The espionage law, the law that has often used in criminal cases that involve leaks or mismanagement of classified information, contains a provision that makes a criminal to reveal secrets of national defense “through serious negligence.”
The law does not require that the information be classified, because it was written before the classification system existed. The law refers simply to “national defense information.”
The specific provision says: “(e) Whoever, having to have or have legal possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photography, photographic negative, blue printing, plan, map, model, note or information, related to national defense, through severe negligence, allow the same to be eliminated from their adequate place of custodium or delivery to any person in violation of their trust or should To the same negligence, to those who are broken, eliminated, eliminated or deleted, They are given, or delivered, delivered, or delivered.
Brad Moss, a lawyer whose practice is dedicated to security authorizations and classified information, said it is “the most reasonably applicable disposition of the espionage law for both Secretary Hegseth and for the National Security Advisor Waltz”, which refers to the Secretary of Defense Pete Pete Hegseth and Trump’s main assistants, Mike Waltz’s editor, who participated in a group of strike in a group of a group of a group of a group of a group of a group of a group High level, the high -level group strike plans that ineymenmen ineymen ineymen inheart.
This provision was summoned by the critics of the FBI’s decision not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton in relation to the classified information that she and her assistants discussed in a private email system not sure.
“To give a pass to Mrs. Clinton, the FBI rewritten the statute, inserting an element of intention that Congress did not require,” Andrew McCarthy wrote for National Review, including Bold Type for emphasis. “The element of added intention, in addition, makes no sense: the point of having a statute that criminalizes serious negligence It is underlining that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; When they do not carry out that obligation due to serious negligence, they are guilty of irregular serious. “
Moss said that another law that seems to be applied here is 18 USC 1924, which makes it a crime to eliminate the classified information to retain it “in an unauthorized place.” While the law requires that the material in question be classified, Moss said that there could be no doubt that the material revealed in the group chat of the Trump administration officials was classified.
“There is no way for a reasonable person to think that military operational details or real -time intelligence on military attacks are not classified, and if they do, they are not qualified to occupy high -level positions in the United States government,” he said.
In normal circumstances, Moss said, the DNI would carry out an evaluation of damage to calculate exactly the information was shared in these chats on a non -governmental platform and to determine what information came to the reporter, and probably a criminal derivation to the Department of Justice would follow.
Moss said he does not believe that this happens under this administration.
Trump officials repeatedly said that the messages in the chat of the signal application did not include classified information, and in testimony before the Chamber Intelligence Committee this morning, Tulsi Gabbard, director of National Intelligence, continued to insist on that point. Gabbard also said that the National Security Council was making a review of the incident.
There is a precedent for high -level officials to get into problems for leaks or mismanagement secrets. When the name of an undercover CIA officer was leaked during the George W. Bush administration, a special prosecutor who announced criminal charges against the chief of cabinet of the vice president, Scooter Libby. In recent times, former CIA director John Deutsch and former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger were among those disciplined by poor management incidents. And the former director of the CIA, David Petraeus, was prosecuted a decade ago after giving notebooks that contain military secrets to someone who wrote a book about him.
