Truman even commuted Monti's sentence in on the condition he rejoin the Air Force via History Net. It wasn't until the Washington Post looked into Monti's time in Italy and discovered he'd joined the SS that the truth came out. Monti was arrested again and pleaded guilty to treason in He was sentenced to 25 years. This time, he served 11 before anyone let him out again. Before he got a job working for Joseph Goebbels, Douglas Chandler was a contributor to National Geographic and was known as the magazine's man in Germany.
Since this was Nazi Germany, he was considered an invaluable source of information in the pre-war years. The trouble was, Chandler wasn't exactly unbiased. Throughout the late s, he dripped a steady stream of pro-Nazi propaganda stories into National Geographic.
When war finally broke out, he simply ditched his cover and started broadcasting Nazi propaganda openly. Under the name "Paul Revere," Chandler broadcast a radio show to up to , Americans nightly.
He divided his audience into "Jew haters" and "Jew servers. Before the war was even over, the FBI had indicted him for treason and, as soon as victory was declared in Europe, they tracked him to a Bavarian village. Chandler was convicted in and spent 15 years in prison, one of the longest sentences of any defector.
Freed by the JFK administration, he returned to Germany. People have reported meeting him on trains as late as the s. His views hadn't changed one bit. The surprise Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor sucked for everyone, but it super-sucked for those Americans who happened to be in Japan when the war kicked off. Stuck in wartime Japan, d'Aquino took a job at a Tokyo radio station to make ends meet.
Her English broadcasts, built around sappy songs and a little bit of commentary, became notorious for supposedly undermining U. The key word there is "supposedly. Soldiers testified that they'd heard her broadcasting Axis propaganda, and she was convicted.
However, the truth was actually much murkier. By the s, it was evident that the soldiers may have either mistaken her for another female English-language propagandist broadcasting out of Tokyo or simply conjured her "subversive" statements from their own battle-scarred psyches. No recordings ever surfaced of her making treasonous statements. As Time notes, the conviction became so confused that President Ford pardoned d'Aquino in Historians today still can't agree on if she was an actual traitor or just unlucky.
While Tokyo Rose was trapped in Japan at the outbreak of war, Axis Sally had been sitting comfortably in Germany for years by that point. An Ohio actress who moved to Dresden in , Sally real named Mildred Gillars was sympathetic to the Nazi cause and joined the propaganda department after war was declared.
Her whole schtick was to play nostalgic American songs and then ponder all the things servicemen's wives might be doing with the neighbor while they were away. Hint: It wasn't playing cards. Still, she sometimes made more direct threats, as when she broadcast a chilling warning to Allied soldiers just before the D-Day landings. It was this last broadcast, incidentally, that got her. The D-Day broadcast was the one clear act of treason the courts could agree on, and Axis Sally went down for 12 years.
Not that this was the end of her life. After her release, the former Nazi spokeswoman enrolled in a convent back in Ohio, where, according to Britannica she taught French, music and, erm, German. When World War II kicked off, it seemed like all the nutters in American society came crawling out the woodwork and went scuttling off to Berlin's radio stations. Aside from Douglas Chandler, Axis Sally and debatably Tokyo Rose, Axis broadcasts were overwhelmed with also-rans and one-offs who briefly poisoned the airwaves, only to be soon forgotten.
One such guy was Robert Henry Best, a former newspaperman who was so anti-Semitic that he felt his best choice was to throw his lot in with the Nazis. As old local papers from his state show, he was convicted of treason after the war and died in prison. He wasn't the only one. Herbert John Burgman was another American turned Nazi-Infowars broadcaster so just like regular Infowars , then who was convicted after the war and died in prison.
Although their trials were big news at the time, they're both now forgotten. Ironically, one of the traitors we today remember the best was never actually convicted of treason at all. The poet Ezra Pound above spent part of the war screaming anti-Semitic propaganda out of the radio before surrendering and being indicted for treason in However, he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial and, per History News Network , ended the war being shipped off to a psychiatric hospital.
He stayed there for 12 years. At time of writing, Tomoya Kawakita has holds a minor, yet notable, place in the U. Kawakita remains the last American citizen to be convicted of treason. Yep, the Rosenbergs came later. And again, nope, they weren't convicted of treason. Like many others, he was a dual U.
Unlike many others, Kawakita managed to take the lemons life had handed him and turn them into particularly sadistic lemonade. In connection with that planned rebellion, the Supreme Court held that a mere conspiracy to levy war does not count as actually levying war. Another treason case resulted from the Christiana Riot, in which dozens of men fought the return of slaves to their owners as required by the Fugitive Slave Act. Jefferson Davis, the former U.
Before trial, however, Chief Justice Salmon Chase made clear his view that the Fourteenth Amendment , which had been ratified a few months earlier, precluded any other treason penalties for Confederates. The poet Ezra Pound was famously prosecuted for Fascist propaganda broadcasts on Italian radio; the case was dropped in , when he was found incompetent to stand trial.
During the Cold War, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted and executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, not treason; the Soviet Union was not technically an enemy. After a half century of no federal treason cases, the indictment of the Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn, in , was the first to concern giving aid and comfort to an enemy that was not a nation.
Gadahn was killed in Pakistan in , by a C. Since the Capitol insurrection, there has been little talk of treason charges.
Investigators examining the emerging evidence on the scope of the plot might disagree. Federal law also makes it a separate felony for anyone who owes allegiance to the U. That vastly widens the net of those who could potentially be charged, including friends, acquaintances, and co-workers of the attackers. Since the attack, many such individuals have, in fact, come forward to give information to law enforcement. Then Trump would have engaged in treason along with supporters who attempted, in his name, to overthrow the U.
At a minimum, it appears that Trump, along with top government officials, was aware that his followers were planning acts of violence. But a Senate conviction requires the votes of at least seventeen Republicans and, so far, looks unlikely. A federal criminal conviction for inciting rebellion or insurrection may offer an alternative route to disqualifying Trump from holding office.
For the time being, the government has indicted more than a hundred and fifty people for crimes related to the insurrection, including unlawful entry, disorderly conduct, theft, destruction of property, firearms offenses, assault on police, conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, obstruction of justice, and even curfew violation.
Convicting propagandist "Tokyo Rose" in was easy enough. When it emerged years later that she had remained a loyal U. Walker could meet the two-witness standard if he was seen bearing his AK rifle on the side of the Taliban.
Proving whether that constituted "levying war" is another story. Walker joined the Taliban in March, before anyone had any idea the sides would be at war. He could argue that to desert after Sept. The government also would have to prove that Walker's commanders made clear to him he was fighting Americans, said John Burris, a prominent California civil rights lawyer.
Walker could argue that Congress has not formally declared war, although that would likely fail, said Sean Murphy, a law professor at George Washington University.
On Friday, he was moved from a forward operating base in southern Afghanistan to a Navy ship in the Arabian Sea. Robert Turner, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said a likelier charge would be to link Walker to the killing of a federal official. Walker was being interrogated by CIA officer Mike Spann just minutes before Spann was killed during a prison uprising in which Walker was shot in the leg.
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