Could the National Security Archive be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing historical documents that U.S. intelligence agencies now say are classified?
Could Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice be detained for continuing to publish historical intelligence records on the State Department web site that the CIA has flagged as classified?
Could thousands of historians and librarians around the country be arrested for retaining and circulating volumes of the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series that are now considered to contain classified documents?
These seem to be silly questions.
And yet the theory of the Espionage Act that has been adopted by the government in its prosecution of two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (who are not charged with espionage) may extend even to silly cases such as these.
The Espionage Act’s prohibitions on the unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information apply to “whoever” may violate them, the government insisted in a January 30 motion.
“Whoever means, ‘no matter who’,” the government contended. “The statute covers ‘anyone’.”
Until now, the Espionage Act has never been interpreted this broadly, and for good reason. Using the Act to penalize the public receipt and distribution of government information leads to absurd conclusions.
Over the past few months, the Trump administration has been laying the foundation to expand the use of the Defense Production Act (DPA) for energy infrastructure and supply chains.
Get it right, and pooled hiring becomes a model for how the federal government decides what to do together and what to do apart. That’s a bigger prize than faster hiring. It’s a more functional government.
As of March 2026, there were at least nine documented U.S. wrongful arrests tied to face recognition misidentification. Errors like these are as much human as machine.
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?