Irving Kaufman & Ethel Rosenberg

 Jeffrey St. Clair>>

+ If Trump had given his trove of documents to say Wikileaks (or even Tucker Carlson), he might have a credible claim as a whistleblower. Instead he kept them for his own vanity, flashed them to visitors and had his Justice Department file charges against Julian Assange for violating … the Espionage Act.

+ When I think about the many victims of the Espionage Act, my thoughts immediately go to Ethel Rosenberg, convicted not, as many believe, for treason, but of being engaged in a conspiracy to “commit espionage.” The case against Ethel was thin and manufactured. Even J. Edgar Hoover opposed her execution, which was in the hands of Federal Judge Irving Kaufman, a close friend of her tormentor and prosecutor Roy Cohn. In condemning the couple to death, Kaufman bizarrely blamed them for starting the Korean War, a judgment so irrational it alone should have been grounds for reversal:

[the Rosenbergs] already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.

It was later revealed that over the course of the trial and again before imposing the death penalty, Kaufman had engaged in secret and grossly unethical communications with Cohn, conversations which sealed Ethel’s fate. Her electrocution was nothing short of judicial murder. (See: Judgment and Mercy: the Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs by Martin J. Siegel)

I guess there’s some cold karma in fact that Trump is ensnared by the very same merciless law that his mentor Cohn invoked in his “public burning” of the Rosenbergs 70 years ago. The evidence against Trump is far more voluminous than it was against Julius and Ethel, much of it captured in his own words and in his own gilded bathroom. The Rosenbergs, after all, were convicted of giving away secrets, which weren’t really secrets (and no longer secret in any event) but merely physics. Yet in this case, and here’s where the karmic resonances begin to move in reverse, the Judge who will preside over Trump’s fate is his own appointee, a minimally qualified jurist, who landed on the bench because she was a fawning acolyte of the great swindler, a woman whose one qualification for her lifetime federal gig is that she probably doesn’t even need ex parté communiques to know which decisions she’s expected to make.