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Excerpts from the March 26, 2025 discussion on CNN NewsNight:
van der Veen: The perjury statute requires the element of intent, and if there's no intent, there's no crime. And you not only have to prove that intent beyond a reasonable doubt, but when you look at their testimony of “I don't really remember,” are you going to convict her on that? You're not going to.
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Host: The bigger issue has to do, maybe, with the Espionage Act. So explain to me gross negligence and who may have been either grossly negligent or negligent.
van der Veen: The Espionage Act comes from 1915. It came at the end of World War I when Woodrow Wilson, in his State of the Union, asked for that piece of legislation. It was always intended, until recent amendments, for somebody who had information and tried to use it to hurt the country. There had to be an intent to harm the nation. They did amend it to add gross negligence, but some people could even say gross negligence is unconstitutionally vague; what's negligence, what's gross negligence, what's reckless negligence? There are standards that are going to be hard to really apply, particularly in this circumstance, because nobody alleges, and I don't myself believe, that anybody [in the Signal Messenger chat] intended to hurt the country. This was certainly negligence because somebody pushed the wrong button to get the wrong guy on.
The Espionage Act isn't really meant for this circumstance; even, I believe, the amendments to it aren't really contemplating this. This was not a wide dissemination of information. First of all, it was one person added that shouldn't have been there. If you want to say it's grossly negligent, well, maybe you need 1,000 people that got added to that to be grossly negligent.
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Conclusion:
van der Veen: We really have to figure out how this doesn't happen again. They need an investigation.
