FBI agents raided the home of a Washington Post journalist for supposedly holding “classified documents,” as we read in the New York Times:

F.B.I. agents searched the home of a Washington Post reporter on Wednesday as part of a leak investigation, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s tactics in seeking information from the news media.

It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law called the Privacy Protection Act generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to the materials.

The Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, had spent the past year covering the Trump administration’s effort to fire federal workers and redirect much of the work force toward enforcing his agenda. Many of those employees shared with her their anger, frustration and fear with the administration’s changes.

A spokesperson for The Washington Post said on Wednesday that the publication was reviewing and monitoring the situation. The F.B.I. agents, executing a search warrant, seized laptops, a phone and a smartwatch during their search. An article in The Post said the publication had received a subpoena Wednesday morning seeking information related to a government contractor.

In a message to staff, Matt Murray, the executive editor of The Post, said neither Ms. Natanson nor the paper was a focus of the investigation.

“Nonetheless, this extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” he wrote.

Court documents indicate that law enforcement officials were investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of gaining access to and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and basement.

According to the F.B.I. affidavit, Mr. Perez-Lugones’s job meant he had access to sensitive information. It said he had printed confidential documents that he was not authorized to search for and took notes this year on a classified report related to government activity.

The court papers show investigators suspected Mr. Perez-Lugones in recent months of illegally mishandling classified information about an unidentified country.

In a statement on social media, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the search was executed at the request of the Pentagon to look for evidence at the home of a journalist “who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”

The Justice Department regulation on the use of search warrants and subpoenas in leak inquiries says the information sought must be “essential” and the government must have first made “all reasonable attempts” to obtain it from alternative sources.

The regulation also requires that the government first negotiate with the affected journalist with few exceptions. Those include whether the attorney general “determines that such negotiations would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation, risk grave harm to national security, or present an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm.”

The Justice Department has not responded to questions about why it did not approach The Post or Ms. Natanson for cooperation. It also has not indicated whether it issued a subpoena to Ms. Natanson as a less intrusive means of obtaining the information. Those steps would have enabled The Post to contest the matter in court or to negotiate limits on what was turned over, including to protect any confidential sources unrelated to the investigation.

In a first-person account of her experience talking to federal employees, Ms. Natanson said she had made 1,169 sources after sharing her contact information and asking for stories of upheaval under the Trump administration. The search of her home raises the possibility that the identities of those people are now in the Justice Department’s hands.

Free speech experts condemned the move as an aggressive escalation that could undercut press freedom.