A defendant was forbidden from saying in court, “Yes, I gave national defense information to a reporter because I was revealing a crime” or “I did it in the national interest.”Īnd to make matters worse, the Sedition Act, which was passed a year later, amended the Espionage Act to criminalize many forms of speech, including “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy.” Political Persecutions Second, there was no “affirmative defense” written into the law. The law doesn’t even mention the term “classified information” because the classification system wouldn’t be invented for another 40 years. First, nobody ever bothered to define what “national defense information” was. But another provision, Section 793, made it a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison to “provide national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it.” was panicked at the thought of German spies working undercover to steal its secrets and to disrupt its ability to produce war materiel and support its allies.Ĭongress drew up a law in which one provision, Section 794, made it a crime punishable by life imprisonment or death to provide “national defense information” to a foreign power. The Espionage Act was written in 1917, at the height of World War I. To understand the damage that this deeply flawed law has done, and will continue to do, we have to look at its origins.
Instead, it’s used as a cudgel to silence whistleblowers, journalists, and occasionally a stupid former president. The Espionage Act, which was written 105 years ago to combat German saboteurs, is rarely used now to target spies and traitors. Nobody should be charged with espionage unless they are working for a foreign power and mean harm to the United States. Boghosian)įormer President Donald Trump shouldn’t be charged with espionage for taking classified documents with him -some of them apparently very highly classified - when he left the White House for semi-retirement at his Mar-a-Lago home. Trump to Mar-a-Lago. (White House, Joyce N. March 29, 2019: Marine One lifts-off after returning President Donald J.
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