On Tuesday, President Trump denounced the New York Times in a Truth Social post as a “serious threat to the National Security of our Nation” and a “TRUE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE” for publishing an article detailing Trump’s close personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. “Chasing women was a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency,” the Times reported.
That was the Times’s second recent treasonous offense. After the Times published a story on how 79-year-old Trump was “slowing down physically” and “showing signs of fatigue” in his second term, Trump declared on Truth Social on December 9: “There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me!” Trump proclaimed that “it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean ‘THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.’”
The following week, Trump raised eyebrows by repeatedly falling asleep during a televised cabinet meeting. The Justice Department has not filed treason charges against websites that reposted videos of Trump fading off.
Trump is using practically a mirror image of treason compared to the standard the Founding Fathers canonized. Because America’s founders had seen horrific political abuses in England in prior times, the Constitution specifically and narrowly defined treason: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”
President Trump is instead using a Lese Majeste standard of treason, presuming that anything that denigrates the supreme leader is a betrayal of the nation.
Trump’s contortion of treason is no novelty in American politics. In the wake of the January 6, 2021 clash at the US Capitol, many Democrats wanted to label any protester who entered the Capitol as a traitor. Even before Trump supporters poured into the Capitol that day, Democrats were accusing them of sedition for filing legal challenges to the 2020 election results, including popular Twitter hashtags such as #GOPSeditiousTraitors and #TreasonAgainstAmerica.
Turn back the clock to 2006, and it was congressional Republicans leading the charge to condemn the media for treason. On June 23, 2006, the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been illegally vacuuming up financial records passing through a Belgian hub for international banking. According to Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey, the US government may have conducted “hundreds of thousands” of warrantless searches of personal financial data. The Bush White House quickly re-labeled the surveillance program the “Terrorist Finance Tracking Program” and thus the media became guilty of helping terrorists destroy America. Treasury Secretary John Snow denounced the Times article as “irresponsible and harmful to the security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide.” ”Freedom-loving people” miraculously became a trump card against the First Amendment.
Congressional Republicans stampeded to condemn the media. Rep. Peter King (R-NY), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, declared, “We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous.” Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) condemned the “Benedict Arnold Press.” Rep. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) declared, “Loose lips kill American people.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared that the New York Times “hate[s] George W. Bush so much that they would be prepared to cripple America in order to go after the president.”
I appeared briefly on Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” the day the Times story was published, and my criticism of the warrantless surveillance provoked enraged e-mails. One guy suggested that “every know-nothing lying jackass like you should be rounded up and gassed with the Iraqi poison gas that does not exist according to you.” He failed to explain the connection between the actual illegal surveillance and the imaginary poison gas.
In an article for American Conservative shortly after that scandal broke, I observed that the “endless threats of treason prosecutions against whistleblowers, reporters, and editors may be a last ditch attempt to prevent Americans from learning about secret presidential orders that would make the National Security Agency wiretapping [exposed by the New York Times in December 2005] look like kids’ stuff.” Seven years later, Edward Snowden revealed federal surveillance crime sprees worse than almost anyone suspected, obliterating the credibility of the US government. The NSA was targeting any American or anyone else in the world who it labeled as a terrorist suspect because they were detected “searching the web for suspicious stuff.” Members of Congress stampeded to condemn Snowden as a traitor, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) publicly joked about putting Snowden on a government kill list. Snowden’s courage helped expose the prevailing bipartisan standard in DC: We have nothing to hide and we’ll kill you if you prove otherwise.
Should we assume that the louder politicians holler about treason, the more crimes they are hiding? Trump’s appointees at the Justice Department and the FBI assured America six months ago that there was nothing more to disclose on the Jeffrey Epstein case. On Christmas Eve, the Justice Department announced that the FBI had discovered a million not-yet-disclosed documents on the case. Oh bother.
Actually, the same hollering-and-hiding pattern goes way back. Did the congressmen who denounced the exposure of the illegal financial surveillance in 2006 realize that the Bush administration (and three subsequent presidents) deceived the American people by hiding the role of the Saudi government in financing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks? As Axios reported last month, “An ongoing federal court case is revealing new details about Saudi officials’ alleged ties to the terror plot — and the potential liability that government faces. The lawsuit unearthed evidence showing one Saudi official — who acknowledges aiding two men who became hijackers — made a drawing of a plane and a mathematical formula that allegedly could have been used to fly into the World Trade Center.”
But the real danger is the New York Times, right?
Unfortunately, Trump is continuing a long presidential tradition of saber-rattling against free speech. Happily, the Supreme Court carved into stone a bright line that no elected official can cross without placing themselves in grave legal peril. In the landmark 1971 Supreme Court case on the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote that the First Amendment protected the media because “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government… The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.”
As President Trump concludes his Truth Social posts, “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
