https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-espionage-acts-ugly-un-american-history-trump-spies-leakers-law-america-dissent-c9ab63f7?mod=opinion_lead_pos6
Donald Trump is charged with violating the Espionage Act, one of the most un-American laws Congress ever enacted. President Woodrow Wilson set the tone in his 1915 State of the Union address: “There are citizens of the United States . . . who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt,” he asserted. “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.”
Congress obliged two years later by enacting the Espionage Act with the express purpose of quashing dissent. The law criminalized not only spying for enemies, but also any attempt to encourage “disloyalty” among military ranks. Prosecutors enforced the act aggressively, using it to imprison hundreds of antiwar activists and political dissenters. The Socialist former presidential candidate Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison in part for denouncing the Espionage Act itself. The law was also used to charge religious leaders who preached pacifism, newspaper editors who republished German accounts of the war, and even the producer of “Spirit of ’76,” a film about the Revolutionary War that portrayed Britain, a World War I ally, in an unfavorable light.
Those who support prosecuting Mr. Trump claim the Espionage Act of 1917 bears little resemblance to the law today. The act was “once used to stamp out dissent,” the New York Times claims, but today punishes only “spies and unauthorized leakers.”
The 1917 law criminalized, among other things, willfully attempting to cause “insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty in the military.” The statute has been amended over time. Today it criminalizes sharing, gathering or refusing to return “information relating to the national defense” that “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
The present law is arguably more expansive than the 1917 act. The original act’s most expansive provisions applied only in times of war. Prosecutors were required to prove that a defendant willfully sought to harm the U.S. military. Neither constraint applies to the current version of the law. Nor is there any requirement that the defendant has acted in bad faith, that the relevant government “information” be classified, that the information ever be shared with anyone, or even that the person charged be a government official.
