Feds will pay $50,000 settlement for raiding home of Washington Times writer

Here's the good news: Our legal structures still work to the extent that when a government agency busts into a journalist's home and seizes her notes - notes for a story she's working on about this very same agency, by the way, including the names of whistleblowers within the agency - it is possible for the journalist to seek and receive legal protection and ultimately a settlement that comes with the implicit admission of the government's wrongdoing.

That's the good news. Freelance writer Audrey Hudson of the Washington Times is going to receive $50,000 from the Department of Homeland Security after Coast Guard agents - ostensibly acting on a search warrant for her husband's firearms - also took documents related to her work. The bad news, of course, is that it happened at all. Tell me again why journalists pimp for Obama? Makes no sense to me:

Audrey Hudson, an award-winning journalist most recently at the Washington Times, told The Daily Signal she was awoken by her barking dog around 4:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, 2013, to discover armed government agents had descended on her property under the cover of darkness. The agents had a search warrant for her husband’s firearms. As they scoured the home, Hudson was read her Miranda rights.

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While inside Hudson’s house, a U.S. Coast Guard agent confiscated documents that contained “confidential notes, draft articles, and other newsgathering materials” that Hudson never intended for anyone else to see. The documents included the identities of whistleblowers at the Department of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard is part of Homeland Security. At the time, Hudson was investigating and reporting on Homeland Security, specifically its Federal Air Marshal Service and the Transportation Security Administration.

Now I have no idea what prompted the investigation of Hudson's husband or her guns, or whether it was legitimate. Perhaps it was. But clearly in the course of acting on that warrant, the agents went way farther than they needed to in seizing material. The fact that Hudson was working on a story about the DHS, even it if was about other DHS agencies, only intensifies the seriousness of what happened. Having said that, was this the intent? Could it have simply been a coincidence that the target of the raid is married to a journalist working on such a story? Of course. But this demonstrates the danger inherent in such raids, which is why criminal laws need to be written in such as way as to minimize the need for such raids in their enforcement. I'm sure some of you will be disappointed that this does not lead me to a libertarian view of things like drug laws. Those are necessary to protect the public good for all kinds of reasons we've covered in this space previously, but they also require strong constitutional protections so that the mere suspicion of drugs doesn't become the government's all-purpose license to storm into people's homes and pull crap like this. Guns are another matter entirely. Guns are protected by the Constitution, whether the government likes it or not. And because the government clearly doesn't like it, it is constantly pushing the bounds of its own authority by attempting to impose new regulations that make it feasible for agents to do what they did here. Let's be glad the DHS got slapped down and had to admit it did wrong. Let's also keep the pressure on so they can't keep doing stuff like this. If the victim hadn't been a journalist who knew how to stand up for her rights, who knows how different the outcome might have been? And who knows how many other times it has happened exactly that way because Obama's DHS cares nothing for the limits of federal power?

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