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The Lincoln Project is an American political action committee formed in late 2019 by former and current Republicans. During the 2020 presidential election, it aimed to prevent the re-election of Donald Trump and defeat all Republicans in close races running for re-election in the United States Senate.Wikipedia
Our Leadership
Rick Wilson, Co-founder and Board Member
Rick Wilson is a renowned political strategist, infamous ad-maker, writer, speaker, and political commentator. In December 2019 Rick co-founded the Lincoln Project, a political
action committee whose goal is to hold accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would place their loyalty to others before their loyalty to the American people and democracy.
Rick has authored two New York Times bestsellers. His first book, Everything Trump Touches Dies, shot to #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His second book, Running Against The Devil – A Plot To Save America from Trump And Democrats From Themselves, was released on January 14th to rave reviews and opened at #4 on the New York Times bestseller list. Rick also writes for The Washington Post, Politico, Rolling Stone, The Hill, The Bulwark, and the London Spectator. Rick regularly brings his unique insights to national cable audiences on CNN and MSNBC,
NPR, and American and international news national outlets. He’s a frequent guest on Real Time With Bill Maher.
A 30-year veteran of national Republican politics, Rick got his start in the 1988 Presidential campaign of George Herbert Walker Bush. He produced groundbreaking political advertising and provided winning, strategic counsel to winning political candidates, SuperPACS, state parties, the national campaign committees, and corporate, association, and government clients across the nation and around the world.
Reed Galen, Co-founder and Board Member
Reed Galen, Co-founder and Board Member
Reed Galen is an independent political strategist and co-founder of The Lincoln Project. A veteran public affairs and political professional with more than 20 years’ experience, Galen has spent more than a decade advising Fortune 50, 100 and 1000 companies in need of high-level counsel in the fields of strategic communications, procurement, and legislation. Reed has also managed several high-profile ballot measure campaigns in California, Texas, and Colorado. Before moving to the private sector, he served as Deputy Campaign Manager for John McCain’s presidential campaign and Deputy Campaign Manager for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successful 2006 re-election campaign. Galen also worked on both the 2000 and 2004 campaigns of President George W. Bush. Between campaigns, Galen spent a year at the White House and served the Bush Administration at both the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Department of Homeland Security.
Megan Matson, Board Member and Senior Advisor
Lincoln Project Board Member and Senior Advisor Megan Matson is a lifelong Democrat now Lincoln Democrat, committed to winning this single-issue pro-democracy fight. After early years as a Creative Director, Megan joined the transformative 2003 Howard Dean campaign as an organizer. She went on to found a data-driven national PAC focussed on absentee voter registration for single moms in the swing states, called the MMOB. Megan and the MMOB went on to organize policy change at school boards around the country, recruit and train Pollworkers for Democracy, successfully litigate with plaintiff Dolores Huerta for secure voting, and help launch Marin Clean Energy, a breakthrough utility model that now serves 11 million Californians. Megan is a partner at Table Rock Infrastructure Partners where she helped finance, launch and now manage the first labor-owned public-private-partnership in the country, raising $172MM in patient capital to upgrade core water and wastewater infrastructure, and win WIFIA microgrid funding for the city of Rialto, CA. Reacting to the family separations at the border, Megan took a political sabbatical and moved to Texas to work as an organizer on Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign. She then partnered with Andrea Miller and Deepak Puri to launch the SeeSay2020 election incidents heat map, in coalition with The Lincoln Project. She worked with Lincoln Senior Advisor Trygve Olson on his 7 Rules For Dealing with Autocrats outreach, joined the Lincoln Project Board, and recruited Obama campaign tech alum and founding YouTube developer Angus Durocher to help build The Union, a single issue pro-democracy initiative incubated by The Lincoln Project. Megan is a graduate of Yale University, and lives in Northern California with her family.
Trygve Olson, Senior Advisor
Trygve Olson is the founder of Viking Strategies LLC, which provides clients worldwide with customized sovereign political risk and public affairs solutions. Mr. Olson focuses his work on developing understanding, devising strategies, and implementing cutting-edge networks and tactics to impact high-level perceptions and ultimate outcomes.
Trygve has spent his career working at senior levels on elections in over thirty countries. In the United States has served in senior leadership positions on three Presidential campaigns, worked on numerous Congressional Elections, and done work for all the central Republican Party’s political committees. Abroad, he has spent over two decades working on behalf of the International Republican Institute (IRI) around the world. In 2001, he opened IRI’s Belarus program and office in Vilnius, Lithuania. Through this work, he was deployed worldwide to train activists fighting for democracy across the region, including Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and across Central Asia.
Mr. Olson is a sought-after speaker on democracy, autocracy, and the sovereign political risks in the battle between the two. He regularly briefs leaders in politics, business, academia, and the media on these topics. Trygve splits his time, with his wife and two daughters, between the Washington, DC area and Europe.
He is @TrygveOlson on Twitter.
Tara Setmayer, Senior Advisor
Tara Setmayer is a former CNN political commentator, contributor to ABC News and former GOP Communications Director on Capitol Hill. She has appeared on ABC’s The View, ABC’s Good Morning America, and on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. On January 9, 2020, Setmayer was named as a Harvard Institute of Politics Spring 2020 Resident Fellow. Also in January 2020, she joined The Lincoln Project as a senior advisor and hosts the live show “The Breakdown” alongside co-founder Rick Wilson, on the organization’s streaming channel, LPTV.
Setmayer was also named a University of Virginia, Center for Politics, Resident Scholar for the 2020-21 academic year. In collaboration with the Center for Politics, she narrated the 3-part documentary, Dismantling Democracy, which aired nationally on PBS stations in September 2020 and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
In 2017, Setmayer was named as a board director for Stand Up Republic, a non profit organization formed in the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump to unite Americans behind the defense of democratic norms, ideals and institutions.
From 2006 to 2013, Setmayer worked in the U.S. House of Representatives as the Communications Director for a Republican Representative during which she handled immigration and federal law enforcement policy issues, and led the national effort to free Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean through a presidential commutation. For over two years, Setmayer served as a community liaison advocating on a variety of issues including affordable housing and services for the chronically homeless and children in South Florida where she co-founded a faith based homeless program.
Stuart Stevens, Senior Advisor
Stuart Stevens grew up in Mississippi, a seventh generation Mississippian. For a very long time he’s been driven by a fascination and love of politics, film, and writing and has pursued those interests throughout his life.
He attended Colorado College; Pembroke College, Oxford; Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English; UCLA Graduate Film School, and the American Film Institute, where he received a diploma signed by Charlton Heston.
It Was All A Lie: How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump is his eighth book. His earlier books are: The Innocent Have Nothing To Fear, last Season: A Father, a Son and a Lifetime of College Football, Night Train to Turkistan, Malaria Dreams, Feeding Frenzy: Around the World In Search of The Perfect Meal and the novel, Scorched Earth: A Political Love Story. He’s written extensively for dramatic television series, starting with Northern Exposure and including I’ll Fly Away, K. Street, Commander in Chief and others. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Outside, The Washington Post, Food & Wine and many others.
He has a long time interest in endurance sports which he pursues badly. He skied the last 100 kilometers to the North Pole and ridden the 1200 km Paris-Brest-Paris cycling event and was the first person to complete all of the World Loppet (Nordic Ski Marathons) in a single season. He wishes he were good at these endeavors, but concedes he is not, yet enjoys them nonetheless.
Stuart Stevens was a founding partner in Strategic Partners & Media and stepped down from the company in April 2019. He is currently an advisor to the Lincoln Project and is working on his next novel.
Joe Trippi, Senior Advisor
Joe Trippi, Senior Advisor
Heralded on the cover of The New Republic as the man who “reinvented campaigning,” Joe Trippi pioneered bringing politics into the digital age and brings an added digital component to the Lincoln Project arsenal.
For decades he and the Lincoln Project co-founders worked against each other in partisan fights. Trippi has worked for Democrats at every level over 4 decades – from Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale and managing Howard Dean’s groundbreaking presidential campaign in 2004. Trippi has been a media and campaign strategist for dozens of Senate and Gubernatorial campaigns including Jerry Brown’s 2010 comeback campaign for Governor of California and Doug Jones’ historic Senate victory in Alabama, where Jones became the first Democratic US Senator in Alabama in 25 years.
Trippi has served as an on-air political analyst for MSNBC/NBC, CBS Evening News, FOX News and CNN. His weekly podcast is “That Trippi Show”.
He joined the Lincoln Project because “we have to stop seeing this as Democrat vs. Republican. Right vs left. This has to be all of us coming together in a pro-democracy coalition to defeat an authoritarian movement that is using every means to seize power.”
Deja Vu Anyone???
https://www.scribd.com/doc/2718120/Integrity-Yea-Right
https://www.scribd.com/doc/7624895/Edwards-Leahy-Dean-Jeffords
I am committed to taking our country back, and I think Ignite will be able to use many of these innovative tools and tactics to stand up for public health vs. corporate tobacco.
Posted by Jacob Baimeat March 8, 2004 06:26 AM
I hated the documentary...it was all about Joe Trippi...in the end, he said all he cared about were the people...this sounded so disingenuous...and what about the Governor..the guy who was in the bright spotlight 24/7 taking the heat, in real time...Trippi didn't say anything about him...I came thinking that Gov Dean should have been saying "Et Tu Brute".
Posted by Mark from CTat March 8, 2004 06:58 AM
Man.. Candy Crawley sucks...
also you guys should just ignore the a**holes who are posting here.
you done good...
