[driveway]

Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!

Pretty treasonous whoever leaked these transcripts. I wonder if they can find out who did it.

Absolutely not treason.

Treason, in the United States, is a very specific crime:

"As treason may be committed against the United States the authority of the United States ought to be enabled to punish it: but as new tangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free governments, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the Convention has with great judgment opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger by inserting a Constitutional definition of the crime."

James Madison - Federalist 43

The Constitutional definition of Treason, from Article III:

"Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason."

So there are two kinds of Treason in the US: Levying war and adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.

There have been a few court cases dealing with the definition of Treason, for example in the case Ex parte Bollman the Supreme Court ruled:

To conspire to levy war. and actually to levy war, are distinct offences. The first must be brought into operation by an assemblage of men for a purpose, treasonable in itself, or the fact of levying war cannot have been committed.

So merely planning to wage war against the US is not treasonous, an 'assemblage of men' must take place in order to reach the level of treason.

When it comes to the question of 'aid and comfort' there aren't any Supreme Court cases which specifically describe what constitutes an 'enemy' but all of the legal literature I can find in 20 minutes of Google-fu are pretty clear that there must be a declaration of, or a levying of war before there can be an enemy. So absent an 'assemblage of men' armed, listed, and marching for the purpose of deposing the United States government, or a declaration of war against a foreign adversary, no crime whatsoever in the United States rises to the level of treason.