Madison knew that when he wrote, “Congress shall make no law abridging … the freedom of speech, or of the press” he and the ratifiers meant no law. As direct and unambiguous as those words are — the Constitution as amended is the supreme law of the land — Congress and the courts have not always been faithful to them.

Thus, at the height of the anti-immigrant hysteria whipped up by President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters, Congress enacted the Espionage Act of 1917, which punished speech deemed harmful to America’s war efforts. Wilson was determined to win the First World War at the price of the suppression of ideas that he hated or feared.

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The Espionage Act was used aggressively and successfully (from Wilson’s vantage point) during the war and in the immediate years following.

Then, a series of Supreme Court decisions instructed that the Act is probably unconstitutional as its sole purpose and effect is to suppress speech. These opinions harkened back to Madison, who believed that the only moral and constitutional remedy for hateful or harmful or even seditious speech was not suppression and punishment but rather more speech.

That attitude prevailed generally in the legal and judicial communities and at the Department of Justice for a few generations — even during World War II — until now.

Now, the Trump DOJ has indicted a non-American whose alleged crimes took place in Europe for numerous violations of the Espionage Act, and it has done so in direct defiance of a Supreme Court decision that ruled against this during the Nixon years.

The non-American is Julian Assange, a radical and unorthodox publisher of truthful information that often exposes the hypocrisy of government. His entity for exposure is WikiLeaks — the website known for receiving stolen data and for posting true and accurate copies of them. . . .

In a landmark decision, known as the Pentagon Papers case, the Supreme Court ruled that a publisher may reveal whatever materials come into the publisher’s possession, no matter how they got there, so long as the materials are themselves material to the public interest. . . .

Assange is also protected by the values underlining that “no law” language. The whole purpose of the First Amendment, numerous courts have written, is to promote and provoke open, wide, robust political debate about the policies of the government. . . .

(Excerpt from Fox News, commentary by former judge Andrew Napolitano.)