Posted by Hubris Sonic (Tokyo4Dean) at March 8, 2004 07:03 AM
questions:
1) Who handed the hot mike to Dean?
2) Why was Enright running around the pressroom telling everyone you "better get ready for this"?
3) How could Joe Trippi tell the press on 1/28/04 that he was gearing up for Super Tuesday when the campaign hardly had enough money to get out of town?
4) Why was steve grossman allowed to roam free for so long?
5) Why did Gore campaign so little for Dean?
6) What happened to the rock solid 37000 supporters Trippi claimed were for Dean in Iowa?
7) Who decided to run the negative adds the last week of Iowa?
8) Since Trippi did so little work as campaign manager, why was he so upset about Roy Neel?
9) Why didnt Trippi resign in December after Dean kept the gore endorsement a secret from him?
10) Didnt anyone think it strange that Gore wanted to endorse Dean in Harlem?
11) Why did the campaign allow Lieberman to run his mouth for so long?
12) How is possible that Joe trippi who really wanted to be a campaign manager, failed to mount an effective counter attack to the attacks by the press?
13) Why was it left to Diane Sawyer to discover the truth about the Dean Scream?
14) What two people were most upset when Roy Neel was brought on as an advisor?
Jibber Jabber like Bush all you want, but there is no way that Dean finishes a distant 3rd in Iowa without a ton help from the inside.
Posted by paul m.at March 8, 2004 07:30 AM
I just want to know whose idea it was for the stupid orange hats. Who proposed it? Was it one of Trippi's people, or one of Dean's people?
Posted by Rose at March 8, 2004 07:56 AM
Everyone including most that watched CNN would like to believe in your noble cause. However we know different don't we? Why else did you folks immrdiately remove me from any blogs and bock my emails? Trippi was banished to Vermont about the time Howard Dean's lawyer got my letter I will wager that this entry lasts only minutes. However if anyone manages to read this blog before it too evaporates give me a call at 617 240 6698 and I will fill you in on the simple truth that I play no favorites as I seek to defend all of our civil rights. The political plays by various dudes to get on the gravy train and the inside workings of the traveling circus that supports them is merely entertainment. Joe Trippi should feel sorry for all the honest hard working souls that truly do want change and worked long and hard for free. By the way I saved this blog myself. I am tired of so many being made to disaapear by people who pretend to be so righteous.
Posted by David Amos at March 8, 2004 08:17 AM
Jeez. Wish I had the gumption to back Joe Trippi all the way. Pity it tripped up and its poor Howard Dean who had to pay the price.
Posted by jacktheknifeat March 8, 2004 08:39 AM
(Posted by paul m. at 07:30 AM )
>"questions:. . . "
Those are interesting questions I suppose but it is not so clear where you think we ought to go to answer them. The context seems to be that perhaps someone (even Trippi himself) was plotting against Dean's interests. Part of the reason the Dean forums are such a mess right now is the number of active paranoids posting to them. I am here looking for something different.
(Posted by Mark from CT at 06:58 AM )
>"I hated the documentary...it was all about Joe Trippi..."
I think that is true, but what everyone on the Dean forum was doing was blaming Trippi for that. People were even suggesting that his firm had paid CNN to run it like an infomercial or something. This quickly morphed into full blown paranoia. My own feeling is that I have always liked the guy and the fact that he came over well on CNN was not quite enough to change that.
(Posted by nancym at 02:44 AM)>"The only thing that got me irritated was giving out the CFA website with no mention of DFA continuing also. But that was Aaron Braun, and not the filmmaker's fault. "
One of the reasons I was tuned in was to see if CNN had any clues about what Dean intended to do with DFA. I have been on the forum there for some time but it seems like no one has a clue and we are all just waiting around until the 18th as things drift in a directionless way.
When I mentioned this place on the Dean forum thread on the CNN thing I was attacked up and down. The line was that Trippi was a rat and intended to either rip off people or get them to march over the cliff in support of Nader.
My answer was that I did not believe it, but that at least I was going to check out the site and I trusted myself not to be marched over any cliff, even by someone I liked as much as Trippi.
The thing that gets me is that there seems to be no upset on the Dean forum about this long period of drifting that is taking place there. It is as though there is some sort of unspoken agreement that until we hear the word from the leader on the 18th such talk is premature. That just does not work that well. That is too long to just tread water without at least starting a real discussion on the future. And filling the void are all sorts of real nuts. There seems to be a real lack of leadership.
Posted by Fred in Vermontat March 8, 2004 08:40 AM
For those of you who are making attacks on Trippi:
a) this was CNN's "programming".
b) you reveal that your experience with campaigns is limited.
And yes, candidates do plenty of work, but a lot of that work is taken on by Campaign Managers.
Dean lacked a lot of interpersonal skills.
A point best exemplified when Trippi pointed out that during the meeting with Carter, Dean looks to the assmebled media and says "New Zogby poll out tonight..." Hubris? Lack of foresight, or the big picture?
A Campaign manager offers guidance in a field they know best - the nuts and bolts of the "process of electing" a candidate, not necessarily what that candidate does in office.
Two other good examples of Trippi's quick eye:
i)his discomfort at seeing the 'I See Dean People' banner (I'm sure many of us also quickly recognized the allusion to "I See Dead People").
ii) His inclination to have Dean spend as little time with "the Bat" onstage. Dean would have been swinging that sucker around if there was no voice of reason to guide him.
On the other hand, why a BAT was used for campaign imagery is beyond me.
One thing I found humourous was Trippi's focus on the lyrical content of the songs used in the rallies.
I seem to recall Joe had the same obsession with the weight of that angle as far back as 1988.
It's an observation that Richard Ben Cramer also concurs on and reiterates in his book 'What It Takes'.
Similarly, I'm certain the progressives and independents felt the same way Mr. Trippi did when he says of Kerry; "He used (stole) my stump speech."
Kerry and his organizers certainly found a way (and found the gall) to co-op the rhetoric of this bloc of voters. They hand picked the 'populist' bits of the truly populist candidates (all three of them) and used them as their own.
I've been on board with DFA's vision for quite a while, but I'll reveal my colours by allowing readers to know I'm a Kucinich supporter.
That said, Trippi's been at it for a long time. If the public thinks it's easy to separate oneself from the passion of a campaign, think again!
Best wishes everyone. We still have a nominee to keep in check.
While I'm certain this is all going to boil down to 2 things - getting Bu$h out of office, and making sure there is a Dem to make appointments to the Supreme Court, there is no reason why a coalition of the 50% + that do not share the vision of the made-for-TV Limousine Liberal cannot make themselves heard.
And this wish goes beyond the immediate goals of CFA and DFA.
The one thing that will dog DFA/CFA is the money issue. We all know this must be clarified quickly or people will start to stray. Oh, that and the "email list" that is purportedly for lease.
I know it's been addressed but I think it needs one more approach to put it to bed. Plenty of other people still seem to be irked and plenty of misinformation about it is circulating.
This is certainly thanks to people's mistrust of the DNC, and the rift in the campaign that have yet to be healed.
Posted by stephenat March 8, 2004 08:46 AM
You bloodthirsty Demons! I cannot take you sitting like vultures trying to pick any meaty bits of Dean's popularity from the steaming carcass of this campaign which you failed to lead effectively, for your own gain & glory. You bastards have obviously been sucking at the evil tit of CNN, who had more to do with Dean's demise than even you wasteful spending & greed. Why is this show being promoted on this site so heavily? Because the evil ones have made a deal with CNN to show themselves as heros, Dean as a tryant that could not be helped, and finally to form a group of former Dean supporters to back their Coven Master - Kerry. Joe & Co have sold their souls for a few bits of fame & a little trifle of cash. Stay loyal, post that they have no shame & you will not support their craven lustful yearnings for power & wealth & that you are returning to the true leader Howard Dean.
Posted by The Ripper at March 8, 2004 08:54 AM
By the way I think Mark from CT was quite perceptive in his observation. Dean is gone and soon to be a footnote as a flash in the pan in a gold diggers lament. However methinks Brute will be around for years to come. He is very media savy and he knew he was being filmed and presented himself in the light he chose for his own benefit. Howard said many a true word in jest but he did try to heed Joe's advice until way past too late. Joe has already proven his worth as a internet guru or a Buzz Tsar(as General Clark's dude likes to discribe himself) many politicians will court him in the future. CNN only helped to raise his fees. However Brute should have learned something about the demise of Caesar. Politicians should beware of the Ides of March. You never know what kind of Noreaster may come storming in and rain on their parade.I don't believe in backstabbing. I perfer straight shooting like Ol Coop did in High Noon
Posted by David Amosat March 8, 2004 08:58 AM
OurWinter,
Welcome. I look forward to working with you.
I live across the river and will, I hope meet you
at the CFA summit in DC.
Thanks for your nostalgia and honesty.
Posted by geri in no va at March 8, 2004 09:18 AM
One last thing before I go. (everybody in heaven and hell knows proper things are done in threes) If anyone would like to read the letter sent out to Senator John Edwards yesterday before he reads it, email me. The link to my email address is in the last post. the email is rather large because it has several attachments that you may find rather interesting. Trust me it is free from viruses and many a member of the foreign press has already received it. If you have read or seen anything of my stuff that was within my files linked to the first posting you should realize that I am genuine although quite possibly very mad as anyone paying any attention these days should be.
Posted by David Amos at March 8, 2004 09:28 AM
Sounds like it wasn't terribly bad, this special.
Then again, it doesn't sound like anything that will make me run out and get cable again.
