Team Trump Is Serious About Unleashing the Espionage Act on the Media [View all]

Source: Rolling Stone

Team Trump Is Serious About Unleashing the Espionage Act on the Media

Ryan Bort and Asawin Suebsaeng
Mon, June 30, 2025 at 8:05 PM EDT

Donald Trump hates leakers. He isn’t a fan of journalists, either. He wants to punish them both in response to reporting that early Pentagon intelligence found the administration’s recent strikes against Iran weren’t as effective as the president has been claiming.

“They should be prosecuted,” Trump said when Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business asked him about his contention that Democrats leaked the intelligence, adding that the administration could attempt to force reporters to reveal their sourcing by saying: “National Security.”

One of the ways Trump has discussed cracking down on leakers and the press is by wielding the Espionage Act, a 1917 law criminalizing the dissemination of sensitive information that could harm U.S. national security or aid a foreign nation. In the months leading up to his second presidency, Trump and several of his advisers and close allies talked about novel ways the Espionage Act could be unleashed not just against government leakers and whistleblowers, but against media outlets that received classified or highly sensitive information, according to two sources involved with such conversations with Trump.

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Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/team-trump-serious-unleashing-espionage-000535029.html

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