It is meant to send a message to anybody else considering speaking truth to power: Challenge us and we will destroy you. The purpose of an Espionage Act prosecution is to ruin the whistleblower personally, professionally and financially.
President Obama has used the Espionage Act to prosecute those whose whistleblowing he wants to curtail. And just to add insult to injury, as a part of his plea bargain, Kim had to stand before the judge and say, “I am not a whistleblower.” His wife left him and moved back to South Korea. Kim also lost his job, his home and his family. And an administration official called the information that Kim was convicted of giving Fox “a nothing burger.”īut that didn’t stop the Justice Department from forcing Kim to take a plea to a felony that sent him to prison for a year and a half.
This was something that was a regular part of his job. His reward was 10 espionage charges, all of which were eventually thrown out, but not until he had lost his job, his home, and his pension.Īnd one man, a State Department analyst named Stephen Kim, took a plea to an espionage charge after he was arrested for having a conversation with a Fox News reporter about North Korea. He went to the NSA’s Inspector General, the General Counsel, the Pentagon Inspector General, and then to the Congressional Oversight Committee, just like he was supposed to. Tom Drake, a senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA), blew the whistle on an illegal and wasteful program to intercept the communications of American citizens. The Justice Department’s decision to file espionage charges against Edward Snowden under the same act is another example of the Obama administration’s policy of using an iron fist against human rights and civil liberties activists.īut there are other cases, too. government policy, I was sentenced to 30 months in prison. was torturing prisoners at black sites around the world and that torture was official U.S. I was charged with three counts of espionage. In most cases, what they did was the definition of whistleblowing: They revealed evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality. Most of them were prosecuted for whistleblowing. Instead they were charged with passing what the statute calls “national defense information” to members of the press or academia. None of those individuals gave or sold classified information to a foreign power. But President Obama’s Justice Department has charged nine individuals with espionage since he became president.
You see, from 1917 until 2008, the Espionage Act was used only three times to prosecute individuals not accused of aiding a foreign country. At least it wasn’t until Barack Obama became president.
The truth of the matter is that the Espionage Act is almost never used.
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