Rand Paul,
a Republican Senator from Kentucky, called for the Espionage Act to be repealed
after Donald Trump, former President of the United States, was charged under
the Act. Donald Trump, 76, is being investigated by the Justice Department for
potential violations of the Act. “The Espionage Act was abused from the
beginning to jail dissenters of World War I,” Rand Paul tweeted, adding: “It is
long past time to repeal this egregious affront to the 1st
Amendment.”

Paul, 59,
also shared a link to a 2019 article by Jacob Hornberger, a former Libertarian presidential
nominee, called the Espionage Act a “tyrannical law”. The Espionage Act of 1917
goes back to World War I. According to Insider, the Espionage Act was
introduced to prohibit sharing information that could harm the United States of
foreign advisories.

Also Read | Donald Trump’s litany of scandals: A timeline

The key
facet of the Espionage Act – Section 793 – is concerned with “gathering,
transmitting or losing defense information.” It relates to documents national
defence, that “through gross negligence” was “illegally removed from its proper
place of custody…to be lost, stolen, abstracted or destroyed.

Federal
investigators took numerous boxes of documents from Donald Trump’s home Mar-a-Lago
in Florida. An unsealed search warrant revealed that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) seized 11 classified documents, some of them marked top
secret.

The
Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating if Donald Trump violated Section
793 of the Espionage Act and potentially broke two other laws, according to the
warrant unsealed by the DOJ on Friday.

Also Read | Was Trump just being Trump? FBI search at Mar-a-Lago raises questions

Charles
Booker, the Democrat Senate candidate who will be up against Rand Paul in the
general election, called Paul’s call to repeal the Espionage Act “shameful”. “Rand
Paul is now calling to repeal the Espionage Act after the world learned Donald
Trump is under investigation for violating it,” the Democrat tweeted Saturday. “When
I am elected to the Senate, you will never have to question my loyalty to the
country.”