[dragonwriter]

> Convicting a non-resident non-citizen of espionage for sharing someone else's leaks would be a fairly shocking decision

The usual foreign intelligence case officer is a non-citizen, often non-resident, whose main business is soliciting, recieving, and redistributing other people's leaks of sensitive information.

It is, to say the least, not at all unheard of for such people to be convicted of espionage, as they are literally the primary target of espionage laws.

> I haven't seriously followed what charges could be brought over the 2016/Russia question, since it seems relatively unlikely that a Trump DoJ would bring a case there.

“Trump DoJ” is too simple of a model; both the Special Counsel's Office at DoJ and other DoJ offices (notably SDNY) are bringing indictments politically uncomfortable to Trump, stemming from (but not always specific to) the “2016/Russia question”.

[Bartweiss]

I mentioned non-resident with the purpose of excluding domestic spies like Anna Chapman, though perhaps "not active in the US" would have been more appropriate.

As for the DoJ, I agree that I simplified the issue. I'm making the assumption that the indictments we've seen so far are much more tractable for those offices than charging Assange would be, but perhaps I'm wrong about that.

I thought Espionage Act charges hadn't been levied against noncitizens operating wholly outside the United States, who would instead be charged under local espionage laws where they acted, US classified materials or other act-specific laws, or UCMJ spying rules in times of war. All of the cases I'd previously read about were either US citizens or foreigners like Truong and Yatskov who acted directly within US borders. It turns out this isn't true.

I'd never heard of Alfred Zehe, but apparently he was a German citizen who did some analysis for the Soviets in Mexico, and was arrested on Espionage Act charges when he later visited Boston. He filed for dismissal over this exact point - that he was a non-citizen, not in the US, and not directly accessing American sources - but was refused. And in a bizarrely ironic twist, it was Robert Mueller who directed prosecutors to withhold documents from the defense over "national security" that had already been offered to Warsaw Pact governments.

So it looks like not only was I wrong on the history of Espionage Act charges, but there's direct evidence that the current Special Counsel has no hesitation aggressively prosecuting such cases. I appreciate the correction.