The FBI raided a Washington Post reporter’s home on Wednesday, and the paper’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos hasn’t said a word about it. His readers are furious.
Within hours of the Post reporting on the search of Hannah Natanson’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, more than a thousand comments flooded the site—many aimed directly at Bezos.
The backlash got so intense that the Post briefly disabled comments before restoring them about 30 minutes later.
WHAT’S GOING ON: Natanson, 29, is known as the Post’s “federal government whisperer” for her coverage of the Trump administration.
In an unprecedented move of fascist power in the United States of America, FBI agents searched her home, checked her devices, and seized her phone, Garmin watch, and two laptops—including one owned by the Post.
She was reportedly told she wasn’t the target of the investigation, which apparently involves “a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.”
Critics are calling it a crackdown on press freedom. And Bezos? Radio silence.
THE DETAILS: Post readers clearly expected this. “Happy now, Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post? You hastened the death of Democracy. It is very dark….” one commenter wrote, racking up over 500 upvotes.
Another predicted: “Coming in 3, 2, 1: A Bezos-ordered, and weirdly written, editorial saying Trump had every right to ransack the Post reporter’s stuff.”
Perhaps the most cutting: “Ooohhh! Jeff’s going to be maaaaddd……at the reporter!”
OF COURSE: This isn’t the first reader revolt against Bezos. The Post hemorrhaged roughly 250,000 subscribers in October 2024 after he killed a planned editorial board endorsement of Kamala Harris. He’s since donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and reportedly paid Melania Trump $40 million for her documentary rights.
The paper’s opinion section has lurched rightward after Bezos announced it would refocus on “personal liberties and free markets”—sparking a petition signed by over 400 staff members opposing the change.
Three liberal columnists departed, including Karen Attiah, who says she was fired over posts about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The Post then hired three conservative writers, and its editorial board has since praised several of Trump’s most controversial moves.
Trump himself has noticed the makeover. “A guy like Bezos, I’ve gotten to know him, and I think he’s trying to do a real job,” Trump said in March. “Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with The Washington Post, and that wasn’t happening before.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Natanson has continued doing exactly the kind of journalism that apparently makes this administration uncomfortable.
On Christmas Eve, she wrote a first-person account about her fiancé urging her to stop fielding late-night calls from federal workers “who wanted to tell me how President Donald Trump was rewriting their workplace policies, firing their colleagues or transforming their agency’s missions.”
Now the FBI has raided her home. And the man who owns her newspaper—the same newspaper whose motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”—can’t be bothered to defend her. The silence says everything about where Bezos’ loyalties actually lie.