Posted by kathy in virginiaat March 8, 2004 09:29 AM
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From: "Donald J. Trump"<contact@email.donaldjtrump.
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 19:13:22 -0600
Subject: An army of agents broke into Mar-a-Lago
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In early June, the Department of Justice and the FBI asked my legal representatives to put an extra lock on the door leading to the place where boxes were stored in Mar-a-Lago - we agreed.
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We cannot stand for this, Friend. THEY BROKE INTO MY HOME - the home of the 45th President of the United States.
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From: "Bergen, Candice - M.P."<candice.bergen@parl.gc.ca>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 23:31:55 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: YO Stewart A. Baker The NSA and the DHS must
remember me I ask again What planet do Yankee lawyers come from???
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PREMIER <PREMIER@gov.ns.ca>, haley.ryan@cbc.ca, djtr
<djtr@trumporg.com>
Cc: motomaniac333 <motomaniac333@gmail.com>,
david.wilkins@nelsonmullins.
<bbachrach@bachrachlaw.net>, Dominic.Cardy@gnb.ca, paul@paulfromm.com,
publicaffairs@doc.gov
I believe you failed to understand me but at least you are ethical
enough to admit that I exist
Have a listen to me talking to judges up here while dealing Trump's
lawyers South of the 49th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5arWK--33t8
Cohen predicts Trump's next move following Mar-a-Lago search
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxYhxZVo-3o Felicidades, es un buen ejemplo. 5:25 Se deja ver que hay muy buenos resultados Saludos desde la Cd.. de world 
los mortales abian apreciado tan hermosa mujer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK4Pw4-HoWQ&ab_channel=CNN
Ex-Trump attorney: What Trump fears the most about the FBI search
9,429 Comments
More???
http://davidraymondamos3.blogspot.com/2017/02/re-fatca-nafta-tpp-etc-attn-president.html
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Elwood, John"<John.Elwood@arnoldporter.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 17:33:15 +0000
Subject: RE: YO Stewart A. Baker The NSA and the DHS must remember me
I ask again What planet do Yankee lawyers come from???
To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Mr. Amos: I received your voicemail. I do not understand your emails
and I can't assist you. I simply don't practice law in the relevant
area.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Justice Website <JUSTWEB@novascotia.ca>
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2017 14:21:11 +0000
Subject: Emails to Department of Justice and Province of Nova Scotia
To: "motomaniac333@gmail.com"<motomaniac333@gmail.com>
Mr. Amos,
We acknowledge receipt of your recent emails to the Deputy Minister of
Justice and lawyers within the Legal Services Division of the
Department of Justice respecting a possible claim against the Province
of Nova Scotia. Service of any documents respecting a legal claim
against the Province of Nova Scotia may be served on the Attorney
General at 1690 Hollis Street, Halifax, NS. Please note that we will
not be responding to further emails on this matter.
Department of Justice
Message blocked
Your message to classaction@wagners.co has been blocked. See technical
details below for more information.
LEARN MORE
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Amos <motomaniac333@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2017 11:42:03 -0400
Subject: Attn Adam Rodgers we just talked correct?
To: Adam@boudrotrodgers.com, "lyle.howe"<lyle.howe@eastlink.ca>
Cc: David Amos <david.raymond.amos@gmail.com>
https://boudrotrodgers.com/
Adam Rodgers was called to the Nova Scotia Bar in 2005. Prior to
joining Boudrot Rodgers, Adam completed his articles with a major
Atlantic Canadian law firm in Halifax, before returning to Guysborough
to practice in his home area. Adam practices Commercial and Personal
Injury Litigation, Municipal Law, Criminal Defense, Divorce & Family
Law, as well as Real Estate and Corporate Commercial.
Adam is active in sports, having played competitive fastpitch softball
on a local and national level. He volunteers as President of the
Strait Pirates Jr. B Hockey team, and is Past-President of the Strait
Area Chamber of Commerce. Adam is a past executive member of the Board
of Directors of the Mulgrave Road Theatre in Guysborough.
Adam is the President of the Strait Area Barristers’ Society, and a
member of the Atlantic Provinces Trial Lawyers Association (APTLA) and
the American Association for Justice.
You can follow Adam on Twitter @adamrodgersNS
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Amos motomaniac333@gmail.com
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2017 09:32:09 -0400
Subject: Attn Integrity Commissioner Alexandre Deschênes, Q.C.,
To: coi@gnb.ca
Cc: david.raymond.amos@gmail.com
Good Day Sir
After I heard you speak on CBC I called your office again and managed
to speak to one of your staff for the first time
Please find attached the documents I promised to send to the lady who
answered the phone this morning. Please notice that not after the Sgt
at Arms took the documents destined to your office his pal Tanker
Malley barred me in writing with an "English" only document.
These are the hearings and the dockets in Federal Court that I
suggested that you study closely.
This is the docket in Federal Court
http://cas-cdc-www02.cas-satj.
These are digital recordings of the last three hearings
Dec 14th https://archive.org/details/
January 11th, 2016 https://archive.org/details/
April 3rd, 2017
https://archive.org/details/
This is the docket in the Federal Court of Appeal
http://cas-cdc-www02.cas-satj.
The only hearing thus far
May 24th, 2017
https://archive.org/details/
This Judge understnds the meaning of the word Integrity
Date: 20151223
Docket: T-1557-15
Fredericton, New Brunswick, December 23, 2015
PRESENT: The Honourable Mr. Justice Bell
BETWEEN:
DAVID RAYMOND AMOS
Plaintiff
and
HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN
Defendant
ORDER
(Delivered orally from the Bench in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on
December 14, 2015)
The Plaintiff seeks an appeal de novo, by way of motion pursuant to
the Federal Courts Rules (SOR/98-106), from an Order made on November
12, 2015, in which Prothonotary Morneau struck the Statement of Claim
in its entirety.
At the outset of the hearing, the Plaintiff brought to my attention a
letter dated September 10, 2004, which he sent to me, in my then
capacity as Past President of the New Brunswick Branch of the Canadian
Bar Association, and the then President of the Branch, Kathleen Quigg,
(now a Justice of the New Brunswick Court of Appeal). In that letter
he stated:
As for your past President, Mr. Bell, may I suggest that you check the
work of Frank McKenna before I sue your entire law firm including you.
You are your brother’s keeper.
Frank McKenna is the former Premier of New Brunswick and a former
colleague of mine at the law firm of McInnes Cooper. In addition to
expressing an intention to sue me, the Plaintiff refers to a number of
people in his Motion Record who he appears to contend may be witnesses
or potential parties to be added. Those individuals who are known to
me personally, include, but are not limited to the former Prime
Minister of Canada, The Right Honourable Stephen Harper; former
Attorney General of Canada and now a Justice of the Manitoba Court of
Queen’s Bench, Vic Toews; former member of Parliament Rob Moore;
former Director of Policing Services, the late Grant Garneau; former
Chief of the Fredericton Police Force, Barry McKnight; former Staff
Sergeant Danny Copp; my former colleagues on the New Brunswick Court
of Appeal, Justices Bradley V. Green and Kathleen Quigg, and, retired
Assistant Commissioner Wayne Lang of the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police.
In the circumstances, given the threat in 2004 to sue me in my
personal capacity and my past and present relationship with many
potential witnesses and/or potential parties to the litigation, I am
of the view there would be a reasonable apprehension of bias should I
hear this motion. See Justice de Grandpré’s dissenting judgment in
Committee for Justice and Liberty et al v National Energy Board et al,
[1978] 1 SCR 369 at p 394 for the applicable test regarding
allegations of bias. In the circumstances, although neither party has
requested I recuse myself, I consider it appropriate that I do so.
AS A RESULT OF MY RECUSAL, THIS COURT ORDERS that the Administrator of
the Court schedule another date for the hearing of the motion. There
is no order as to costs.
“B. Richard Bell”
Judge
Below after the CBC article about your concerns (I made one comment
already) you will find the text of just two of many emails I had sent
to your office over the years since I first visited it in 2006.
I noticed that on July 30, 2009, he was appointed to the the Court
Martial Appeal Court of Canada Perhaps you should scroll to the
bottom of this email ASAP and read the entire Paragraph 83 of my
lawsuit now before the Federal Court of Canada?
"FYI This is the text of the lawsuit that should interest Trudeau the most
http://davidraymondamos3.
83 The Plaintiff states that now that Canada is involved in more war
in Iraq again it did not serve Canadian interests and reputation to
allow Barry Winters to publish the following words three times over
five years after he began his bragging:
January 13, 2015
This Is Just AS Relevant Now As When I wrote It During The Debate
December 8, 2014
Why Canada Stood Tall!
Friday, October 3, 2014
Little David Amos’ “True History Of War” Canadian Airstrikes And
Stupid Justin Trudeau?
Vertias Vincit
David Raymond Amos
902 800 0369
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Kulik, John"<john.kulik@mcinnescooper.com>
Date: Thu, 18 May 2017 17:37:49 +0000
Subject: McInnes Cooper
To: "motomaniac333@gmail.com"<motomaniac333@gmail.com>,
"david.raymond.amos@gmail.com"<david.raymond.amos@gmail.com>
Dear Mr. Amos:
I am General Counsel for McInnes Cooper. If you need to communicate
with our firm, please do so through me.
Thank you.
John Kulik
[McInnes Cooper]<http://www.
John Kulik Q.C.
