Rand Paul Calls for Abolition of Espionage Act Following FBI Raid on Trump’s Florida Estate

The former president is being investigated for potential violations of the Espionage Act, the same rarely used law which the Trump and Biden Justice Departments have used to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul has demanded the repeal of the Espionage Act, saying it conflicts with provisions of the Constitution protecting free speech.

“The Espionage Act was abused from the beginning to jail dissenters of WWI. It is long past time to repeal this egregious affront to the 1stAmendment,” Paul tweeted late Sunday.

The lawmaker accompanied the tweet with a link to a 2019 article by the Future Freedom Foundation, a Virginia-based nonprofit and think tank advocating for civil liberties, arguing why the Espionage Act should be repealed.

The FFF characterizes the Espionage Act a damaging “relic” of US involvement in the First World War, and a major threat to press freedom.

Paul’s tweet comes amid the ongoing US push to extradite Julian Assange, who is not a US national, on charges that he violated the Espionage Act by publishing verified evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It also follows in the wake of the partial unsealing of documents by the Justice Department on Friday indicating that the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on August 8 was related to allegations that the president may have kept classified documents at his private residence, in violation of the Espionage Act.

Despite repeatedly clashing with Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries, Paul became an on-again, off-again ally of the president when his policies coincided with the libertarian-minded Kentucky senator’s views, particularly on foreign policy.

While most Democrats and some Never-Trump Republicans have remained silent on or even praised the Mar-a-Lago raid, Paul has expressed support for the former president, going so far as to warn that an impeachment inquiry may be warranted against Attorney General Merrick Garland for authorizing it.

“I’ve never been a fan of overusing impeachment, but I think there has to be an investigation. And if it warrants it, there’s going to have to be a look at whether or not the attorney general has misused his office for political purposes. Have they gone after a political opponent? I mean, this is beyond the pale. No one would have ever imagined before that we would be using, or one political party would be using the FBI to attack their political opponents,” Paul told Fox News last week.

Paul comes from a political family of lawmakers opposed to what they feel is government overreach in citizens’ lives. His father, 86-year-old former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, has also criticized the 1917 law at length. He has also spent decades attacking the FBI itself as a harmful agency seemingly “designed to spy on Americans who might be disagreeing” with government’s policy and calling for its abolition.

Trump’s supporters have accused the Biden administration and their allies in Congress of using the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago as another attempt to try to bar the businessman from making another bid for the White House in 2024.