Fourteen weeks have passed since Magistrate Judge Anthony Trenga ruled on February 24 that the FBI's search of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson's home violated the Privacy Protection Act. The Department of Justice filed an April 9 motion to overturn that ruling, putting the dispute back in the magistrate's hands. No Fourth Circuit notice of appeal has surfaced on the docket through Sunday afternoon. [1]

The paper's Saturday brief on the same docket named the bounded-negative-evidence position: the story holds until another filing lands, and forty-five days without one is itself the artifact. Sunday's update is the next day on the same calendar. The federal interlocutory-appeal window for civil cases involving the United States ran sixty days and expired April 25; the April 9 reconsideration motion runs a parallel track that resets the appellate clock only when the magistrate rules. The magistrate has not ruled. The matter sits in motions-pending status with no docketed next step.

The structural pairing with the Disney FCC clock holds into Sunday too. Both produce institutional pressure on speech without a courtroom confrontation. A reporter cannot work without her seized devices. A network operates inside a regulator's review window. Neither story advances without a document, and both clocks reward delay. The Disney window closes Thursday at T-4. The Natanson docket reaches Week Fourteen Sunday. The DOJ has made the strategic choice to let the magistrate's ruling stand without appellate review, and Sunday is the day that choice acquires its third consecutive weekend of confirmation. [1]

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington