Espionage Act Has Been Used To Silence Dissent In The Past

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – You may recall that when the United States got involved in World War I, there was the first-ever conscription; there was a draft.  There were many, many American men that were constitutionalists and were still federalists and they said: No, you don’t have the authority to draft us.  Hell no, we won’t go.  The Espionage Act was used to prosecute people that were opponents of Woodrow Wilson’s entre or his goading of the United States to enter into World War I.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  This cloak and dagger that’s going on here, especially when it pertains to members of the media, members of the press corps that are the subjects of this, it has the appearance of a government that does not want the people that hired the government to know what it is that it’s doing.  It can invoke at every turn national security.  My problem with this is we have to take it on good faith. This is an article of faith.  I am being asked to pray at the altar of national defense and to believe my almighty, magisterial federal overlords, who would never ever lie to me and never have lied to me, that what they say is true and that that’s the real reason why the AP reporters, and yesterday the big news that James Rosen of Fox News, were being investigated and indeed warrants were issued to surveil.  Just reading it, it’s spooky reading what they did to Rosen.  Isn’t that spooky, the way the FBI was radioing back?  They had agents following the man.

AG:  Absolutely.

Mike:  Google was sitting there transmitting to the Department of Injustice and to the FBI all of Rosen’s emails, all of them.  He might have been writing notes to his wife for all we know?

AG:  Where would you say the government should draw the line in terms of trying to figure out leaks?  Do you then say the line is going anywhere into the private sector?

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Mike:  I say if someone in the federal government, an employee of the federal government, is transmitting what they know to be top-secret information that would lead to an escalation of hostilities, meaning they were then acting as an aider and/or abettor of an effort by some other entity, and it has to be a country — it cannot be an individual; it has to be a country — that is conspiring to make war on them, then they are covered by the definition of treason, as I understand it.  We pointed this out earlier today when we were doing show prep.

Eugene Robinson cites the Espionage Act of 1917.  As I told you, the Espionage Act of 1917 was a nice name and it sounds like a great act.  It sounds like: They’re just trying to stop people from turning over state secrets.  That was not the purpose of the Espionage Act.  It was the Espionage and Sedition Act.  It was passed, as I remember reading about this — I was trying to recall earlier so I could go to the source and re-read it.  The Espionage Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Wilson.

You may recall that when the United States got involved in World War I, there was the first-ever conscription; there was a draft.  There were many, many American men that were constitutionalists and were still federalists and they said: No, you don’t have the authority to draft us.  Hell no, we won’t go.  The Espionage Act was used to prosecute people that were opponents of Woodrow Wilson’s entre or his goading of the United States to enter into World War I.  I’m just very suspicious.  I don’t trust these people.  They use national security and the ability to make war as an excuse to abuse their authorities all too often.  I am on Rosen and the AP reporters’ side 100 percent on this one until proven otherwise.

AG:  Would you say then that the jailing of Bradley Manning would be ill-advised or wrong?  He didn’t do it to aid a foreign entity or country.

Mike:  Then he is a political prisoner.  He is an American Nelson Mandela.  He has been identified as someone that is not going along with America’s penchant and lust and thirst for never-ending wars, so we’ve got a place for you, buddy, called jail.

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AG:  But even if he knew, as part of his employment with the military, I forget which branch —

Mike:  He was in the Army, wasn’t he?

AG:  I think it was Army.  Even if he knew his employment with the Army be contingent that you are not allowed to leak information lest you be faced with jail time as a possibility for doing that.

Mike:  As the government grows in size, its machinations cannot be known to the populous because they might reject it.  It seems to me that the government’s interest is not in protecting the American sheeple so much as it is in protecting the American sheeple that work for the government and are involved in the affairs of State.  I’m glad Eugene Robinson brought up the Espionage Act.  It was either Robert Higgs or Anthony Gregory or maybe even Tom Woods that had written about the Espionage Act and its true purpose, which was to basically allow the federal government to silence and jail people that opposed Wilson’s desire to get us involved in World War I.  Eugene Robinson writes this, speaking about the subpoenas of the AP reporters:

[reading]

It also may well be unconstitutional. In my reading, the First Amendment prohibition against “abridging the freedom . . . of the press” should rule out secretly obtaining two months’ worth of the personal and professional phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, including calls to and from the main AP phone number at the House press gallery in the Capitol. Yet this is what the Justice Department did.

The unwarranted snooping, which was revealed last week, would be troubling enough if it were an isolated incident. But it is part of a pattern that threatens to redefine investigative reporting as criminal behavior.

 

[end reading]

Mike:  I think he’s right.  They want to make it criminal behavior so no one will do it, that way the government can operate in total secrecy.  You don’t want the government operating in total secrecy.  This whole idea that this clandestine world has to be erected here so that the United States can dabble and meddle in the affairs in the entire known universe, that’s what’s really at issue here.

[reading]

The Post reported Monday that the Justice Department secretly obtained phone and e-mail records for Fox News reporter James Rosen, and that the FBI even tracked his movements in and out of the main State Department building.

[end reading]

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Mike:  That’s the creepy part of it, that they were following him.  They weren’t just eavesdropping and reading his email.  They were following him, James Rosen.  [mocking] “Well, Mr. Church, what do you think of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?”  At least they leaked their secrets to an actual State entity.  Do you remember the case of the Rosenbergs?  Did you study that in high school?  Do you remember reading about that?

AG:  That was definitely one of the cases we studied in college.

Mike:  I think they were Marylanders, weren’t they?  I want to say that they lived in the D.C. area.  Maybe they lived in New York, somewhere on the East Coast.  I’m just going to say this off the record because I don’t recall —

AG:  New York.

Mike:  I believe they were the last two Americans that were executed for espionage, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.  There’s an independent documentary that’s made about this.  Their family still swears today, their children and grandchildren still swear that their parents were duped, that they were innocent.

End Mike Church Show Transcript