re: #57 Belafon

I kind of lean though in the direction of him getting in trouble. If a reporter helped someone plan a bank robbery so that they could have a story, I would be in favor of the reporter getting in trouble.

In the Pentagon Papers case, NYT and WaPo had a valid 1st Amendment defense that kept them out of trouble.

Daniel Ellsberg did not.

The NYT and WaPo had nothing to do with stealing the stuff they published; it was just dropped in their laps.

Ellsberg would have gone to prison for life, except that some seriously over-the-top prosecutorial misconduct invalidated the whole thing. (they broke into his psychiatrist’s office and stole his medical records).

If the prosecutors had stuck to legitimate, established rules of evidence, they could have put him away for life. Which is a risk he understood, and willingly accepted, when he stole the documents.