Partner & General Counsel
McInnes Cooper
tel +1 (902) 444 8571 | fax +1 (902) 425 6350
1969 Upper Water Street
Suite 1300
Purdy's Wharf Tower II Halifax, NS, B3J 2V1
asst Cathy Ohlhausen | +1 (902) 455 8215
Notice This communication, including any attachments, is confidential
and may be protected by solicitor/client privilege. It is intended
only for the person or persons to whom it is addressed. If you have
received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender by e-mail or
telephone at McInnes Cooper's expense. Avis Les informations contenues
dans ce courriel, y compris toute(s) pièce(s) jointe(s), sont
confidentielles et peuvent faire l'objet d'un privilège avocat-client.
Les informations sont dirigées au(x) destinataire(s) seulement. Si
vous avez reçu ce courriel par erreur, veuillez en aviser l'expéditeur
par courriel ou par téléphone, aux frais de McInnes Cooper.
On 8/3/17, David Amos <motomaniac333@gmail.com> wrote:
> If want something very serious to download and laugh at as well Please
> Enjoy and share real wiretap tapes of the mob
>
> http://thedavidamosrant.
> ilian.html
>
>> http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/
>>
>> As the CBC etc yap about Yankee wiretaps and whistleblowers I must
>> ask them the obvious question AIN'T THEY FORGETTING SOMETHING????
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?
>>
>> What the hell does the media think my Yankee lawyer served upon the
>> USDOJ right after I ran for and seat in the 39th Parliament baseball
>> cards?
>>
>> http://archive.org/details/
>> 6
>>
>> http://davidamos.blogspot.ca/
>>
>> http://www.archive.org/
>>
>> http://archive.org/details/
>>
>> FEDERAL EXPRES February 7, 2006
>> Senator Arlen Specter
>> United States Senate
>> Committee on the Judiciary
>> 224 Dirksen Senate Office Building
>> Washington, DC 20510
>>
>> Dear Mr. Specter:
>>
>> I have been asked to forward the enclosed tapes to you from a man
>> named, David Amos, a Canadian citizen, in connection with the matters
>> raised in the attached letter.
>>
>> Mr. Amos has represented to me that these are illegal FBI wire tap tapes.
>>
>> I believe Mr. Amos has been in contact with you about this previously.
>>
>> Very truly yours,
>> Barry A. Bachrach
>> Direct telephone: (508) 926-3403
>> Direct facsimile: (508) 929-3003
>> Email: bbachrach@bowditch.com
>>
>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcVSC-BgTww&ab_channel=TheLincolnProject
Insider
---------- Original message ----------
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 05:30:34 +0000
Subject: OSGG General Inquiries / Demande de renseignements généraux au BSGG
To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Thank you for writing to the Office of the Secretary to the Governor
General. We appreciate hearing your views and suggestions. Responses
to specific inquiries can be expected within three weeks. Please note
that general comments and opinions may not receive a response.
*****
Nous vous remercions d'avoir écrit au Bureau du secrétaire du
gouverneur général. Nous aimons prendre connaissance de vos points de
vue et de vos suggestions. Il faut allouer trois semaines pour
recevoir une réponse à une demande précise. Veuillez noter que nous ne
donnons pas nécessairement suite aux opinions et aux commentaires
généraux.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This message may contain confidential or privileged
information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are
not the intended recipient, you should not disseminate, distribute or
copy this email. Please notify the sender immediately if you have
received this email by mistake and delete it from your system.
AVIS IMPORTANT : Le présent courriel peut contenir des renseignements
confidentiels et est strictement réservé à l’usage de la personne à
qui il est destiné. Si vous n’êtes pas la personne visée, vous ne
devez pas diffuser, distribuer ou copier ce courriel. Merci de nous en
aviser immédiatement et de supprimer ce courriel s’il vous a été
envoyé par erreur.
---------- Original message ----------
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 05:30:02 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: [SUSPECTED SPAM] YO Stewart A. Baker The SA
and the DHS must remember me I ask again What planet do Yankee lawyers
come from???
To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Thank you for your email. Please note that I will be out of the
office attending discovery examinations August 15, 2022 and out of the
Province attending a family funeral August 16-19. I will be checking
my messages and will try to respond periodically.
If you matter is urgent, please email Cassandra Billard at
cbillard@pattersonlaw.ca.
I apologize for any inconvenience.
---------- Original message ----------
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 05:31:36 +0000
Subject: Automatic Reply
To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Thank you for writing to the Honourable David Lametti, Minister of
Justice and Attorney General of Canada.
Due to the volume of correspondence addressed to the Minister, please
note that there may be a delay in processing your email. Rest assured
that your message will be carefully reviewed.
We do not respond to correspondence that contains offensive language.
-------------------
Merci d'avoir écrit à l'honorable David Lametti, ministre de la
Justice et procureur général du Canada.
En raison du volume de correspondance adressée au ministre, veuillez
prendre note qu'il pourrait y avoir un retard dans le traitement de
votre courriel. Nous tenons à vous assurer que votre message sera lu
avec soin.
Nous ne répondons pas à la correspondance contenant un langage offensant.
From: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 02:29:44 -0300
Subject: YO Stewart A. Baker The SA and the DHS must remember me I ask
again What planet do Yankee lawyers come from???
To: news@nowtoronto.com, "Chrystia.Freeland"
<Chrystia.Freeland@parl.gc.ca>, signalhfx@gmail.com,
josh@chesterlaw.ca, RPineo@pattersonlaw.ca,
smcculloch@pattersonlaw.ca, "Michelle.Boutin"
<Michelle.Boutin@rcmp-grc.gc.
<blaine.higgs@gnb.ca>, "hugh.flemming"<hugh.flemming@gnb.ca>,
"Roger.Brown"<Roger.Brown@fredericton.ca>, "Mark.Blakely"
<Mark.Blakely@rcmp-grc.gc.ca>, "Marco.Mendicino"
<Marco.Mendicino@parl.gc.ca>, "martin.gaudet"
<martin.gaudet@fredericton.ca>
<oldmaison@yahoo.com>, Nick.Carleton@uregina.ca, tara@mdwlaw.ca,
mscott@pattersonlaw.ca, comlaw <comlaw@uottawa.ca>,
eratushn@uottawa.ca, paulpalango <paulpalango@protonmail.com>,
NightTimePodcast <NightTimePodcast@gmail.com>, nsinvestigators
<nsinvestigators@gmail.com>, andrewjdouglas
<andrewjdouglas@gmail.com>, andrew <andrew@frankmagazine.ca>, tim
<tim@halifaxexaminer.ca>, Nicholas.Dorrington@rcmp-grc.
"Brenda.Lucki"<Brenda.Lucki@rcmp-grc.gc.ca>, "Bill.Blair"
<Bill.Blair@parl.gc.ca>, "Ian.Shugart"<Ian.Shugart@pco-bcp.gc.ca>,
"Nathalie.Drouin"<Nathalie.Drouin@pco-bcp.gc.ca
info@masscasualtycommission.ca
<Katie.Telford@pmo-cpm.gc.ca>, Viva Frei <david@vivafrei.com>,
"drea.humphrey"<drea.humphrey@rebelnews.com>,
info@easternshorecooperator.ca
<jcarpay@jccf.ca>, info <info@gg.ca>, "Bill.Hogan"
<Bill.Hogan@gnb.ca>, info@aboriginallegal.ca,
hrgeneral@aboriginallegal.ca, "michael.macdonald"
<michael.macdonald@
<Michael.Gorman@cbc.ca>, office.journalism@ryerson.ca,
patti.sonntag@concordia.ca, iij@concordia.ca, "ian.fahie"
<ian.fahie@rcmp-grc.gc.ca>, "Nathalie.Drouin"
<Nathalie.Drouin@justice.gc.ca
<Anita.Anand@parl.gc.ca>, mcu <mcu@justice.gc.ca>, "Candice.Bergen"
<Candice.Bergen@parl.gc.ca>, dbeers@thetyee.ca, abennett@thetyee.ca,
pwillcocks@thetyee.ca, "fin.minfinance-financemin.
<fin.minfinance-financemin.
<news-tips@nytimes.com>, volokh@law.ucla.edu,
chris.mitchell@reason.com, tips@reason.com, david.g.post@gmail.com,
jblackman@stcl.edu, john.elwood@arnoldporter.com, baude@uchicago.edu
Cc: motomaniac333 <motomaniac333@gmail.com>, sheilagunnreid
<sheilagunnreid@gmail.com>, Newsroom <Newsroom@globeandmail.com>,
PREMIER <PREMIER@gov.ns.ca>, haley.ryan@cbc.ca
Deja Vu Anyone???
https://www.scribd.com/doc/
https://www.banking.senate.
https://www.steptoe.com/en/
Stewart A. Baker
Of Counsel
Stewart Baker's career has spanned national security and law. He served as General Counsel of the National Security Agency, Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, and drafter of a report reforming the intelligence community after the Iraq War. His legal practice focuses on cyber security, CFIUS, export controls, government procurement, and immigration and regulation of international travel.
At Homeland Security, Stewart created and staffed the 250-person DHS Policy Directorate. He was responsible for policy analysis across the Department, as well as for the Department’s international affairs, strategic planning and relationships with law enforcement and public advisory committees. From 2006-2009, Stewart led successful negotiations with European and Middle Eastern governments over travel data, privacy, visa waiver and related issues. In addition, he led the Department’s policy effort to reform federal immigration laws, and transformed the Department’s role in CFIUS, helping to drive the first rewrite of the CFIUS law and regulations in a generation.
