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 greater 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 Oct. 18, former FBI agent Terry J. Albury was sentenced to four years in federal prison for leaking classified information to the press after he grew frustrated over the agency's abuse of immigrants, including racism and xenophobic attitudes. He sent secret FBI files to the media, which published it.
The Espionage Act passed Congress in 1917 just after the United States 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.
On Sunday, while you were eating the leftovers from Thanksgiving and watching the afternoon's football games, the National Security Agency stopped acquiring the call data records of millions of Americans.
Meantime, a National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, sent to the press hundreds of thousands of documents that showed the United States routinely collected information on its citizens. Mr. Snowden ultimately wound up in Russia, where he remains today under political asylum. Like Manning, he claimed that Americans had a right to know that the government spied on them. The State Department has asked the Russian government to extradite him to the United States to stand trial for violating the Espionage Act.
And now Donald Trump and his Department of Justice want to halt leaks of government wrongdoing to the press by intimidating potential whistleblowers like Mr. 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 DOJ charged a Treasury Department official for leaking information about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's secret wire transfers. Other indictments are presumably pending in the wings.
So far, no reporters themselves 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.
Jack Fruchtman teaches constitutional law and politics at Towson University. His email is jfruchtman@towson.edu.