WASHINGTON (TNND) — A Pentagon contractor has been indicted on charges that he allegedly shared classified national defense information with a Washington Post journalist.
Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones was charged with five counts of unlawfully transmitting and one count of unlawfully retaining classified national defense information, according to a release from the Justice Department.
The case was linked last week to the search of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home in Virginia, who recently published an article describing how she grew her contact base to hundreds of new sources. She covers the Trump administration’s government transformation.
Perez-Lugones is accused of taking home classified documents on multiple occasions and later passing them to a reporter who used the information in news articles, FBI Director Kash Patel said.
The reporter, who was not named by the DOJ, co-wrote and contributed to at least five articles that contained classified information Perez-Lugones provided.
“On October 31, 2025, November 11, 2025, December 8, 2025, January 6, 2026, and January 9, 2026, Reporter 1 co-authored articles containing classified information from these reports,” officials detailed.
Investigators also said they found phone messages between Perez-Lugones and the reporter that revealed photographs of classified documents. “I’m going quiet for a bit … just to see if anyone starts asking questions,” Perez-Lugones said.
“Illegally disclosing classified defense information is a grave crime against America that puts both our national security and the lives of our military heroes at risk,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement.
Perez-Lugones, 61, of Laurel, held a top-secret security clearance “with access to Sensitive Compartmented Information” and was working as a systems engineer and information technology specialist for a government contracting company, the DOJ said.
In October 2025, Perez-Lugones took screenshots of classified intelligence reports, some of which are related to a foreign country, and pasted them in Microsoft Word documents and other applications to “obscure his unauthorized review and access of this information,” according to officials.
Authorities also found documents in a lunchbox in his car and basement marked as “SECRET,” according to court papers.
The Washington Post asked for a court order on Wednesday requiring authorities to return electronic devices they seized at Natanson’s home,” a court filing detailed. Federal agents seized a phone, two laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive and a Garmin smartwatch.
A federal magistrate judge in Alexandria, Virginia, temporarily barred the government from reviewing any material from the seized devices. The judge also scheduled a Feb. 6 hearing on the newspaper’s request.
“The outrageous seizure of our reporter’s confidential newsgathering materials chills speech, cripples reporting, and inflicts irreparable harm every day the government keeps its hands on these materials,” the Post said in a statement.
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Editor’s note: The Associated Press contributed to this article.
