Espionage seems not to be protected by the First Amendment

From The Washington Post:

A decade-long feud between Reps. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) appeared to end in Boehner's favor yesterday when a court ruled McDermott liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and legal fees over an illegally taped conference call he leaked to reporters.

In a 5 to 4 opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the offense was especially egregious because McDermott was a senior member of the House ethics panel at the time.

The case stretches back to December 1996, when a couple using a police scanner illegally taped a cellphone conference call between House Republican leaders discussing ethics allegations against then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). The couple gave the tape to McDermott, who turned it over to news outlets.

When McDermott became a member of the ethics panel, he "voluntarily accepted a duty of confidentiality that covered his receipt and handling of the . . . illegal recording. He therefore had no First Amendment right to disclose the tape to the media," Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote for the majority.

Good. Nobody with an IQ in the double digits ever believed that that old couple with the scanner recorded Boehner's conversation that it was innocent happenstance. The ONLY real question was whether McDermott was the one who ordered the surveillance and wiretapping of if he was just another soldier following the orders of a higher-up.

This incident was every bit as bad as what G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt did in the Watergate affair. It is just a shame that McDermott can't be sent on a years-long tour of the federal penal system to encourage him to talk the way Liddy was.