Law Professor Advocates NYT Indictment for Violating Espionage Act

This one’s really good, folks. Writing in Friday’s FrontPage Magazine, Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School Henry Mark Holzer made the case for why the New York Times should be indicted for violating the Espionage Act (hat tip to American Thinker):

It is an article of faith on the Left and among its fellow travelers that the Bush administration stole two elections, made war on Iraq for venal reasons, tortured hapless foreigners, and conducted illegal surveillance of innocent Americans. A corollary of this mindset is that the press, primarily the Washington Post and The New York Times, has a right, indeed a duty, to print whatever they want about the administration—even if the information compromises national security.

Holzer marvelously responded to this absurd notion:

Not true. The press is not exempt from laws that apply to everyone else. The press is not exempt from laws protecting our national security. The New York Times is not exempt from the Espionage Act, as we shall see in a moment.

Holzer then step-by-step walked the reader through the legalese of such an indictment:

First, an Espionage Act indictment of The New York Times would not even remotely constitute an attack on a free press. As Justice White wrote in Branzburg v. Hayes, “[i]t would be frivolous to assert . . . that the First Amendment, in the interest of securing news or otherwise, confers a license on either the reporter or his news sources to violate valid criminal laws.”

Nor would an indictment of the Times constitute an attempt to restrain it from publishing news. The anti-anti-terrorists who seek to justify the Times revealing the NSA’s domestic surveillance program and thus prevent their flagship paper from being indicted, rely on a Supreme Court decision entitled New York Times Company v. United States, better known as the Pentagon Papers Case. Their reliance is misplaced.

This is a must read. For those interested, it is here.