Kendra Kingsbury, an FBI intelligence analyst, who pleaded guilty in October to two counts of willful retention of national defense information, and was sentenced on June 21 to 46 months in prison.Robert Birchum, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, who pleaded guilty in February to one count of unlawful retention of national defense information, and was sentenced on June 1 to three years in prison.When Trump made a similar claim in a speech following his June 13 arraignment, CNN listed seven other people – all convicted between 20 – who were charged under the same provision of the Espionage Act. Not only is it unlawful if an individual “willfully communicates, delivers, transmits” such documents to “any person not entitled to receive it,” the law also says it is illegal if a person “willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.” 793 (e), which is the part of the Espionage Act that makes “unauthorized possession” of documents “relating to the national defense” a crime. Instead, he has been charged - 31 times - with violating 18 U.S.C. It has nothing to do with a former president legally keeping his own documents.”Īs we’ve written before, Trump is not being charged as a spy. … The Espionage Act has been used to go after traitors and spies. “An act for a crime so heinous that only the death penalty would do, is one of the most outrageous and vicious legal theories ever put forward in an American court of law. “harging a former president of the United States under the Espionage Act of 1917, that’s like making nuclear weapons in your basement, isn’t it?” Trump said. Trump is not the first non-spy to face charges under a section of the Espionage Act pertaining to the illegal retention of classified information, contrary to his suggestion that this is a novel legal strategy from federal prosecutors. Trump made those claims at this month’s Faith & Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington, D.C., where he spoke for roughly 90 minutes. But IRS agents told Congress in May that it hadn’t been established that Biden was with his son, as Hunter Biden claimed in a July 2017 WhatsApp message. He also said that an IRS whistleblower “revealed that crooked Joe sat in a room while his son Hunter messaged a Chinese Communist Party official” about money.What he left out was the part of the article that said NARA can refer suspected violations of law to the Department of Justice, as it did in Trump’s case. Trump accurately quoted from a January New York Times article that said the National Archives can’t on its own enforce a request that a former president return presidential records to the government.But other individuals who weren’t alleged to be spies have been convicted of violating the same section of that federal law concerning the willful retention of national defense information. Trump complained that charging him for alleged Espionage Act violations is an “outrageous and vicious” legal argument because he’s not a spy.Trump also made an unsubstantiated claim about President Joe Biden. In June 24 remarks, former President Donald Trump made misleading claims about the reach of the National Archives and Records Administration and the federal charges he is facing for allegedly retaining classified documents after he was no longer in office.
0 kommentar(er)
