According to Article III, treason against the United States consists only of (1) waging war on the United States or (2) sticking to our enemies and giving them aid and comfort. “Working with foreign countries to harm the United States” is not part of the definition; It would be in many countries, but not in ours. In a separate article, I will discuss the “raise war” argument with particular reference to cyberattacks. This article will focus on sticking to the enemy. This chapter, referred to in the text, was contained in the original “present Act”, i.e. the Act of October 6, 1917, c. 106, 40 Stat. 411, known as the Trade with the Enemy Act, also known as the Commerce with the Enemy Act, which is primarily assigned to this chapter. For a complete classification of this Act in the Code, see section 4301 of this title and the tables. But – and this is the crucial point – we did not do it. The United States did not choose to treat Russian interference as an act of war. And for good reason. Imagine what an actual war with Russia would look like; That is, imagine a nuclear holocaust.
We simply will not enter into an open war with Russia. And not because the Trump administration might be a Russian puppet. President Hillary Clinton would not have launched a war against Russia under these circumstances. A response is clearly needed, but it will not take the form of open war. For all the internet commentators who insist that we are at war with Russia, believe me, if we were really at war with Russia, it would be transparent to everyone. When the story of Donald Trump Jr. The Post contacted me again and asked for further analysis of the treason law. I was reluctant to do that at first; Although the facts are different, the legal issues are essentially the same. But I agreed to write something, stressing again that cooperation with Russia cannot be treason, because Russia is not an “enemy.” Although the high treason law has many complications, this question is not even close. U.S.
law defines treason unusually narrowly. As a result, I argued, many crimes that are clearly treason against the United States are not technically treason. Finally, there is an argument recently made by a Daily Kos blogger – suppose an American citizen helped plan the attack on Pearl Harbor. Before the attack, Japan was not technically an enemy, but it would be ridiculous to say that the Americans did not commit treason. Similarly, Americans who helped Russia before interfering in the elections are in the same situation. The treason charges against Donald Trump Jr. are undoubtedly extremely satisfying for many people. But in the context of history, such accusations must be treated with great caution. To support this argument, one must accept that (1) treason should be expanded from the narrow definition of the Constitution in a way that no court in the United States has ever sanctioned; (2) It is a good idea to accuse a political opponent of the capital crime of high treason, with the implicit suggestion that execution might be an appropriate punishment; (3) It is a particularly good idea to encourage the use of treason trials, which can only be initiated by the U.S. Department of Justice, against political opponents at a time when the Department of Justice is under the control of Jeff Sessions.
(4) Hundreds, if not thousands, of other people are also guilty of treason for aiding Russia, for becoming a formal enemy under our law at an undetermined and unspecified date; and (5) U.S. policy should effectively declare that there is an open state of war between us and another nuclear power. The words “ally of the enemy,” as used here, mean: To better focus the analysis, let`s assume it`s not Russia. Suppose Belize has done everything Russia is supposed to do. Could we argue that Belize has waged acts of war against the United States and respond with a declaration of war against Belize, or at least with the bombing of Belize with a punitive strike? Probably. Most nations would probably condemn us for overreacting and call for sanctions as a better way to deal with the problem. But, at least theoretically, one could imagine that the U.S. government would respond to foreign election interference with military action to such an extent that the interfering foreign country could now be considered an enemy under our treason law.
In February, when Michael Flynn`s story came up, the Washington Post asked me to write an article on the treason law for its weekly “Five Myths” article. I stressed, among other things, that Flynn`s ties to Russia could not constitute treason, because Article III requires that aid and comfort be given to an “enemy” and that Russia was not an enemy in the sense of American treason. None of this is to say that Trump Jr.`s behavior was legal. There is a lot of space between “no betrayal” and “legal”. The behavior of Trump Jr. was also not child abuse or arson, but that shouldn`t give him much legal comfort. As I argued in the Post, there is “a significant gap in our legal vocabulary — we don`t have a good term to describe behavior that is not technically treason, but is nonetheless a betrayal of the United States.” The extraordinary narrowness of the U.S. High Treason Act means that a wide range of disloyal behavior cannot be punished as treason; Fortunately, it can almost always be punished like something else. The court ruled that the conversations and events well before the indictment constituted admissible evidence on the issue of the accused`s intent.
More importantly, it concluded that the constitutional requirement of two witnesses to the same public act or confession in open court does not serve to exclude extrajudicial confessions or confessions if a legal basis for the conviction has been established by the testimony of two witnesses whose confessions or confessions are only corroborating. This relaxation of restrictions on the definition of treason caused obvious satisfaction in Douglas J.A., who saw in Haupt a confirmation of his position in the Cramer case. His unanimous opinion contains what might be called a reformulation of the law of treason and deserves to be quoted at length: In other words, convincing a country technically at peace with the United States to attack the United States is not an act of attachment to the enemy. Foster`s solution was to punish persuasion as an act of death by the king, but this provision was deliberately removed from the U.S. treason law. 1487 325 U.S. to 34–35. Previously, Judge Jackson had stated that this phase of betrayal had two elements: “Clinging to the enemy; and to provide help and comfort.
A citizen, it was said, could take measures “that aid and comfort the enemy. But if there is no loyalty to the enemy, if there is no intention to betray him, there is no betrayal. Id. on 29 Jackson J. erred in stating that the requirement of two witnesses for the same manifest act was an original invention of the 1787 Convention. In fact, it comes from the British Treason Trials Act of 1695. 7 Wm. III, c.3. In 1947, for the first time in its history, the Supreme Court upheld a conviction for high treason in Haupt v.
United States.1488 Here it was found that, although the overt acts on which they relied to support the charge of treason – the defendant sheltered and sheltered his son, who was an enemy spy and saboteur, in his home, helped him buy an automobile and found him a job in a defense factory – were all acts, that a father would, of course, accomplish for a son, This fact did not necessarily relieve them of the treacherous purpose of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. On behalf of the court, Justice Jackson said: “Whether the young chief`s mission was benign or treacherous, known or unknown to the accused, these acts aided and comforted him.