Internet, Telecom & Media
When not in government, Stewart manages one of the nation’s premier technology law practices. Described by The Washington Post as “one of the most techno-literate lawyers around,” Stewart’s practice covers national security, electronic surveillance, law enforcement, export control encryption, and related technology issues. He has been a key advisor on US export controls and on foreign import controls on technology. In 2010 Stewart’s policy memoir, Skating On Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism, was published by Hoover Press. He continues to comment on these topics at Lawfare.com and the Volokh Conspiracy, and he hosts Steptoe's Cyberlaw Podcast.
International Trade
Stewart's practice includes issues relating to government regulation of international trade in high-technology products, and advice and practice under the antidumping and countervailing duty laws of United States, European Union, Canada, and Australia. He also counsels clients on issues involving foreign sovereign immunity, and compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Stemming from his role at DHS, Stewart has a deep background in the international implications of US security policy – from the disputes over US collection of data from international businesses to the US statutory command that all containers being shipped to the US be scanned before leaving foreign ports.
Worldwide Arbitration
Stewart has handled the arbitration of claims exceeding a billion dollars, is a member of national and international rosters of arbitrators, and is the author of articles and a book on the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law arbitration rules.
Appellate
Stewart has had a number of significant successes in appellate litigation and appearances before the United States Supreme Court. He developed, and persuaded the Court to adopt, a new theory of constitutional federalism that remains the most vibrant Tenth Amendment doctrine of the past 30 years. In addition to having filed many Supreme Court and appellate briefs, Stewart was appointed by the Supreme Court to brief and argue Becker v. Montgomery and was recognized in the Court’s opinion for his “able” advocacy. He founded the State and Local Legal Center, which represents state and local governments before the Court; and his writings on appellate and constitutional issues have been cited in various opinions of the Court. His brief opposing the federal government in New York v. United States, 488 US 1041 (1992), was described by Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger as “one of the most influential amicus briefs ever filed in the Supreme Court.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74lDvZ1IPj4&ab_channel=FoxNews
Tucker Carlson: No honest person could believe this
4,491 Comments
Mystery Donor Backing Pro-Trump Disinfo Troll With Bitcoin
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Trump’s Most Influential White Nationalist Troll Is A Middlebury Grad Who Lives In Manhattan
Who is Ricky Vaughn? That was one of the big questions for anyone following far-right politics during the 2016 presidential election. The Twitter troll who took his name and avatar from Charlie Sheen’s character in “Major League” was everywhere on social media, an indefatigable circulator of edgy memes and rah-rah Donald Trump boosterism.
And anti-Semitism and white nationalism:
There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn’s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the “alt-right” white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails. The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert. Mainstream conservatives didn’t know they were retweeting an avowed racist and anti-Semite, but they liked what Ricky Vaughn had to say.
“He did this thing that people connected to organized white nationalism have not been able to do ― walk both sides of the extremist line in the sand,” said Keegan Hankes, a data intelligence expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Ricky Vaughn also played an important role in amplifying disinformation injected into American politics by the Russian government. HuffPost and a team of data scientists known as Susan Bourbaki Anthonythat tracks online propaganda analyzed who was retweeting the now infamous Kremlin-controlled Twitter account @TEN_GOP, which consistently praised Trump, attacked Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and churned out a vile medley of racism, Islamophobia and “fake news.”
In the data set of significant accounts we looked at, Ricky Vaughn retweeted @TEN_GOP the most, by far. Although Twitter shut down his @Ricky_Vaughn99 handle in October 2016, another handle he possibly used, @RapinBill, took over and retweeted @TEN_GOP at least 162 times between early March and late August 2017. (@RapinBill also retweeted @Pamela_Moore13, another Kremlin-controlled account, at least 37 times during this period.)
Some far-right sources suggest that @RapinBill might be an account run by another anonymous bad actor, an assertion for which there is no proof, but the account has nevertheless capitalized on the Ricky Vaughn brand of far-right intolerance and fake news. We will update this story as we learn more.
Curiously, @RapinBill, which is still active and followed by Donald Trump Jr., does not appear to have received a single reciprocal retweet from @TEN_GOPduring the time period we looked at, perhaps indicating an attempt to conceal the connection. @RapinBill retweeted @TEN_GOP until the end. When Twitter finally shut down @TEN_GOP last August, after having ignored numerous complaints about the Russian account, Ricky Vaughn did not take it well. He groused that @TEN_GOP had been “banned for supporting our president.” Within hours, he was steering traffic to the Kremlin’s backup account:
Ricky Vaughn was able to remain anonymous ― until this week.
On Monday, white nationalist Republican candidate Paul Nehlen, who is running against House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin, grew upset about criticism directed at him ― and seemingly not disavowed by Ricky Vaughn ― as the alt-right fragments under the weight of infighting, lawsuits and anti-fascist opposition. Two main camps have emerged: the real-world extremists who want to continue holding rallies and mixing it up in the streets, and the “optics cucks” who think the best approach to the mainstream is to keep pushing alt-right ideas through better propaganda. Ricky Vaughn is in the latter camp. And he hasn’t been shy about it.
“I’m dividing the movement between effective people and dumb losers,” he wrote on Gab, a social media platform overrun by white supremacists.
Amid all this infighting, an angry Nehlen dropped Ricky Vaughn’s real name:
Douglass Mackey.
The name ― with the double-s ― checked out. So did many other details. In October, I’d spoken with Loren Feldman, a filmmaker in Los Angeles who interviewed “Ricky Vaughn” in 2016 for a documentary project. Feldman agreed not to show the far-right troll’s face on camera and never learned his full name. But Ricky Vaughn, whom Feldman described to me as a nervous, slightly built blond man in his mid- to late 20s, had introduced himself as “Doug.” He told Feldman that he was from New England and had gone to a private school and worked in “consulting or finance” in New York. He was smart and well-heeled, an urbane cosmopolitan elite. “You would never ever in a million years think that was Ricky Vaughn,” Feldman said.
On Monday, I sentphotos I’d found of Douglass Mackey online to Feldman. I did not mention Mackey’s name or any identifying details. I simply asked Feldman if he recognized the man.
“That’s him,” Feldman said.
“Who?”
“Ricky.”
On Tuesday, Christopher Cantwell, another white nationalist who is feuding with Ricky Vaughn, posted a more recent photo of the propagandist to Gab that wasn’t readily available online. It appeared to be an older, heavier Mackey.
“Several photos have been showing up in several different mediums by which I communicate with my audience,” Cantwell said. “I don’t remember who gave it to me, but it matched the face I’ve seen in several other photos purporting to be him. I know people who have met Doug, and nobody who knows him has bothered to correct me, so I’m operating under the assumption that it’s authentic.”
The voice checked out too. Ricky Vaughn has done numerous white supremacist podcasts, and his calm, distinctive voice was identical to the voice of “Doug” that Feldman recorded for his film and to which I listened. A former colleague of Mackey’s who listened to one of Ricky Vaughn’s podcasts also deemed the voices a match. “That does sound like Doug,” he told me. I asked him how certain he was. “I don’t think you’re wrong,” he said. “It’s him.”
Another source, one who worked for the Trump campaign and is friendly with Ricky Vaughn, told me on Monday that the troll was desperately trying to get Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, to remove the information about him that Nehlen had posted. Torba denies this. “I have not been contacted by Ricky, anyone representing Ricky, or anyone by the name that has been listed,” Torba wrote on Gab shortly after this story was published.
Nehlen was banned from Gab on Thursday for violating the platform’s community guidelines about publishing private information about a user without their consent, Torba added. All of which would seem to further confirm Ricky Vaughn’s identity as Douglass Mackey.
So who is Doug Mackey?
The 28-year-old has done a good job keeping information about himself off the internet. Either before or immediately after Nehlen published his name, Mackey, who did not respond to requests to comment, removed all his personal social media accounts, traces of which remain online. But here’s what we know so far. (We will update the story as more information becomes available.)
Mackey is from Waterbury, Vermont, a small town of around 5,000 people in the middle of the state. His father, Scott,a lobbyist who focuses on tax policy affecting wireless communications and the digital economy, was a former legislative aide to the late U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords, who was a Republican at the time. When contacted by email, Mackey’s parents, Scott and Kathy Mackey, told HuffPost that “we were devastated to learn this week of Doug’s beliefs and on-line activities as reported in the Huffington Post. They are antithetical to the values we hold and with which he was raised. We are still trying to understand how he could have done something like this and hope he will find some way to make amends for the harm he has caused.”
Growing up in Vermont, Mackey went to Harwood Union High School, then nearby Middlebury College, where he competed on the track and field team for one season, running mainly the 800-meter distance. He graduated in 2011 with an economics degree.
After college, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, and took a job as an economist at John Dunham & Associates, an economic consulting firm that uses data to help clients “respond to threats and opportunities in the policy arena.” When reached by phone on Wednesday, the president of the company, John Dunham, confirmed that Mackey had been an employee there from April 2012 to July 2016, when he was terminated for reasons that Dunham could not reveal under New York labor laws. (A month earlier, the @RapinBill Twitter account was registered.)
Mackey appears to have moved that year into a two-bedroom apartment on Lexington Avenue in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. That was certainly his residence by the time he voted, as a Republican, in the 2016 election, according to New York voter registration information.
By then, his apparent alter ego Ricky Vaughn had become a mighty pusher of propaganda, teaming up with other far-right operatives, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, to spread racist lies and dangerous conspiracy theories.
