"Don''t charge Donald Trump with espionage"
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When classified documents were found at Mar-a-Lago, John Kiriakou wrote a column for Consortium News whose headline was "Don''t charge Donald Trump with espionage" and whose subheading was "and don''t charge anyone else either."

The alternative

The proposal in the piece was a return to the practice he had watched in the 1990s: "we need to come up with something akin to what we had in the 1990s when classified information was mishandled, or allegedly mishandled", an administrative penalty rather than a prosecution.

He applies the test consistently to both men. Of the box in Joe Biden''s garage: "who had access to that information? Who saw the information? Who was the information revealed to? Nobody. Maybe it went to his ghost writer. Okay, shame on you, you should have a strongly worded letter put in your personnel file. But espionage? Sorry." Of Trump: "Donald Trump has a problem, he has lots of problems, but in this case he had a problem with taking classified information with him in his retirement. Did he publish it? Did he turn it over to Fox News? Is society a more dangerous place because of it? No, not that anybody has proven. So let''s put a strongly worded letter in his personnel file or something. But to charge him with espionage, which in some cases can be a death penalty case? No. I''m sorry, it''s not appropriate."

What he wants instead

"We need to revamp the whole thing. The Espionage Act needs to be scrapped and rewritten, so that it targets people who mean harm to our country, people who are working on behalf of foreign governments or foreign entities or dangerous terrorist groups or something like that. Not for some absent-minded politician who leaves boxes in his garage, and not for whistleblowers and other lower-level leakers who had their lives destroyed."

See also

- Espionage Act
- The pillow talk leak case
- Consortium News
- Donald Trump
- Joe Biden
- Mar-a-Lago pardon pitch
