'BradCast' 8/23/2022 (Guest: ACLU's Ben Wizner on the Espionage Act)
On today's 'BradCast':\xa0 New reporting reveals that Donald Trump stole at least 300 documents marked as classified from the White House, with several said to be incredibly sensitive national security documents. The National Archives negotiated with Trump for more than a year to get him to return all of the stolen documents, eventually triggering a grand jury subpoena and court-approved FBI search. Trump reportedly 'went through the boxes himself' before failing to return the stolen documents that he unlawfully possessed. Trump is under investigation for violating the Espionage Act, but civil liberties groups argue the statute is over-broad and misused by the government over decades to target whistleblowers and journalists. BEN WIZNER of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, lead attorney for national security whistleblower Edward Snowden, explains the history and uneven application of the century-old Espionage Act in the past. Wizner discusses how the law 'doesn't distinguish between selling the country's secrets' vs. whistleblowers sharing information with journalists 'in the public interest'; the law's application in high-profile cases like Snowden and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange; and how it may or may not apply to Donald Trump's theft of government documents. Also today:\xa0 New York, Florida and Oklahoma hold primary elections today.\xa0 In Kansas, a partial hand recount of an anti-abortion ballot referendum proved that the measure definitively failed, showing that public, non-partisan, professionally-administered hand-counts, paid for by the challengers (even loony ones), do not undermine but rather boost public confidence in elections.\xa0 Plus Desi Doyen has our latest 'Green News Report.'