
After denouncing it for a century they have had a collective epiphany.
For a century after the Espionage Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by Democrat President Woodrow Wilson, our friends on the left have consistently denounced it as antithetical to democracy. They objected when it was used to jail socialist Eugene Debs in 1918 and continued to condemn the statute 55 years later when the Nixon administration deployed it against Daniel Ellsberg pursuant to the Pentagon Papers. As recently as 2013, the Guardian accused the Obama administration of McCarthyism for using this law to “persecute” whistleblower Edward Snowden.
