Espionage Act

The Espionage Act of 1917 is a federal law that criminalizes, among other things, the unauthorized gathering, retention, or transmission of national defense information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Its national-defense-information provisions, codified at 18 U.S.C. section 793, apply regardless of whether the material was later declassified, and have been used in cases ranging from leaks to the mishandling of classified documents. The Act formed the basis of several counts in the 2023 federal indictment of Donald Trump over his deliberate retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, a case later dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon on unrelated grounds.