June 13,2023
On
Tuesday, for the first time in US history, a former president will be arraigned
in court for violating federal criminal law. The decision to indict Donald
Trump reflects profound divisions within the ruling class and accelerates a
crisis that will rattle the foundations of the American political establishment
in the coming weeks and months.
There
is no lack of political and constitutional reasons for prosecuting Trump. In
his four years as president, he ran roughshod over the population’s most basic
democratic rights. He led an attempt to overthrow the Constitution and
establish a dictatorship on January 6, 2021. He launched a Hitlerian initiative
to separate immigrant children from their parents. He encouraged fascist
supporters to “stand by” in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election in
order to intimidate voters. He pardoned war criminals, declared that “torture
works,” and threatened to blow up Iranian cultural sites in violation of
international law and the Nuremberg Principles.
However,
the Democratic Party-led prosecution of Donald Trump addresses none of these
crimes. While Trump and his main co-conspirators have never been punished for
their attacks on the rights of the population, the Justice Department’s
indictment of Trump focuses solely on his transgressions against the national
security apparatus.
The
indictment centers on Trump’s retention of state secrets relating to US
imperialism’s plans for war. Among the documents that the indictment states
Trump kept after leaving office are those detailing the nuclear capabilities of
the US and its enemies as well as attack plans against various countries and
contingencies for war. The state guards such documents as “top secret” because
the population cannot be allowed to know about them.
To
safeguard its secret war plans, the Biden administration’s indictment relies
for statutory authority almost entirely on the Espionage Act of 1917.
Nothing
progressive can come from prosecuting Trump based on the Espionage Act. For
over a century, the Espionage Act has served as the sharpest legal implement in
the toolshed of state reaction, used for the purpose of suppressing opposition
to imperialist war.
The
Espionage Act, which was based explicitly on the Alien and Sedition Act of
1798, arose in the bloody adolescence of American imperialism, when it
confronted the outbreak of the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
President
Woodrow Wilson first demanded the passage of such a law in his December 7, 1915
State of the Union address, when the United States remained formally neutral in
the imperialist maelstrom into which it was being drawn.
Denouncing
those “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our
national life,” Wilson demanded Congress “enact such laws at the earliest
possible moment” to “do nothing less than save the honor and self-respect of
the nation.” Referring to the growth of strikes and the increasing popularity
of socialism, especially among immigrant workers, he said, “Such creatures of
passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed out. … The hand of our power
should close over them at once.”
Wilson’s
speech set the tone for the debates surrounding the two most important and
interrelated pieces of congressional actions of 1917: the declaration of war
against Germany and the Espionage Act.
In
his formal address to Congress asking for a declaration of war, Wilson blamed
German intrigue for internal dissent: “From the very outset of the present war
it has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of government
with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our national
unity of counsel, our peace within and without, our industries and our
commerce.” He again demanded swift passage of a bill to safeguard the state’s
war plans and crush dissent. Such a bill was introduced in early April, passed
the House by a 261-109 vote on May 4, passed the Senate by an 80-8 vote on May
14, and was signed into law by Wilson on June 15.
The
debates and passage of the Espionage Act coincided with the rapidly developing
revolutionary changes taking place in Russia.
In
February, the revolutionary upheaval of the Russian workers and peasants forced
the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, and a bourgeois provisional government was
established in its stead. In April, simultaneous to the introduction of the
Espionage Act in the House, Lenin returned to Russia. In mid-April, anti-war
sentiment among Russian toilers exploded when a secret letter pledging
continued support for the war, written to the allies by the provisional
government’s foreign minister, Pavel Miliukov, was leaked to the public.
Washington
followed these developments with the most intense concern and attention and
enacted the Espionage Act to protect the state from the threat of revolution
and to eliminate obstacles to waging imperialist war.
Since
becoming law, the Espionage Act has served as the statutory foundation for the
massive national security apparatus that both parties have constructed over the
last century. In his book Secrecy, former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote
that with the passage of the act, “The modern age began.” He continued:
Three
new institutions had entered American life: Conspiracy, Loyalty, Secrecy. Each
had antecedents, but now there was a difference. Each had become institutional;
bureaucracies were established to attend to each. In time there would be a
Federal Bureau of Investigation to keep track of conspiracy at home, a Central
Intelligence Agency to keep tabs abroad, an espionage statute and loyalty
boards to root out disloyalty or subversion. And all of this would be
maintained, and the national security would be secured, through elaborate
regimes of secrecy.Over
the course of the 20th century, the Espionage Act has been utilized by
Republican and Democratic administrations to carry out some of its most
atrocious crimes.