Ricky Vaughn had also by then gone public with the history of his political metamorphosis into a white nationalist, which began, as it did for many members of the alt-right around his age, with Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. Paul’s conspiratorial libertarianism and racist ideas were attractive to many young white men with hard-right leanings. For some, though, Paul wasn’t radical enough. He was merely a gateway.
As Ricky Vaughn has explained in various podcasts and interviews for white nationalist platforms, after about three years of toying with libertarian ideas, he started growing more extreme. First, he became a critic of feminism. Then he went full racist “after the Trayvon Martin thing” in 2012 (when George Zimmerman fatally shot Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in Florida). “Why were they trying to make this racial narrative?” Ricky Vaughn told white nationalist Richard Spencer in a podcast. He elaborated in a separate interview on the website for Spencer’s Radix Journal:
At that time I realized what a con job the media was playing on all of us, and how the mainstream race propaganda was all bullshit. So from there I began to explore the different facets of cultural Marxism. The Jewish role in subversion, homosexuality, et cetera.
During Gamergate, a 2014 online harassment campaign waged by misogynists and racists online against women and minorities in the video game industry, Ricky Vaughn linked up with Yiannopoulos and Cernovich, who were ringleaders in the harassment and would both go on to even greater notoriety with their attempts to contaminate American political discourse with conspiracy theories.
“I owe a lot to them,” Ricky Vaughn said on a recent podcast.
By the beginning of 2016, he was clearly an open “alt-right” white nationalist. He talked about how “the good people are siding with nationalism and the Shabbos goyim shills and the neocohens are siding with the globalists.” He talked about how he wanted to “introduce ideas of racial consciousness into the mix so that patriotic American conservatives don’t feel bad about creating all-White communities and shunning mixed-marriages and that sort of thing, because we need racial separatism in order to maintain our unique culture and racial heritage.”
He tweeted anti-Semitic imagery:
Although Ricky Vaughn would later try to distance himself from white supremacy ― one reason it was easy for some neo-Nazis to celebrate his doxing this week ― he never could. “I still call myself alt-right,” he said on a recent podcast.
He still engaged in the trolling and harassment that conveys status within the far-right. After the mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school in February, Ricky Vaughn, true to form, used another one of his Twitter accounts to attack Cameron Kasky, one of the survivors, after Kasky advocated for gun control. In a tweet that he has since deleted, he wrote:
“You’re a crass, craven, disgusting worm. Smiling and laughing and taking selfies in the wake of a massacre. Why? Because you’ve punched your ticket now. You’re famous, just like you always wanted to be. A little theatre whore. Dance for the cameras, monkey.”
But his desire ― or need ― to be all things to all racists no longer worked. The opportunism that gave him mass appeal when the far-right was unified during the Trump campaign and for several months after the election also spelled his doom after last summer’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The deadly rally was a disaster for the alt-right. The infighting began soon after. And Ricky Vaughn was a target.
“That same strategy of one foot in the mainstream camp and one foot in the white nationalist camp didn’t hold up after Charlottesville,” Hankes from the SPLC said. “You saw him getting attacked pretty viciously by the hard right in the post-Charlottesville moment where a large part of the alt-right was black-pilled (i.e. soured) on Trump. That mainstream strategy kind of crumbled and ruined his credibility.”
He was too soft, many other white nationalists said. Too much of a sellout. Many denounced him. But Ricky Vaughn kept fighting for relevance. A month ago, in the debut of his own “Ricky Vaughncast” podcast, he described his new approach, which was softer even still. He felt the alt-right should move away from trying to publicly convert people to white nationalism with brute-force propaganda and instead seduce them secretly in private.
“I view it strictly from the standpoint of what’s effective,” he said.
Secrecy will no longer be effective for Ricky Vaughn.
UPDATE: After the publication of this story, Twitter suspended the @RapinBill account. This story has been updated to include more details about that account, as well as comments from Andrew Torba and a new statement from Scott and Kathleen Mackey.
Clarification: This article originally included a Ricky Vaughn tweet that generally referenced Nazis. It has been replaced with another tweet that demonstrates the account’s use of anti-Semitic imagery.
Luke O'Brien covers political extremism and disinformation for HuffPost and is a contributing writer on the Highline team. He specializes in narrative and investigative features and has worked for POLITICO magazine, Deadspin, Wired News, an alt-weekly and a small-town daily. His freelance work has appeared in The Atlantic, Fortune, Rolling Stone, Fast Company, and Slate, among other publications.
Social Media Influencer Charged with Election Interference Stemming from Voter Disinformation Campaign
Defendant Unlawfully Used Social Media to Deprive Individuals of Their Right to Vote
BROOKLYN, NY – A criminal complaint was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging Douglass Mackey, also known as “Ricky Vaughn,” with conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 United States Presidential Election to use various social media platforms to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote. Mackey was arrested this morning in West Palm Beach, Florida and will make his initial appearance via videoconference today before United States Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart at the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach.
Seth D. DuCharme, Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Nicholas L. McQuaid, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), announced the arrest and charges.
“There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote.” stated Acting United States Attorney DuCharme. “With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes. They will be investigated, caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
“According to the allegations in the indictment, the defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one the of most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution: the right to vote,” stated Acting Assistant Attorney General McQuaid. “This indictment underscores the department’s commitment to investigating and prosecuting those who would undermine citizens’ voting rights.”
“Protecting every American citizen’s right to cast a legitimate vote is a key to the success of our republic. What Mackey allegedly did to interfere with this process—by soliciting voters to cast their ballots via text—amounted to nothing short of vote theft. It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public’s trust in our electoral processes. He may have been a powerful social media influencer at the time, but a quick Internet search of his name today will reveal an entirely different story,” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney.
In 2016, Mackey established an audience on Twitter with approximately 58,000 followers. A February 2016 analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as the 107th most important influencer of the then-upcoming Election, ranking it above outlets and individuals, among others, such as NBC News (#114), Stephen Colbert (#119) and Newt Gingrich (#141).
As alleged in the complaint, between September 2016 and November 2016, in the lead up to the November 8, 2016, United States Presidential Election, Mackey conspired with others to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages designed to encourage supporters of one of the presidential candidates (the “Candidate”) to “vote” via text message or social media and thus to fail to cast their ballots in a legally valid manner.
For example, on November 1, 2016, Mackey tweeted an image that featured an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for [the Candidate]” sign. The image included the following text: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘[Candidate’s first name]’ to 59925[.] Vote for [the Candidate] and be a part of history.” The fine print at the bottom of the image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by [Candidate] for President 2016.” The tweet included the typed hashtags “#Go [Candidate]” and another slogan frequently used by the Candidate. On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “[Candidate’s first name]” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which was used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by the defendant and his co-conspirators.
If convicted of the charge, conspiracy against rights, Mackey faces up to 10 years in prison. The charges in the complaint are allegations, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
The government’s case is being handled by the Office’s Public Integrity Section. Assistant United States Attorneys Erik Paulsen and Nathan Reilly are in charge of the prosecution, with Trial Attorney James Mann from the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section.
The Defendant:
DOUGLASS MACKEY
Age: 31
West Palm Beach, Florida
Twitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. Says
Douglass Mackey, a right-wing provocateur, was accused of spreading memes that made Hillary Clinton supporters falsely believe they could cast ballots in 2016 via text message.
A man who was known as a far-right Twitter troll was arrested on Wednesday and charged with spreading disinformation online that tricked Democratic voters in 2016 into trying to cast their ballots by phone instead of going to the polls.
Federal prosecutors accused Douglass Mackey, 31, of coordinating with co-conspirators to spread memes on Twitter falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton’s supporters could vote by sending a text message to a specific phone number.
The co-conspirators were not named in the complaint, but one of them was Anthime Gionet, a far-right media personality known as “Baked Alaska,” who was arrested after participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a person briefed on the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
As a result of the misinformation campaign, prosecutors said, at least 4,900 unique phone numbers texted the number in a futile effort to cast votes for Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Mackey was arrested on Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Fla., in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter.
“With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes,” said Seth DuCharme, the acting United States attorney in Brooklyn, whose office is prosecuting the case.
Mrs. Clinton was not named in the complaint, but a person briefed on the investigation confirmed that she was the presidential candidate described in the charging documents.
A lawyer for Mr. Mackey declined to comment.
Mr. Mackey, who was released from custody on Wednesday on a $50,000 bond, faces an unusual charge: conspiracy to violate rights, which makes it illegal for people to conspire to “oppress” or “intimidate” anyone from exercising a constitutional right, such as voting. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
The case will test the novel use of federal civil rights laws as a tool to hold people accountable for misinformation campaigns intended to interfere with elections, a problem that has recently become an urgent priority for social media platforms and law enforcement officials to stop.
It has become a game of whack-a-mole to police users like Mr. Mackey, who prosecutors said would simply open new Twitter accounts after his old ones were suspended. Mr. Mackey used four different Twitter accounts from 2014 to 2018, the complaint said, always seeking to hide his true identity from the public.
The Trump Investigations
Numerous inquiries. Since Donald J. Trump left office, the former president has been facing several different civil and criminal investigations across the country into his business dealings and political activities. Here is a look at some notable cases:
The goal of Mr. Mackey’s campaign, according to prosecutors, was to influence people to vote in a “legally invalid manner.”
In 2018, Mr. Mackey was revealed to be the operator of a Twitter account using the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, which boosted former President Donald J. Trump while spreading anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda.
Mr. Mackey’s account had such a large following that it made the M.I.T. Media Lab’s list of the top 150 influencers in the 2016 election, ranking ahead of the Twitter accounts for NBC News, Drudge Report and CBS News.
