Espionage act of 191712/24/2022 ![]() ![]() The overbreadth of the Espionage Act makes this easy. The Obama administration, wrote former New York Times reporter James Risen in December 2016, “prosecuted nine cases involving whistleblowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined.’” It snooped on Fox News reporter James Rosen’s phones and named him as a “co-conspirator” in an Espionage Act leak case. In 2013, the Obama Justice Department used the Espionage Act to justify wiretapping trunk lines and 30 separate Associated Press phones. The Espionage Act was not used much in the century after Wilson because the government classifies so much material, including widely disseminated newspaper articles, that just about anyone could be targeted.īut recently, there have been exceptions. Thankfully, a Republican Congress allowed the Sedition Act to expire, and President Warren Harding, a Republican and a journalist, commuted Debs’ sentence and invited him to the White House. The Espionage Act was passed with bipartisan support and was supplemented by a Sedition Act banning “abusive language.” This was used to prosecute and jail socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who had received some 900,000 votes in 1912. In July 1916, German agents blew up the Black Tom munitions dump in New York harbor, with an explosion loud enough to be heard in Connecticut and Maryland. ![]() Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) explained in his 1998 book Secrecy, to pre-1917 sabotage. President Woodrow Wilson and Congress were responding, as former Sen. The Espionage Act of 1917 passed two months after the United States, with 56 dissenting votes, had declared war against Germany. These reports surely have some folks gleefully contemplating the prospect of the 45th president being consigned to the 10 years in the slammer that is the maximum penalty for violations of the Espionage Act.īut as the left-wing Substacker Matt Taibbi pointed out, “Anyone thrilled at the prospect of trying to prosecute a former president under the Espionage Act has blacked out the recent history of this law.” It’s a history of liberal Democrats invoking a notoriously overbroad statute to curb freedom of the press and penalize criticism of government policy. When federal agents removed top-secret documents from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence last week, they carried with them a search warrantciting possible violations of the Espionage Act.Īh, the Espionage Act! How that must have sounded comfortingly confirmatory to those leftists who still believe, despite the total lack of evidence, that Trump was elected and governed in collusion with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. ![]()
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