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
The question of the year is How did Obama get into Harvard Law? Now there's a project for a young investigative reporter. Any takers? . .
I'm pretty certain that Kerry's first choice was Harvard Law. He was intent on following in JFK's footsteps.
BC may well have come in second because of Fr. Drinan.
I don't recall anything about him applying to Yale Law. Recall the FReeper Congressman BillyBob? He was a Kerry antagonist at Yale -- knew him well, hated his guts. I think BillyBob would've mentioned it had Kerry applied for Yale Law.
If he were following JFK(1), he’d have gone to Harvard undergrad. He didn’t—he went to Yale but couldn’t get into Yale Law (wish I could remember where I read or heard that!), never mind Harvard.
Then his boss---the Pope---told him he wasn't too pleased about that. He had better quit Congress.
And he did.
REFERENCE The DOJ search warrant in the Rosen case cites Section 793(d) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code ...... a person lawfully in possession of secret govt-classified info who turns it over to someone not lawfully entitled to posses it has committed a crime (The source).....anyone who conspires to help the source do that has committed the same crime (The journo).
So why the brouhaha? B/c the Obummber crew has NEVER, EVER exhibited a modicum of interest in defending US ntl security from foreign domination ---- nor has it exhibited a concern for the life and liberties of Americans.
On the contrary----via "immigration reform" Ohaha is forcing on Americans entire primitive populations of creepy savages emanating from antediluvean Third World countries.
THIS IS RICH When the Nigerian jihadist butchered the Brit soldier, then defiantly gave an interview with blood-soaked hands, Ohaha okayed $50 million to his homeland---Kenya---as a sign of Ohaha's "tolerance and compassion.".
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$50 mill to another jihadist hellhole means more stupid futile nation-building ---- to subsidize living standards for dumbos still living in huts---w/ no water, electricity, adequate shelter and food.
But forget these "amenities" --- your tax dollars will build Kenyan "madrassas" to train more of these jihadist zealots to butcher innocent people.
bookmark
If the Lyin’ King can use a 1917 definition of “Espionage” to squash Freedom of the Press, then Perhaps we can use the Constitutional Definition of TREASON to squash HIM!
This made absolutely no sense to me either. Name when small-governmnet conservatives suppress civil liberties?
Isn’t that sentence just bloody weird? I normally have reasonable respect for Barone, I have to wonder how this sneaks into something he has written. How did that happen? Did some staff intern sit down at his word proc while he went to the can but left his computer open?
Wilson was the father of the Federal Reserve in the US. As such he also gave US sovereignty of US finances to the big money baggers in Europe such as the Rothschilds who gave us the likes of Soros and Europe the likes of Marks, Lenin and the communists who would burn our Constitution.
Yes. I was surprised that this particular Jesuit still took orders from his boss. Several of the other Jebbies didn’t.
Isn’t that sentence just bloody weird?
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Yes, very weird.
It hit my eyes as if it were typed in fluorescent font.
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.
Here’s a video of several journalists being harassed by Homeland Security... scary stuff...
http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/29/pro-homeless-pols-give-street-people-the-bums-rush/
Could there be an additional level to the suppression of information by Obama and Co.?
Mind Control.
Please tell me that SOB Church was one of them, I was a kid then, but the more I hear about him it makes my head explode...
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