Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is calling for the Espionage Act to be repealed after the FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and found boxes of classified documents, potentially violating the act.
“The espionage act was abused from the beginning to jail dissenters of WWI,” Paul tweeted. “It is long past time to repeal this egregious affront to the 1st Amendment.”
Paul also tweeted a link to a 2019 post from the Future of Freedom Foundation, explaining the history of dissent against the law and making the case for its repeal.
The Espionage Act was introduced to prohibit sharing information that could harm the US or advantage foreign adversaries during World War I. Section 793 of the act is concerned with “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,” which relates to any document relating to national defense that “through gross negligence” was “illegally removed from its proper place of custody … to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed,” Insider reports.
On Monday, the FBI recovered 11 sets of classified documents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home while executing a search warrant. It is a possible violation of the Espionage Act, according to the search warrant unsealed on Friday.
Some of the materials recovered were marked as “top secret/SCI,” one of the highest levels of classification and are only to be stored in secure government facilities.
The search warrant identifies three federal crimes that the Justice Department is looking at as part of its investigation: violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records.
