Democrats commit election fraud and few brave prosecutors and judges dare to ever punish them, so they get away with it. Whereas when a Republican merely pretends to commit an election crime in order to be a funny troll, the Democratic-controlled justice system puts them in prison. Douglass Mackey tweeted fake images in 2016 encouraging Democrats to vote for Hillary Clinton by sending the text message “Hillary” to a number. The Biden DOJ sentenced him to 7 months in prison this month for “conspiracy to interfere with potential voters’ right to vote.”
Breon Peace, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said Mackey engaged in “weaponized disinformation in a dangerous scheme to stop targeted groups, including black and brown people and women, from participating in our democracy.” Judge Ann M. Donnelly of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, who was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama, said his tweets and memes were "nothing short of an assault on our democracy."
The law Mackey ostensibly violated prohibits conspiracies “to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person ... in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution.” It was passed in 1870 to stop the Ku Klux Klan from intimidating blacks from voting.
The DOJ said several thousand people texted the number, but there is no indication prosecutors ever produced a single person who had said it stopped them from voting. Obviously, most of them were texting the number merely to see what would happen, and when they didn’t receive a response, they weren’t likely to think they had actually voted.
With all the heavy scrutiny on ballot security, and people extremely concerned about merely voting by mail, no one would realistically think you could vote for president by text. When people started hearing about his memes, they joked about them, no one took them seriously.
The DOJ hyped everything up, including claiming that an “analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as one of the most significant influencers of the then-upcoming presidential election.” Mackey had only 58,000 followers, no way near enough followers to be considered very influential. The DOJ accused him of targeting minorities since one of the memes was in Spanish and another featured a photo of a black woman.
An analysis from the University of Kentucky Election Law Society found that it was “questionable” whether Mackey’s actions violated the law. Unless it was “voter intimidation,” “providing misinformation to voters is likely not technically illegal.”
Josh Hammer at The American Mind didn’t think Mackey would actually be convicted since the case was so weak, and pointed out that a leftist who engaged in the exact same conduct, Kristina Wong, wasn’t prosecuted. Her tweet is still up.
The New York Times admitted it was the first time someone had been prosecuted for “voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter." People lie in political campaigns constantly. Legal scholar Eugene Volokh pointed out at Tablet Mag that the Supreme Court hasn’t gotten involved in prohibiting lies in politics. In other areas of the law, such as defamation, in order to prove a lie about a public figure, there must be malice.
Mackey, who was an internet troll merely stirring up trouble, clearly didn’t have malice. The Daily Beast gloatingly admitted he was a “MAGA Twitter Troll” in a headline about the sentencing. His account looked goofy, with a made-up username, @TheRickyVaughn, that didn’t match the made-up name, Publius Gaius, and a profile photo of an unrecognizable man in a MAGA hat wearing a mask, glasses, and huge spikes where his mouth should be. Another profile photo he used appeared to be of the actor Charlie Sheen.
You’d have to be really stupid to take him seriously. But Democrats always pretend that blacks are too stupid to figure out how to vote and are incapable of providing ID, in order to relax election integrity laws, so it’s no surprise they used this ruse to claim Mackey was targeting and fooling minority voters.
Meanwhile, Democrats were accused of engaging in massive election fraud in 2020, causing Republicans to vote in person in huge numbers in states like Arizona in 2022. The voting machine tabulators failed to read the ballots from people voting in person in 2022 in Maricopa County, disenfranchising thousands of mostly Republican voters. The DOJ had zero interest in looking into whether there was voter suppression, although the Arizona Legislature conducted its own investigation, which was stymied by Maricopa County so did not get very far.
And there are many more ways Democrats are accused of suppressing the Republican vote, from throwing out their lawsuits to ballot harvesting, but the DOJ pays no attention.
Although Mackey lives in Florida, he was strangely prosecuted in New York, with the proceedings conducted by two left-leaning judges. In 2017, Donnelly blocked Trump’s executive order from going into effect that halted refugees coming into the country from seven countries known for terrorism.
It took awhile for the jury to reach a unanimous verdict in his case. Judges have immense control over the decisions of juries, by carefully crafting the jury instructions and telling them what evidence and witness testimony they are allowed to consider. Mackey has started a Meme Defense Fund about his case and will be appealing.
If Mackey deserves to be prosecuted, then Wong does too and the DOJ should also be investigating voter suppression by Democrats who disenfranchised Republicans. Otherwise it’s selective prosecution and evidence the U.S. has become a banana republic.
The DOJ has become politicized, resulting in the overcriminalization of certain political and election activities. This creates a slippery slope for criminalizing speech about elections. It’s set a dangerous precedent for criminalizing satirical memes about Democrats cheating and stealing elections — that will be coming next as a result of this.
Reprinted from WND