The Conversation - The Espionage Act, explained

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You may think the Espionage Act is about spying. You’d only be partly right.

Although the act specifies that spying for a foreign government will earn you a lifetime behind bars, such spy cases are rare, write national security legal experts Thomas Durkin and Joseph Ferguson. More typically, the act has been used in cases involving the “unauthorized gathering, possessing or transmitting of certain sensitive government information.”

That’s why you’ve likely been hearing a lot about the act recently. FBI investigators cited a portion of the Espionage Act in their search warrant for sensitive government documents believed to be in former President Donald Trump’s estate, Mar-a-Lago. Liberals and the anti-Trump wing of the GOP got excited that Trump might be prosecuted for espionage, while the former president’s defenders attacked the raid as the kind of abuse you’d find in a banana republic police state.

That constituted a role reversal of sorts; in the past, liberals have largely been critical of the Espionage Act, while conservatives have championed it.

All this confusion led us to ask Durkin and Ferguson to set out the facts about what’s really in the Espionage Act, what it protects and how it’s been used.

Also today:

Naomi Schalit

Senior Editor, Politics + Society

Former President Donald Trump, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Aug. 6, 2022, in Dallas. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images

You don’t have to be a spy to violate the Espionage Act – and other crucial facts about the law Trump may have broken

Joseph Ferguson, Loyola University Chicago; Thomas A. Durkin, Loyola University Chicago

Two national security law experts explain how the Espionage Act isn’t only about international intrigue, and share other important points about the law that was invoked in a search of Trump’s estate.

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