Show Notes
Three stories pitting freedom of the press and national security are in the news this week, and On Background host and veteran investigative journalist Susan Crabtree talks through the implications of all of them on this week’s show.
A Secret Service agent lost his security clearance after he shared highly classified information about the movements of Vice President JD Vance in a journalistic “honeypot” operation. A Washington Post reporter’s home was raided by the FBI in pursuit, it said, of information on a military contractor suspected of sharing classified information. And a group opposed to deportation of illegal immigrants has obtained and threatened to release the names and personal information of ICE agents.
All these stories have in common is a breakdown in the “push-pull” relationship between government’s need to protect secret information and journalists’ right to publish the information they obtain and verify. Like the famous “Pentagon Papers” Supreme Court case half a century ago, these stories are pushing the envelope of what is acceptable ethics for journalists and what government can and cannot do to punish reporters who expose this information.
Last week, journalist James O’Keefe released footage of Tomas Escotto, a Secret Service agent caught on camera bragging to his date about being on the Vice President’s security detail and disclosing classified information about his movements in violation of Secret Service rules. Escotto’s security clearance was revoked, and he faces further disciplinary action.
Crabtree learned exclusively from her own agency sources that Escotto told his superiors he has been in a relationship with the unnamed journalist, possibility for as long as six months, which included physical intimacy.
“This is what our foreign adversaries do,” Crabtree tells co-host Eric Eggers. “It’s an extraordinary sort of way to go about getting the story, if indeed that is true,” she says. This is not ethical journalism, but rather a well-known spy tactic known as a “honeypot operation,” using sex to cajole a source into giving up secrets. Journalists, she says, are not spies.
Nor does Crabtree spare the agent from criticism. “Whether you’re talking about the FBI, Special Forces soldiers, or the Secret Service, agents are supposed to be quiet operators,” she adds.
She understands the pressure the Secret Service is under, with assassination attempts against President Donald Trump in 2024 and continuing threats from Iran this year. “Just before we got on this podcast, I shared a clipping from the Iranian state news agency threatening President Trump’s life once again,” she says.
🚨🚨Now Iran is giving Trump every justification for intervention. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://t.co/E81VXBLMum
— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) January 14, 2026
“Secret Service was so concerned about [Iran] that at one point that they shot at a drone they thought might have be an Iranian drone out of the moon roof of the Secret Service motorcade,” she shares.
This week someone, possibly within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), leaked the names of ICE agents to “The ICE List,” which calls itself “an open journalistic project aimed at collecting and sharing information that can hold ICE members legally accountable.” ICE agents often partially cover their faces with cloth to avoid being “doxxed” by activist groups, but if someone from inside DHS leaked those names it would be a gross violation of government rules.
The third story covered by the hosts shows how the government can be as heavy-handed as aggressive journalists. The home of Hannah Natanson, a Washington Post reporter, was raided by the FBI last week. They seized her phone, two computers, and her Garmin watch, looking for evidence against a military contractor from Maryland named Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is suspected of leaking classified information about the raid on Venezuela.
“This is crazy!” Crabtree says. “It’s a new low for the FBI.”
She speaks with experience, telling Eggers her own sources have reported being approached on the phone by people saying they were journalists and friends of hers and asking them to share what they might have told her.
Crabtree shares she is working on two stories now about the brutality of the Iranian regime against hostages and Iranian-Americans on US soil.
“I also plan to have some more reporting on the Secret Service and maybe some changes that are coming,” she says.