What we consider before using anonymous sources.How do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
Twitter shut down the account in 2016, one month before the election, for violating the company’s rules by “participating in targeted abuse.” At that time, the account had about 58,000 followers. Three days later, an associate of Mr. Mackey’s opened a new account for him, prosecutors said, which was also quickly suspended.
It was not clear how Mr. Mackey became connected to Mr. Gionet, or “Baked Alaska,” who was also a popular social media figure among white nationalists and far-right activists. A lawyer for Mr. Gionet declined to comment.
Mr. Mackey is a Vermont native who graduated from Middlebury College. He worked for five years as an economist at a Brooklyn-based research firm, John Dunham & Associates, until his termination in the summer of 2016, a company representative said.
The complaint showed a surgical precision in the disinformation campaign by Mr. Mackey and his four co-conspirators. In private group conversations on Twitter, they discussed how to insert their memes into trending conversations online, and dissected changes in wording and colors to make their messages more effective.
Mr. Mackey was obsessed with his posts going viral, the complaint said, once telling his associates, “THE MEMES ARE SPREADING.” He and his co-conspirators joked about tricking “dopey” liberals.
Their effort to misinform voters began after the group saw a similar campaign intended to deceive voters in the 2016 referendum in Britain on whether to leave the European Union, also known as Brexit, according to the complaint.
Mr. Mackey and his associates created their own version, sharing photos that urged Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to vote for her on Election Day using a hashtag on Twitter or Facebook. To make the images look more legitimate, they affixed the logo of her campaign and linked to her website.
Some of their memes appeared to target Black and Latino voters. One image had a Black woman standing in front of a sign supporting Mrs. Clinton, telling people to vote for Mrs. Clinton by texting a specific number. Mr. Mackey shared a similar image written in Spanish, prosecutors said.
Less than a week before Election Day, the complaint said, Mr. Mackey sent a message on Twitter: “Obviously, we can win Pennsylvania. The key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.”
Around that time, Twitter began removing the images with false information and suspended Mr. Mackey’s account. But the memes had already taken on a life of their own, prosecutors said, as his associates continued to share them with a wider audience.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
Nicole Hong covers law enforcement and courts in New York. She previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for stories about secret payoffs made on Donald Trump's behalf to two women.
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Are Douglass Mackey’s Memes Illegal?
The case of notorious internet troll ‘Ricky Vaughn’
In 2016, a Florida man named Douglass Mackey (using the online alias “Ricky Vaughn”) allegedly conspired to distribute a meme aimed at deceiving pro-Hillary voters.
Four years later, Mackey is now being prosecuted (as to this and as to other memes) for violating 18 U.S.C. § 241, a federal law that punishes 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”—namely, the right to vote. Lying to voters in a way that keeps them from voting, the theory goes, is a crime.
Is this sort of prosecution constitutional? After all, people often lie in political campaigns. Candidates do it, activists do it, political operatives do it. Can election lies simply be outlawed?
Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has never resolved the question. It hasn’t resolved the big-picture question: When can the government punish lies? It hasn’t resolved the medium-size question: Can the government punish lies in election campaigns? And it hasn’t resolved the particular question: Can the government punish lies about the mechanisms of voting, and in particular about how to vote?
1.
Let’s start with the big picture. Certain kinds of lies (let’s focus now on knowing lies, not inadvertent errors) can indeed be punished, including criminally.
The classic example is defamation: lies that injure reputation. Criminal libel prosecutions are rare, but they are constitutional—if the criminal libel statute is limited to knowing lies. Perjury can similarly be punished. So can fraud, even in otherwise constitutionally protected contexts (such as charitable solicitations). As the Supreme Court has held, though “under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea,” “there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.”
But the court has refused to say that all lies are constitutionally unprotected. In 2012, the court considered the case of Xavier Alvarez, a local government official in an LA suburb; he had lied about getting the Congressional Medal of Honor, and was prosecuted under the Stolen Valor Act, a statute that bans such lies about military decorations. Unconstitutional, six justices said. (I should disclose that I filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that most lies should be constitutionally unprotected; but that argument did not prevail.)
And yet the justices didn’t explain where to draw the line. There was broad agreement that “Laws restricting false statements about philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and other matters of public concern … would present a grave and unacceptable danger of suppressing truthful speech.” “The point is not that there is no such thing as truth or falsity in these areas or that the truth is always impossible to ascertain, but rather that it is perilous to permit the state to be the arbiter of truth.” (That’s from the dissent, but the concurrence endorsed it, and the plurality’s opinion was even more speech-protective than the others.)
Yet when it came to more specific lies, whether about one’s own medals or something else, there was no majority opinion. Four justices (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor) took a broadly speech-protective view. Two more justices (Justices Breyer and Kagan) concurred with an intermediate view. Three justices (Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas) dissented, reasoning that lies are generally unprotected. And that has been the court’s last word on the subject so far.
2.
Lower courts have considered the question more, including with regard to laws banning knowing lies in election campaigns. Do courts uphold such laws? I answer unequivocally: yes, and no. In 1985, an Ohio appellate court upheld the Ohio statute, and in 2000 the Michigan Supreme Court held that lies by candidates for judicial office could be punished (though the Michigan rule didn’t involve criminal punishment).
On the other hand, a 2007 Washington Supreme Court decision struck down that state’s election lies statute. And since Alvarez, federal and state appellate courts have struck down the Ohio, Minnesota, and Massachusetts statutes. All those cases focused on the specific details of those statutes; but it’s fair to say that those judges were highly skeptical of the government’s ability to fairly adjudicate such cases. To quote the Massachusetts case,
[Such a] statute may be manipulated easily into a tool for subverting its own justification, i.e., the fairness and freedom of the electoral process, through the chilling of core political speech. ... [T]he distinction between fact and opinion is not always obvious. ... Moreover, even in cases involving seemingly obvious statements of political fact, distinguishing between truth and falsity may prove exceedingly difficult. ...
Thus, in the election context, as elsewhere, it is apparent “that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which [the people’s] wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.”
3.
But what if a law focuses narrowly on one category of election lies—lies about the details of the voting process, which risk misleading voters not about the qualities of a candidate or the costs and benefits of a ballot measure, but about the who, where, when, and how of voting (e.g., whether one can vote by text)?
In 2018, the Supreme Court offhandedly remarked that “We do not doubt that the State may prohibit messages intended to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures”—at least in the government-controlled space in voting locations. And while it takes much more to justify speech restrictions outside government property than it does to justify restrictions on government property, I expect that courts would likely uphold a narrow ban on lying about the rules of the voting process—though I know of no cases specifically dealing with such narrow bans.
For such lies, “the distinction between fact and opinion” is usually easy to draw. “[D]istinguishing between truth and falsity” would generally not “prove exceedingly difficult.” There’s no real concern about suppressing debate about “philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and other matters of public concern” or even just about a particular candidate or ballot measure.
There is a compelling interest in making sure that voters aren’t deceived into voting in a legally ineffective way, and thus throwing away their votes. The law would be narrowly focused on preventing such harm to the democratic process. And five of the justices in Alvarez (the dissenters and the two concurring justices) took the view that restrictions on lies should be easier to uphold than restrictions on other speech.
Now even such a narrow restriction would have some cost. Much humor, for instance, consists of knowingly false statements being said as satire or hyperbole. Such statements are usually obviously, ridiculously false, which is what makes them funny. One classic example is “Democrats vote Tuesday, Republicans vote Wednesday” (or vice versa); it’s sometimes offered as an example of deception, but my sense is that it’s usually a joke, precisely because readers know that a general election is one day for everyone, rather than different days for different parties. Many people may have viewed Mackey’s meme as a joke as well, though the government’s evidence suggests he was hoping to actually be taken seriously by some voters. (The prosecutors allege that a small portion of his audience may indeed have been taken in, but the question in conspiracy cases is whether the defendants sought to achieve the goal, not whether they actually achieved it.)
Courts have dealt with this “lie or satire?” question in other cases, often involving libel. Consider New Times, Inc. v. Isaacks, a 2004 Texas Supreme Court case. The backstory was that a 13-year-old had been arrested and kept jailed for five days on a “terroristic threats” charge, for writing a story about a school shooting—in response to a Halloween assignment from a teacher who had asked the children to write a scary story. The incident drew criticism of the judge and prosecutor who authorized this.
To the extent it is a precedent, the breadth of the Mackey indictment is disquieting.
In response, a local alt-weekly published an article that described the arrest and detention of “diminutive six-year-old” Cindy Bradley, who was purportedly jailed for writing a book report about “cannibalism, fanaticism, and disorderly conduct” in Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. Adjacent to the article was a picture of a smiling child holding a stuffed animal and bearing the caption, “Do they make handcuffs this small? Be afraid of this little girl.”
The article ascribed these actions to the judge and prosecutor in the original story, and the allegations got still more ridiculous as the article went on (satirical articles are often structured this way): “Cindy was placed in ankle shackles ‘after [authorities] reviewed her disciplinary record, which included reprimands for spraying a boy with pineapple juice and sitting on her feet.’” The judge and the prosecutor sued for libel, and the trial court and intermediate appellate court allowed the case to go forward (even ordering the newspaper to pay the plaintiffs’ attorney costs for the appeal): “A genuine issue of material fact exists,” the appellate court reasoned, “as to whether a reasonable person could construe the asserted parody or satire as a statement of actual fact.” It took a further appeal to the Texas Supreme Court to get the casereversed, unanimously.
