we do know that this kind of intrusion is exactly what freedom of the press advocates fear from authoritarian governments.
If the federal government were to access a reporter’s notes, they could identify confidential sources in the government; they could punish those sources for speaking to the press; they could discourage other sources from coming forward and effectively break the system by which a free press holds the government accountable.
Given everything else this administration is doing right now, it is reasonable to think this is exactly what it looks like.
It’s notable that the Trump administration chose to try this out by targeting The Washington Post. After all, this is the paper owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who has gone out of his way to placate this president and push the newspaper in a more Trump-friendly direction.
Bezos himself hasn’t come out with a statement condemning this raid, even as the paper’s editorial board labeled it “an aggressive attack on the press freedom of all journalists.”
It is also notable that Trump’s Justice Department went after this reporter in particular. Natanson is one of the most well-sourced reporters in the federal government, and she has been doing some of the most dogged reporting on how the Trump administration has upended the federal government from the inside, based on conversations with people who work there.
In the early days of the Trump administration, she broke stories about how the Trump administration was using sensitive Medicare data to hunt down immigrants, how Elon Musk was feeding sensitive government data into artificial intelligence to decide what to target for cuts, how the Trump administration had canceled government contracts to help veterans and later how the Trump administration reversed those cuts after she and her colleagues exposed them.
Just three weeks ago, Natanson wrote a firsthand account of how she became the Trump administration’s “federal government whisperer,” obtaining more than 1,100 sources who had come forward to tell her about how the president was “rewriting their workplace policies, firing their colleagues or transforming their agency’s missions.”
She wrote about receiving urgent Signal messages from distressed workers across the federal government, people who said things such as, “Every piece of our data may be at the mercy of unscrupulous people.”
Some of those sources even disclosed that the enormous pressure they were under had resulted in suicidal thoughts, telling Natanson things such as, “I think about jumping off a bridge a couple times a day,” and “I want to die. It’s never been like this.”
She became a person federal employees could turn to — someone they trusted enough to tell their stories about how the government was under attack from the president who was elected to lead it.
But here’s the thing: Natanson herself isn’t even the target of this investigation. The search of her home and the seizure of her devices is part of an investigation into a government contractor who is accused of illegally mishandling classified information about an unidentified country.
Raiding the home of a reporter who isn’t even suspected of a crime is an extraordinary step for the federal government to take. Could it be that the administration wanted to send a message to government officials and employees, to scare them away from speaking to journalists? It’s certainly possible. Or worse, could the administration want access to this reporter’s devices to identify her sources inside the federal government? That is certainly possible as well. Right now, we don’t know what information the federal government could gain access to, or whether they could act upon that information, but we do know this raid was implemented by an administration that has put silencing critics at the top of its agenda. On Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X that the warrant was executed “at the request of the Department of War,” meaning Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department. Whether it’s journalists or law firms, or comedians or protesters or members of Congress, Trump wants to silence anyone who dares speak out against him. I just want to take a moment to point out the absurdity of that, given Hegseth himself famously sent sensitive information about an active military operation to a Signal chat that included a journalist. While we’re on the subject of irony, remember when I said that this investigation was about mishandling classified information concerning an “unidentified country”? Well, someone inside the federal government has now revealed the name of that country to the press. While speaking to reporters inside the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump appeared to reference the case and said the government had caught “a very bad leaker.” “Another piece of information that I think is very important is the leaker has been found and is in jail right now,” he said. “That’s the leaker on Venezuela.” The president of the United States just revealed information his administration had sought to withhold from the public, while criticizing someone he says is a “leaker.” Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up. Setting aside the Trump administration’s hypocrisy on disclosing sensitive information, it’s pretty clear what this is all about: It’s a story we’ve seen time and again, whether it’s journalists or law firms, or comedians or protesters or members of Congress — Trump wants to silence anyone who dares speak out against him. Allison Detzel contributed.
Jen Psaki is the host of "The Briefing with Jen Psaki" airing Tuesdays through Fridays at 9 p.m. EST. She is the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden. Recommended
