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Posted on 05/28/2013 6:13:35 PM PDT by neverdem
The president uses the overly broad and little-used WWI-era law to go after reporters.
There is one problem with the entirely justified if self-interested media squawking about the Justice Department’s snooping into the phone records of multiple Associated Press reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen.
The problem is that what the AP reporters and Rosen did arguably violates the letter of the law.
Section 793(g) is a conspiracy count that says that anyone who conspires to help the source do that has committed the same crime. That would be the reporter.
It sounds as though this law criminalizes a lot of journalism. You might wonder how such a law ever got passed and why, for the last 90 years, it has very seldom produced prosecutions and investigations of journalists.
The answer: This is the Espionage Act of 1917, passed two months after the United States entered World War I. In his 1998 book Secrecy, the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tells the story of how it came into being. Congress was responding to incidents of German espionage before the declaration of war. In July 1916, German agents blew up the Black Tom munitions dump in New York Harbor. The explosion was loud enough to be heard in Connecticut and Maryland. The Espionage Act was passed with bipartisan support in a Democratic Congress and strongly supported by President Woodrow Wilson, also a Democrat.
Wilson wanted even more. “Authority to exercise censorship over the press,” he wrote a senator, “is absolutely necessary.” He got that authority in May 1918 when Congress passed the Sedition Act, criminalizing, among other things, “abusive language” about the government.
Wilson’s Justice Department successfully prosecuted Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate who received 900,000 votes for president in 1912, for making statements opposing the war. The Wilson administration barred Socialist newspapers from the mails, jailed a filmmaker for making a movie about the Revolutionary War (don’t rile our British allies), and prosecuted a minister who claimed Jesus was a pacifist. German-language books were removed from libraries, German-language newspapers were forced out of business, and one state banned speaking German outdoors.
It was an ugly period in our history. It’s also a reminder that big-government liberals can be as much inclined to suppress civil liberties as small-government conservatives can — or more so.
Fortunately, things changed after Wilson left office. A Republican Congress allowed the Sedition Act to expire in 1921. Debs received 915,000 votes for president in 1920 while in Atlanta federal prison, but President Warren Harding, a former journalist and a Republican, commuted Debs’s sentence to time served, effective Christmas day 1921, and invited him to the White House.
The Espionage Act of 1917 remained on the books and was amended to cover news media. But it was used sparingly. Franklin Roosevelt, who served in the Wilson administration, didn’t use it in World War II. When his attorney general urged him to prosecute the Chicago Tribune for a story three days before Pearl Harbor that detailed military plans for a possible world war, he brushed the recommendation aside. That despite the fact that New Deal Democrats were as paranoid about the Republican and isolationist Tribune as conservatives have been in recent times about the New York Times.
Roosevelt did order the internment of West Coast Japanese Americans in 1942. But an act apologizing for that and providing restitution was passed with bipartisan majorities and signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988.
Presidents and attorneys general of both parties have been reluctant to use the Espionage Act when secret information has been leaked to the press because they have recognized that it is overbroad. They have understood, as Moynihan argues in Secrecy, that government classifies far too many things as secrets, even as it has often failed to protect information that truly needs to stay secret.
Barack Obama and his Justice Department seem to be of a different mind. They have used the Espionage Act of 1917 six times to bring cases against government officials for leaks to the media — twice as many as all their predecessors combined.
“Gradually, over time,” Moynihan writes, “American government became careful about liberties.” Now, suddenly, it seems to be moving in the other direction.
― Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor, and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. © 2013 The Washington Examiner
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In time, governments become more concerned with their own preservation than the lives of the citizens they were originally intended to protect.
THe Espionage Act could have been used against Tom Hayden/Jane Fonda and company for aiding the North Vietnamese during the war.Unfortunately Watergate wiped out a planned congressional hearing into their “Hanoi Lobby” activities on Capital Hill, especially after Congress learned of their trip to Paris in Oct. 1973 to get instructions for setting up the 1974-75 anti-aid lobbying campaign.
Hayden used the Coalition to Stop Funding the War to illegally use tax-exempt organizations, esp. churches, to funnel donations to the lobbying effort. He was never really called on it, though you will find some information on the Hanoi Lobby and Anti-Defense Lobby in the hearings of the House Ways & Means Committee hearings on revising the Lobbying Act, held in 1987, statement/report attached to the publication.
John Kerry should have been charged, as well as Hayden/Fonda/Dellinger, etc. under the 1798 Logan Act which forbids a private US citizen from “negotiating” with a foreign government (i.e. conducting foreign policy outside of the government).
