The Democratic former speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said on Wednesday that press freedom is “under siege” in the United States after the Trump administration arrested a prominent journalist and searched the home of another.

The warning from Pelosi comes on the same day that the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire who has recently sought to curry favor with Donald Trump, conducted mass layoffs of its reporters and editors worldwide.

“Let’s make no mistake: we are living in a time when the first amendment is under siege here at home,” she said at an annual dinner for reporters covering Congress convened by the Washington Press Club.

“Facts are challenged, truth is distorted, and the press is treated by those in power as an enemy, fake news, rather than vital partner.”

Pelosi called the arrest last month of former CNN anchor Don Lemon as well as the search of Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, in which the FBI seized several electronic devices, “an affront to press freedom meant to scare, chill and silence.”

“But amid that political intimidation, we must also reckon with an ongoing and accompanying threat,” the former speaker continued.

“Just today, we saw painful layoffs at the Washington Post – part of a broader reprehensible pattern in which corporate decisions are hollowing out newsrooms across the country.”

Around one third of the Post’s staff were laid off Wednesday, despite public pleas from journalists to preserve their jobs. In a nod to the paper’s own slogan – “Democracy dies in darkness” – Pelosi said: “A free press cannot fulfill its mission if it is starved of the resources it needs to survive. And when newsrooms are weakened, our republic is weakened with them. Because democracy does die in darkness.”

One of the most prominent Democratic lawmakers in Congress, Pelosi became the first female speaker of the House of Representatives in 2007, serving until 2011 and playing a major role in advancing Barack Obama’s legislative agenda. She presided over the chamber for a another four-year stint lasting from 2019 to 2023, during the second half of Trump’s first term and the first two years of Joe Biden’s.

She emerged as a major antagonist of the Republican president, squabbling with him at the White House and ripping a copy of his 2020 State of the Union address after he finished delivering it. Pelosi stepped down as the leader of House Democrats after the party lost its majority in the chamber at the beginning of 2023, and last year announced she would retire after this year, ending a 40-year stint in Congress.

She did not spare the president in her remarks, nor the conservative justices who hold a majority of the supreme court’s seats.

“America is in a crisis of conscience. We have a president who has crowned himself King, a Congress which has abolished itself, and a supreme court that has gone rogue,” Pelosi said.

“Our first amendment – a free and independent press – the fourth estate – is essential to the survival of our Republic.”