A year after the start of WWI, President Woodrow Wilson addressed his message to Congress and warned that the “gravest threats against our national peace and safety” did not come from “other governments”, but from “within our own borders”.
“Citizens of the United States,” Wilson continued, “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.”
Wilson, a notorious racist and a supporter of the KKK who had contempt for a wide variety of other peoples, likely had German immigrants, but not just them, in mind when he called for what would become the Espionage Act so that “we may be purged of their corrupt distempers.”
“I need not suggest the terms in which they may be dealt with,” Wilson concluded.
When former President Trump was indicted under the Espionage Act, he was being targeted by a law that from its very inception had been created to suppress the political opposition. While elements of the Espionage Act were watered down over the years and only media hacks still quote “shouting fire in a crowded theater” as if it were standing law, that hasn’t really changed.
Widely loathed by liberals and leftists, who were justly often the targets of it, the Espionage Act was mostly used against actual spies during the Cold War. That changed dramatically under Obama who dusted it off and used it to go after reporters and whistleblowers. A decade ago, the Obama administration used the Espionage Act to target FOX News reporter James Rosen.
The Espionage Act allowed Obama to use warrantless wiretapping to bust leakers who were in many cases acting as whistleblowers and trying to expose his administration’s misconduct.
