The Daniel Ellsberg Act: Tlaib’s Push to Stop Using the Espionage Act Against Truth-Tellers

The Law Built for Spies, Used on Truth-Tellers

The Espionage Act of 1917 was passed during World War I to address a specific threat: people transmitting national defense information to foreign enemies during wartime. More than a century later, the statute remains substantially intact — and the government has used it not against foreign spies, but against American citizens who disclosed classified information to the American press about American government conduct. That gap between original purpose and current application is what the Daniel Ellsberg Press Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib out of Detroit on March 12, 2026, is designed to close.

Tlaib’s framing in her official release was direct: exposing government wrongdoing should not be treated like espionage. The bill targets what she describes as an “abuse” of the law that has recurred across administrations, both Democratic and Republican.

Three Cases, One Statute

The pattern is consistent across decades and administrations. Three cases illustrate it.

What the Bill Would Actually Do

The Daniel Ellsberg Act proposes three structural changes to how the Espionage Act operates.

The Espionage Act Across Administrations

One detail worth stating plainly: the use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers and journalists’ sources is not a partisan problem. The Obama administration used the Espionage Act to prosecute more sources than all prior administrations combined. The Trump administration prosecuted Snowden, pursued Julian Assange under the statute, and has signaled continued interest in using it against leakers. The Biden administration inherited Assange’s extradition proceedings and continued them before an eleventh-hour deal was reached. Tlaib’s bill describes the pattern as “abuse” across administrations — because it is. The statute does not care who is in office. It provides a tool, and successive administrations have used it.

The Michigan Angle

This bill came out of Detroit, not a Washington messaging cycle, and that distinction matters. Michigan is already dealing with FOIA resistance from state and county agencies, record integrity disputes in courts and probation systems, and increasing friction between institutions and independent reporting. Clutch Justice has documented these patterns across Barry County, court administrative offices, and MDOC. The Espionage Act is a federal statute, but the question it raises is not. When an institution can classify information, control access to records, and prosecute or threaten disclosure, the power asymmetry between institution and public is structural — whether the instrument is a federal secrecy statute or a county’s refusal to comply with a FOIA request. The Daniel Ellsberg Act challenges that asymmetry at the federal level. The underlying question applies at every level of government: what happens when the system decides the truth is the threat?

Why This Matters

The law currently has a built-in advantage in favor of secrecy: it can classify information, control access, and prosecute disclosure. What it cannot tolerate is exposure. The Daniel Ellsberg Act challenges that imbalance not by expanding rights in theory, but by limiting the government’s ability to weaponize secrecy in practice — by requiring proof of harmful intent, by creating space for public interest arguments, and by protecting the press from prosecution for doing what the press exists to do. Whether the bill advances through the current Congress is a separate question from whether the underlying problem it names is real. It is. Every journalist who self-censors because a source faces Espionage Act exposure, every source who stays silent rather than risk prosecution, every story that doesn’t get told because the legal risk is too high — those are the operational consequences of a law that treats disclosure as the offense and intent as irrelevant.