Among
the Wilson administration’s first targets was Eugene V. Debs, the revolutionary
leader of the Socialist Party. Debs was arrested and convicted for violating
the Espionage Act after delivering an anti-imperialist speech in Canton, Ohio,
in which he attacked the war and the capitalist class. “Every solitary one of
these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an
arch-patriot,” Debs declared. “Every one of them insists that the war is being
waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false
pretense!” Debs ran for president in 1920 from prison and won almost a million
votes.
Others
were jailed for speaking out against World War One, including Emma Goldman,
Kate Richards O’Hare, Charles Schenk and Jacob Abrams. Thousands of immigrants
were arrested and deported for their political views in a series of raids which
Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, justified in part under the
Espionage Act.
During
the Second World War, after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Attorney General
Francis Biddle had convicted 18 members of the Socialist Workers Party under
the Smith Act for opposing the war, Biddle used the Espionage Act to bar the
SWP from distributing its publication, The Militant, through the mail.
In
the years following the Second World War, the Espionage Act served as the
pseudo-legal backbone for the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s,
including most notoriously the murder of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on June 19,
1953 on trumped-up charges that they conspired to conduct atomic espionage for
the Soviet Union. The government decided to charge the Rosenbergs under the
Espionage Act rather than the Atomic Secrets Act because the former carried a
death penalty while the latter did not.
In
1971, the Nixon administration charged Daniel Ellsberg with violating the
Espionage Act after the former RAND employee provided the New York Times and
Washington Post with the Pentagon Papers, which detailed the war plans and
crimes of US imperialism in Southeast Asia.
Though
presidential administrations of the 20th century were hesitant to use the
Espionage Act too often, any restraint was abandoned by Barack Obama, whose
Justice Department prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than all
previous presidents combined.
The
Obama administration prosecutions focused solely on stopping leaks of military
documents to the press. Those prosecuted by Obama included Jeffrey Alexander
Sterling, a former CIA officer who revealed to New York Times journalist James
Risen details of covert CIA spying on Iran; Thomas Drake, a former National
Security Agency official who attempted to blow the whistle on NSA spying to the
Baltimore Sun; Chelsea Manning, who provided information about US war crimes in
Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks; John Kiriakou, who leaked information about
the illegal torture of detainees; Edward Snowden, who provided journalists with
a mass of documents showing the NSA was engaged in massive illegal surveillance
against the world’s population; and Daniel Hale, who leaked internal military
documents about the Pentagon’s drone assassination program.
The
decision to prosecute Trump under the Espionage Act comes as the Biden
administration continues to fight to extradite WikiLeaks publisher Julian
Assange from Belmarsh prison in London where he has been locked in a cell for
four years. Prior to his confinement in Belmarsh, Assange was forced to take
refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was effectively detained
for seven years. Assange’s “crime” is that he published evidence of massive war
crimes conducted by American imperialism and its allies. He faces a potential
170-year prison sentence under Espionage Act charges.
Trump
is no victim of the state. He is the former commander in chief of the US
military and a fascistic conspirator. But the prosecution of Donald Trump under
the Espionage Act can produce no progressive outcome. This is precisely why the
Democratic Party has selected the Espionage Act as its legal vehicle for
attempting to remove Trump from the political arena, and it is in line with its
strategy for opposing Trump on the basis of right-wing foreign policy
considerations ever since he took office in 2017.
Trump
is the leading Republican candidate for president, and the prospect of his
return to office is a very real and dangerous one. But the ruling class knows
that the war which the US and NATO are escalating against Russia will unleash
profound opposition, and they are preparing their mechanisms to suppress and
illegalize anti-war sentiment and crush strikes that threaten production. The
Espionage Act will no doubt be used for this purpose.
To
generate support for its war, the ruling class is appealing to an extremely
reactionary layer of the upper-middle class. The method of the working class
for opposing Trump is entirely different from the method of sex scandals and
anti-Russia hysteria. Immense social struggles are on the horizon as workers
confront the social and economic costs of the escalating war. Armed with a
socialist political perspective independent of both the Democrats and
Republicans, the working class has the power to stop both fascist dictatorship
and imperialist war.
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