A hearing on this, or a trial, would have opened up the can of worms of the Hanoi Lobby and how it operated throughout the world and thru Hayden’s group, PCPJ, New Mobe, Women Strike for Peace, World Peace Council and Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Vietnam, the latter having been takenover in late 1972/early 1973 by the maoist Revolutionary Communist Party of Barry Romo and company.
While the Espionage Act of 1917 was not written well, it did have very definitive sentences about “aiding and abetting the enemy during a time of war”.
Court decisions up to the federal level held that Vietnam was a “war” and a “legal” one at that. Thus the prosecution of the Hanoi Lobby would have been not only justified, but eye-opening, to say the least (would have nailed Tom Harkin and a bunch of the old Communist Party network in Congress for aiding the enemy - Conyers, Abzug, Cranston, etc).
If you only knew what was going on back in those days, information that never made it to the light of day, you would cringe and demand firing squads immediately.
Don’t even ask about the newsmen who served the communists, a few willingly, many as dupes such as in the Pham An spy case.
That is something George W. Bush should have done back in the day when the Shadow Warriors in the State Department, CIA, and Senate Committee were stabbing him in the back. But he didn’t, and we had a milquetoast Karl Rove creation; and we have never recovered from it.
Presidents and attorneys general of both parties have been reluctant to use the Espionage Act when secret information has been leaked to the press because they have recognized that it is overbroad. They have understood, as neverdem ~:” Moynihan argues in Secrecy, that government classifies far too many things as secrets, even as it has often failed to protect information that truly needs to stay secret.
Barack Obama and his Justice Department seem to be of a different mind. They have used the Espionage Act of 1917 six times to bring cases against government officials for leaks to the media — twice as many as all their predecessors combined.”
Eric Holder had personally signed for the subpoena (under the Sedition Act of 1917) for information against Rosen .
The “Just-Us” Dept. had to go to three judges to get the subpoena signed ; that means that 2 judges had to have ‘declined’ to issue.
Only after there was a great hue and cry in the press about the Rosen case did Holder indicate that he had no intention of prosecuting Rosen.
Also , the subpoena included Rosen’s parents phone records: Also , his employers (Fox News )phone records
Knowledge of the issuance of subpoena were to be divulged 30 days after issuance; this notification never happened .
With no prosecution of Rosen , nor the intent to prosecute , this issuance of the subpoena under the Sedition Act of 1917
was a subtrefuge to get arround the legal issues of a reporter who was only doing his job.
This subpoena gave the Federal Dept. of “Just-Us” the right to conduct a FISHING EXPEDITION to circumvent legal
and moral issues ; a ‘bending of the law’if you will.
Or in more colloquial terms : “OverReach”
One can only imagine that since this happened recently , perhaps other fishing expeditions may have happened in the recent past.
One issue that comes immediately to mind is Sheryl Atkinson and her coverage of Benghazi.
Great summary! Never thought about the Espionage Act, but Kerry was open to myriad UCMJ charges as well. He was still in uniform. Never happened. But it’s interesting that he chose Boston College for his Bachelor of Law degree. The notorious Fr. Drinan, who ran for and was elected to Congress, was Law faculty at BC, and JF*K worked on his campaign. Guess we’ll never know whether it was a dishonorable discharge that kept him from the better-known law schools, but we certainly DO know that his connection to a BC democrat helped in his admission to ANY law school!
Apparently “firing” car dealers by the car tsar.
BINGO! We have a winner. For the best description of how that happens read a book called The Political Illusion by Jacques Ellul.
“It’s also a reminder that big-government liberals can be as much inclined to suppress civil liberties as small-government conservatives can — or more so.”
Huh?
Obamalocks....
The Constitution is too old...
The Contract with America is too new...
But the 1917 espionage act is just right.....
The Curse of Obamanation continues to be “Moving Forward” with NO resistance from our sorry Congressional RINOs.
Thanks neverdem.
The stinking ghost of Woodrow Wilson still lives, and almost a century later his despotic legacy is a repressive tool in the hands of our latest wannabe dictator. Wilson, like Obama, hated the Constitution and its system of checks and balances that hindered Executive power. Woodrow Wilson was the father of Big Government in America.
Kerry first applied to Harvard Law School.
They turned him down due to inadequate grades as a Yale undergraduate.
Thus, JF*K was forced to settle for BC.
What an idiotic smear in service to the appearance of even-handedness. How, pray tell, do a "small-government conservatives" enforce their supposedly tyrannical agenda without big government? Answer, they don't. What we want is for government to stop forcing its amoral agenda down our throats.
Outstanding.
That’s certainly true on its face. But I still think there’s more to it than that. Why BC? I thought he applied to Yale as well. It’s too much of a coincidence that Drinan happened to be at BC and Kerry happened to be accepted there. I don’t know what the current standards are, but back then a DD kept you out of ALL law schools.
Huh?
________
Zackly.
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