Can you be prosecuted for not quitting a group chat where you are invited accidentally and you're aware of it?

Question

Recently journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally invited into a Trump administration group chat. He shouldn't have been in there, and he ended up quitting the chat on his own.

Had he not quit and the admins only found out much later, would it be a prosecutable offense, given that he was aware of the impropriety and would have decided not to quit?

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EDIT: I'd clarify that the question is preferably interpreted as @Jen said: other facts (such as whether classified information is involved) are to be handled separately.

Answer 1

• The chat contained what was presumably classified information posted by senior government officials.
• Under US law, it is illegal to knowingly publish, furnish, use, ... classified information without authorization. In this case, Goldberg's statements show he knew. Ignorance may be a possible defense to that.
• Some members of this chat were presumably authorized to authorize the declassification of this classified information.
  (That's from news reports, I have no hard source on that.)
• Prior to his second term, President Trump argued in a classified materials case that there was no form requirement for the President to declassify information; he could note it on a napkin or speak it loud and it would be done.

So Goldberg could argue that the DefSec and others had cleared him for the information they shared.

Answer 2

I can certainly imagine one scenario where the chances of prosecution are indeed very high - if you are accidently invited to a chat group created by terrorists, and you don't quit immediately.

Note that anti-terrorism laws (not just in the US but around the world) are so perverted that in many such cases, you aren't "innocent until proven guilty" but "guilty until proven innocent" (i.e. the state has a lesser burden of proving your guilt, and the onus is more on you to prove your innocence).

The New York Times (Sep 2011): The goal of stopping terrorism before it happens caused federal law enforcement officials to make early arrests and then to rely on charges that required little proof of concrete conduct. Prosecutors often charged defendants accused of involvement in terrorism with conspiracy or “material support” of groups said to engage in terrorism ... in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court ruled that it could also be a serious felony merely to urge terrorist groups to use peaceful means to resolve disputes. Such speech, the court said, amounted to material support and could be made criminal notwithstanding the protections of the First Amendment ... Aggressive use of material support and similar laws, critics responded, chipped away at two principles that had been thought settled for about half a century. One was that mere membership in a subversive organization cannot be made a crime ... The Humanitarian Law Project decision “is akin to the kind of criminalization in the McCarthy era of speech and guilt by association,” said David D. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown who represented the challengers in the Humanitarian Law Project case as a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

... A second law already on the books, this one allowing the arrest and detention of material witnesses — people said to have evidence of others’ crimes — was misused, critics say, as a shadow preventive detention regime. Instead of using the law to make sure people with information about the wrongdoing of others would turn up to testify, these critics said, prosecutors used the law to hold people themselves suspected of links to terrorism.

References:

1. Civil Liberties Today
2. Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Answer 3

canada

Without more, there is no criminal offence made out by the mere act of knowingly remaining in a group chat you've been invited to.

Answer 4

It depends.

The question says to ignore whether classified material is present, but that fact is quite relevant, as is whether the person in question has or has held a security clearance and a need to know.

In the general case, no, there is no such requirement.

For special cases (like the one in this incident) where classified information is involved, it's more complicated.

If you are a government employee, officer, or contractor with a security clearance, then knowingly retaining classified information in an unauthorized location is a crime under 18 USC 1924.

(a) Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than five years, or both.

(b) For purposes of this section, the provision of documents and materials to the Congress shall not constitute an offense under subsection (a).

(c) In this section, the term “classified information of the United States” means information originated, owned, or possessed by the United States Government concerning the national defense or foreign relations of the United States that has been determined pursuant to law or Executive order to require protection against unauthorized disclosure in the interests of national security.

Of course, providing the classified information to another unauthorized person would also be illegal under 18 USC 798, but merely retaining it without authorization or retaining it in an unauthorized place is sufficient for prosecution under 18 USC 1924.

Whether it's illegal for someone who is not a cleared government employee, contractor, etc. who has sworn to protect classified information to knowingly publish classified information that they've gained access to is something of an open question. The most relevant case I'm aware of is the landmark New York Times Co. v. United States, 1971, where the Supreme Court overturned an injunction that the Nixon administration had obtained against the New York Times for further publication of contents of the Pentagon Papers. The Supreme Court ruled that barring the New York Times from continuing to publish contents of the papers would violate the First Amendment, despite their status as classified material. However, the court stopped short of ruling that such an injunction would always be illegal or that the publication could not be prosecuted later.

The lack of a clear ruling on whether the government may prosecute a non-cleared person for disclosure of classified information is due primarily to the lack of attempted prosecutions for such cases. The MTSU First Amendment Center quotes the litigation director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press as describing a WWII-era case against a reporter from the Chicago Sunday Tribune as stating that the case was "the only time in American history that the United States government has ... taken steps toward prosecuting a member of the media under the Espionage Act." The government convened a grand jury in the case, but ultimately declined to charge him and instead seal the case, so no rulings on the legality of such charges arose from the case.

In the case of Julian Assange, who was obviously not a cleared person, his charges (and subsequent guilty plea) stemmed not from merely disclosing information that had been given to him, but rather from conspiracy to obtain the documents illegally in the first place. Conspiring with someone to steal classified information from the government is obviously illegal, but that is not relevant to the case in the question.