RonNell Andersen Jones

but also to sort of think about some of the wider constitutional concerns that are at play when we think about the Espionage Act, which is the statute that is likely to come into play here.

So the administration's explanation is that they are investigating a very serious charge of an Espionage Act violation by another person, a potential source of this Post reporter.

That individual was apparently a government contractor who is alleged to have misused, mishandled confidential classified information that he came into contact with over the course of his work.

And the government has said that there were illegalities involved and that they were investigating those illegalities.

And so they needed to search the reporter's home in order to tackle them.

The Washington Post and the reporter have noted that there is a federal law.

It's called the Privacy Protection Act, and it has a fairly strict ban on searching illegal

newspapers and reporters' homes and newsrooms for work product and documentary materials that were gathered by the reporter in the course of news gathering.

And there are only very, very narrow exceptions.

One problem that exists here is that the government itself didn't address that law.

And so tussling with what exception it exists, I think, is a part of the ongoing court battle here.

One exception that does exist to that law is if the journalists themselves

are the target of the investigation, that is, they are suspected of committing a crime, then those searches are legal.

And one large concern that press freedom advocates now have is that this might signal that the Justice Department believes that the journalist herself

could somehow be implicated under the Espionage Act.

That would be a radical expansion of the treatment of the Espionage Act and would be fraught with a lot of First Amendment concerns that we've discussed over the last decade in thinking about the scope and contours of that act.

Yeah, this case has been challenged in the courts.

Initially, a lower court judge who was a Trump appointee ruled in favor of the AP and said that while the White House didn't need to open things up to reporters more generally, once they had done so, they couldn't engage in brazen viewpoint discrimination, eliminating the access on the grounds that the president didn't like that they refused to use his preferred words and phrases.

The appellate court in D.C.

heard this case as a procedural matter over the last summer and signaled that they would reverse when they got to the merits of the case, suggesting that this is at the president's discretion, that this isn't a public forum, and that particularly now that the White House Correspondents Association doesn't oversee this pool, the president himself and the White House itself does so.