Between 1917 and 2009, only one person was convicted of violating the Espionage Act for leaking classified information to the press.
Then the Obama administration came along and prosecuted eight government whistleblowers at a far higher rate than those undertaken by all previous presidential administrations.
These included Thomas Drake, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, and (almost) Edward Snowden.
The Trump administration continues the trend. On October 18, former FBI agent Terry J Albury was sentenced to four years in federal prison for leaking classified information to the press after he became frustrated by the agency’s abuse of immigrants, including racism and xenophobic attitudes.
The Espionage Act passed Congress in 1917 just after the US entered World War I. Legally and constitutionally the act raised an ironic question: How could authorities enforce it in light of the First Amendment? A good deal depended on the “intentions” of the speaker or writer.
The old English common-law principle regarding expression was based on “the rule of proximate causation”; that is, the relationship between spoken or written words and subsequent illegal actions.
The first key case before the Supreme Court involved Charles T Schenck, secretary of the Socialist Party in America, who printed, distributed and mailed to draft-eligible men information that advocated opposition to US involvement in the war.
There was no leak to the press, but his conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court.
One of the most publicised cases occurred in 2011 when army private first class Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning, released hundreds of thousands of national security documents and video recordings tapes to WikiLeaks.
Manning was indicted for violating the Espionage Act.
In 2013, after announcing that she was a woman, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, the longest in a leak case, and dishonourably discharged from the army.
President Barack Obama commuted her sentence, after which Donald Trump as a presidential candidate called her an “ungrateful traitor.”
Meantime, a National Security Agency contractor, Edward J Snowden, sent to the press hundreds of thousands of documents that showed the US routinely collected information on its citizens.
Snowden ultimately wound up in Russia, where he remains today under political asylum.
The state department has asked the Russian government to extradite him to the US to stand trial for violating the Espionage Act.
And now Donald Trump and his department of justice want to stop leaks of government wrongdoing to the press by intimidating potential whistleblowers like Albury and others.
In August, a woman charged with leaking a government report on Russian hacking in 2017 was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
And last month, the justice department charged a treasury department official with leaking information about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s secret wire transfers.
Other indictments are presumably pending.
So far, no reporters have been targeted.
But given the president’s attacks on “fake news,” which is news he does not like or want the public to know, and claims that the press is the “enemy of the people,” the next in line may well be reporters and editors.
