![]() That Winner’s single charge resulted in more than five years in prison is an indication of just how seriously the Espionage Act can be prosecuted it’s also part of an almost consistent struggle between the free press and the US government across administrations. She was arrested shortly after the story published in June 2017 and sentenced to five years and three months in federal prison on one count of transmitting national defense information under the Espionage Act. Reality Winner was a contractor with the National Security Agency when she leaked a classified government report about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to the Intercept. High-profile Espionage Act cases often involve leaking classified government information to news sources. Who has previously been charged under this act, and for what? ![]() That yielded 11 tranches of documents, four of which are top secret, three of which are labeled “secret,” three others labeled “confidential,” and one labeled “various classified/TS/SCI documents,” meaning they’re meant to be read only in secure rooms by people with high levels of security clearance, according to the Justice Department’s property receipts. Violating the Presidential Records Act alone would be significant enough, but, as Haberman said, “the fact that there were documents marked ‘classified’ in these boxes raised all kinds of concerns from federal officials.” Even more concerning, Trump apparently didn’t return all of the records falling under the Presidential Records Act - prompting Monday’s Mar-a-Lago search. When NARA finally received those documents earlier this year, Haberman reported, they found several marked “classified.” They also contained a number of documents that fell under the Presidential Records Act, and NARA spent the better part of 2021 negotiating with Trump’s team to obtain those records. Those boxes contained, as Haberman recounts, items like a raincoat and golf balls. That didn’t happen at the end of the Trump administration instead, as Maggie Haberman reported on a recent episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily, Trump took 15 boxes of material with him when he departed for Mar-a-Lago as Joe Biden took office. Under that statute, presidential records belong to the national archivist - and therefore the American people - when a president leaves office, unless that person has the permission of the archivist to dispose of records that are no longer useful. ![]() The Presidential Records Act is a post-Watergate innovation that “changed the legal ownership of the official records of the President from private to public, and established a new statutory structure under which Presidents, and subsequently NARA, must manage the records of their Administrations,” according to the NARA website. Under the Presidential Records Act, which relates to the retention of government documents by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), official documents and other material or information a president or a vice president may have obtained while in office must go to NARA for preservation. Section 793 specifically states that people legally granted access to national defense documents - people like the former president - are subject to punishment should they improperly retain that information. The Mar-a-Lago search warrant referred to Section 793 - “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,” which doesn’t just cover “spying” in the sense that many think of when they hear the term. The Espionage Act is actually a series of statutes under 18 US Code Chapter 37 related to the collection, retention, or dissemination of national defense or classified information. After a week punctuated with reprimands of the Department of Justice by Republican lawmakers and their subsequent demands for accountability following an FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, the search warrant released Friday indicates the search was conducted in connection with, among other things, the Espionage Act. ![]()
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