RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

There are likely hundreds of violations of the Espionage Act every day, but politically disfavored opponents are the ones who end up targeted. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was indicted under this law, but the Washington press corps reports leaked information with impunity. Two lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee were charged for meeting with and listening to a former Pentagon official, while hundreds of similarly situated lobbyists faced no repercussions at all. A whistleblower on the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program is charged in part based on unclassified documents about cost overruns found in his home, but former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Deutch and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who both took classified documents home, walk free.

The U.S. must prosecute spies and protect national secrets, but the Espionage Act isn’t necessary to do so. More than a dozen more-specific federal statutes criminalize spying, hacking and misuse of government records. These statutes require criminal intent. Most of them expressly apply only to “employees and officers” of the U.S., so they couldn’t be used to target journalists or former presidents.

The Espionage Act nullifies—or at least confounds—subsequently enacted laws that apply to specific types of government documents. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 gives the president the sole authority to decide what records to take with him when he leaves office. Judge Amy Berman Jackson held in the “sock drawer” case that Bill Clinton’s decision on what to keep was judicially unreviewable. That statute would be meaningless if, as the Justice Department now contends, the Espionage Act is broad enough to criminalize an exercise of presidential discretion expressly granted under the 1978 act. The indictment of Mr. Trump, which doesn’t even mention the Presidential Records Act, suggests the Espionage Act is again a weapon against dissent, as it was in 1917.

A startling number of those convicted under the Espionage Act have been pardoned or had their sentences commuted once political tides changed. After World War I, Wilson issued more than 200 pardons or commutations. By 1923 Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge had released the rest. Mr. Clinton pardoned government whistleblower Samuel Morison, and President Obama commuted most of WikiLeaks leaker Chelsea Manning’s sentence.

In other cases, the government has suddenly dropped charges immediately before trial. In the case of Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a judge accepted an Espionage Act plea only after apologizing for the executive branch’s “abuse” of power in targeting him and misrepresenting the nature of the documents he allegedly retained, saying the prosecutors had “embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.”

Instead of periodically pardoning defendants, commuting their sentences, dropping charges and apologizing for prosecutorial abuses, we should admit a century-old policy mistake and repeal the Espionage Act. If I’m elected president, I’ll urge Congress to do that—and order the Justice Department to stop enforcing the act in the meantime.

Mr. Ramaswamy is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.