Kill the Espionage Act, an American Abomination to Civil Liberties

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

18 June 21

Reality Winner is free, but the law that saw her imprisoned should be struck from the books.

his is unqualified good news from the Guardian. A towering idiocy has been corrected. And, if we’re lucky, we’ll all be more well-informed about our recent past.

[Reality] Winner was sentenced to five years in 2018, after being convicted of leaking the report. Aged 26, she was the first person charged by the Trump administration under the Espionage Act over a document leak. She pleaded guilty as part of a deal. Prosecutors said Winner, who was working for a defense contractor, Pluribus International Corporation, printed a classified document that showed how Russian military intelligence hacked at least one voting software supplier and attempted to breach more than 100 local election systems before polling day in 2016.

But, from the New York Times, of course…

Once she is released from the halfway house, she will still not be able to talk about any of the documents she reviewed while working at the National Security Agency, but she will be able to speak broadly about issues that concern her.

God knows, we can’t know what she knows. It was the NSA’s election, not ours. We can’t frighten the children or scare the horses or prompt a mean email from the Crackerpot Palace down in Florida. Well, here’s one thing we can do: We can get Congress to kill the Espionage Act really, most sincerely dead. It is a meat-ax abomination to civil liberties born in one of the worst periods for civil liberties in our history: the days of A. Mitchell Palmer and that prince of fools, President Woodrow Wilson, who said while pushing for the bill’s passage:

There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.

And Mexico is not sending us their best people, either.

In October of 1917, Fightin’ Bob LaFollette, the great Progressive senator from Wisconsin whose birthday we celebrated on Monday, rose in front of a hostile Senate to inveigh in defense of free speech during wartime. It is one of the greatest defenses of free speech ever delivered by an American politician, and it was delivered by a man who had so stubbornly resisted the drive toward American involvement in World War I that people seriously called for him to be hung, shot, or at least expelled from the Senate. (It was a federal judge who called for him to be shot.) He also was the enemy of all the enabling legislation, including the Espionage Act, that makes Wilson such an indelible canker on the presidency. LaFollette, a man whose bag of fcks was pretty small to begin with, emptied them all in the faces of his war-drunk tormentors.

I have in my possession numerous affidavits establishing the fact that people are being unlawfully arrested, thrown into jail, held incommunicado for days, only to be eventually discharged without ever having been taken into court, because they have committed no crime. Private residences are being invaded, loyal citizens of undoubted integrity and probity arrested, cross-examined, and the most sacred constitutional rights guaranteed to every American citizen are being violated.

It appears to be the purpose of those conducting this campaign to throw the country into a state of terror, to coerce public opinion, to stifle criticism, and suppress discussion of the great issues involved in this war.

I think Bob LaFollette and Reality Winner might get along. I hope her life is everything she wants it to be. And I hope one day her truth will be revealed.