So: On one hand, the legal system did end up properly distinguishing a lie from a joke. On the other, it took years and doubtless a lot of money to get there, with four judges (the trial judge and three intermediate appellate judges) ruling one way and the nine Texas high court judges ruling the other. That’s a sobering reminder of the danger posed even by laws that ostensibly target falsehoods.
Of course, even “obvious” falsehoods that might be funny or at least harmless for most viewers could deceive a few—and that deception might be harmful, especially in a close election. But one can say the same about libels: The judge and the prosecutor in the New Times case (both elected officials themselves, by the way) might have been worried that some readers—some voters—wouldn’t get the joke, even if most would have.
Now we don’t let the satire tail wag the libel dog: We keep libel law, coupled with the rule that satirical material shouldn’t be treated as libelous, rather than jettisoning it altogether. Likewise, we might have a ban on lies about the mechanics of voting, and trust prosecutors, judges, and juries to sort the lies from the satire. Still, there would be some cost to free speech from such a prohibition, especially since something that’s a joke to 95% of the people may be taken seriously by 5%.
4.
Narrow and clearly defined statutes that prohibit lies about the mechanics of how to vote are likely constitutional. Some states have such statutes (e.g., Missouri’s ban on “Knowingly providing false information about election procedures for the purpose of preventing any person from going to the polls”), though even those might need to be tightened up a bit.
But, to return to Mackey the meme-maker, there is no such clear and narrow federal statute. Instead, the statute under which Mackey is being prosecuted bans all 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’s not obvious that deceiving someone into voting in an invalid way qualifies as “injur[ing]” or “oppress[ing].” But if the statute does cover deception, then there’s nothing in the text limiting such deception to speech about the mechanics of voting. Alleged lies about the government or national security or the economy could also be prosecuted, if the government thought they were intended to discourage people from voting. Some might applaud that, on the theory that the law should do more to punish political lies generally. But as we saw above, many courts are quite skeptical about general bans on lies in elections.
Nor can I find any precedent for such prosecutions under this statute. The closest analog, which the Justice Department writes about it in its Federal Prosecution of Election Offensesguide, is U.S. v. Tobin, where the government prosecuted a party official for “a scheme to jam telephone lines for ride-to-the-polls services offered by the opposing political party” and by the Manchester Professional Firefighters Association. “The object of the conspiracy was to impede certain voters from getting to the polls in order to influence what was perceived to have been a very close United States Senate contest.” A federal trial judge held that § 241 would cover such conduct. But Tobin was acquitted by the jury, so there was no opportunity for an appellate court to consider the legal question. (Under the Double Jeopardy Clause, the government can’t appeal acquittals.)
To my knowledge, no other court has since considered the issue. And the Tobin decision didn’t consider a First Amendment argument, since the government was prosecuting Tobin for his conduct (jamming the lines) rather than for speech. It’s thus not the strongest precedent for what the government is now doing in the Mackey case.
And to the extent it is a precedent, the breadth of the Mackey indictment is disquieting. For instance, urging the Manchester Professional Firefighters Association to shut down its get-out-the-vote effort (with no threats or incitement of violence, but just advocacy) would be advocacy protected by the First Amendment. But under the trial court’s reasoning—that § 241 bans conspiracies “with the specific intent to impede or prevent qualified persons from exercising the right to vote”—such advocacy would in fact be a crime. Likewise, picketing outside a party’s headquarters, urging party activists not to show up for the get-out-the-vote effort (perhaps arguing that the party’s candidate has recently been shown to be a crook or a racist), would be a crime, too.
What’s more, § 241 isn’t limited to protecting the right to vote; it applies to “injur[ing]” or “oppress[ing]” people “in the free exercise or enjoyment” of any constitutional right. Say that people try to prevent a public speech at a local university by urging university employees to cancel it. That too would be a conspiracy “with the specific intent to impede or prevent qualified persons from exercising” the First Amendment right to speak, or the right to listen (which the court has held is also protected by the First Amendment).
In First Amendment cases, the court has asked not only whether the defendant’s speech is theoretically punishable—it has asked whether the particular law is narrowly tailored to punishing it, and whether it clearly enough defines what is punished. (This is done under the “overbreadth,” “strict scrutiny,” “intermediate scrutiny,” and “vagueness” doctrines.) Section 241 may be adequate for punishing nonspeech conduct, whether violence or vandalism or tying up phone lines, or for speech that falls within a recognized First Amendment exception (such as perjury). But if the federal government wants to punish speech about elections, even deliberately deceptive speech, it ought to use something clearer and narrower.
In the Tobin case, there was an appeal of a different charge: Tobin had also been convicted under a telephone harassment statute, which banned repeated calls made “with intent to harass.” But the appellate court reversed that, and added: “Despite the unattractive conduct, this [telephone harassment] statute is not a close fit for what Tobin did. If the government thinks this a recurring problem, it better seek an amendment [to the statute].” Those words ring true for the Mackey prosecution as well.
Eugene Volokh is a professor of First Amendment law at UCLA School of Law, and the co-founder of the law professor blog The Volokh Conspiracy.
https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/
Eugene Volokh teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, an intensive editing workshop, and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic at UCLA School of Law, where he has also often taught copyright law, criminal law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. Before coming to UCLA, he clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (7th ed. 2020) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 80 law review articles; his work makes him one of the most cited law review article authors. He is a member of The American Law Institute, a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, and the founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a Weblog (independent 2002-2014, hosted at the Washington Post 2014-2017, hosted at Reason from 2017).
Volokh has argued over 30 appellate cases since 2013 in state and federal courts throughout the country, and has filed over 100 appellate briefs; his articles have also been cited over 240 times in judicial opinions.
Volokh worked for 12 years as a computer programmer, has a B.S. in math-computer science at UCLA (1983), and has written many articles on computer software. Volokh was born in the USSR; his family emigrated to the U.S. when he was seven years old.
Areas of research interest
Cyberspace and the law� free speech, privacy, intellectual property.
Constitutional and legal history.
Sexual/religious/racial harassment.
Affirmative action, including the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI or Prop. 209).
Religious freedom and separation of church and state.
Copyright and intellectual property law.
Restrictions on sexual behavior.
Constitutional law generally.
| Eugene Volokh |
https://reason.com/volokh/who-we-are/
The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent | Est. 2002
Who We Are
Most of us are law professors, though some are lawyers and one is a political science professor. Naturally, we speak only for ourselves, and not for the institutions that employ us.
- Dale Carpenter, SMU.
- David Bernstein, George Mason University.
- David Hyman, Georgetown University.
- David Kopel, Independence Institute.
- David Post, Temple University (ret.) & Cato Institute (e-mail address).
- Eugene Kontorovich, George Mason University.
- Eugene Volokh, UCLA.
- Gail Heriot, University of San Diego.
- Ilya Somin, George Mason University.
- Irina Manta, Hofstra University.
- Jim Lindgren, Northwestern University.
- John Elwood, Arnold & Porter.
- Jonathan H. Adler, Case Western Reserve University.
- Josh Blackman, South Texas College of Law.
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- Ken Anderson, American University.
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- Nita Farahany, Duke University.
- Orin Kerr, UC Berkeley.
- Paul Cassell, University of Utah.
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- Sam Bray, University of Notre Dame.
- Sasha (Alexander) Volokh, Emory University.
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- Stewart Baker, Steptoe & Johnson.
- Stuart Benjamin, Duke University.
- Todd Zywicki, George Mason University.
- Will Baude, University of Chicago.
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From: "Bergen, Candice - M.P."<candice.bergen@parl.gc.ca>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 16:28:40 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: YO Stewart A. Baker The NSA and the DHS must
remember me I ask again What planet do Yankee lawyers come from???
To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
On behalf of the Hon. Candice Bergen, thank you for contacting the
Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition.
Ms. Bergen greatly values feedback and input from Canadians. We read
and review every incoming e-mail. Please note that this account
receives a high volume of e-mails. We reply to e-mails as quickly as
possible.
If you are a constituent of Ms. Bergen’s in Portage-Lisgar with an
urgent matter please provide complete contact information. Not
identifying yourself as a constituent could result in a delayed
response.
Once again, thank you for writing.
Sincerely,
Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Au nom de l’hon. Candice Bergen, nous vous remercions de communiquer
avec le Bureau de la cheffe de l’Opposition officielle.
Mme Bergen accorde une grande importance aux commentaires des
Canadiens. Nous lisons et étudions tous les courriels entrants.
Veuillez noter que ce compte reçoit beaucoup de courriels. Nous y
répondons le plus rapidement possible.
Si vous faites partie de l’électorat de Mme Bergen dans la
circonscription de Portage-Lisgar et que votre affaire est urgente,
veuillez fournir vos coordonnées complètes. Si vous ne le faites pas,
cela pourrait retarder la réponse.
Nous vous remercions une fois encore d’avoir pris le temps d’écrire.
Veuillez agréer nos salutations distinguées,
Bureau de la cheffe de l’Opposition officielle
From: "Elwood, John"<John.Elwood@arnoldporter.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 17:33:15 +0000
Subject: RE: YO Stewart A. Baker The NSA and the DHS must remember me
I ask again What planet do Yankee lawyers come from???
To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Mr. Amos: I received your voicemail. I do not understand your emails
and I can't assist you. I simply don't practice law in the relevant
area.
-----Original Message-----
From: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2022 12:27 PM
To: dfrench@steptoe.com; zzz.External.mrathbone@
<mrathbone@steptoe.com>; nkimbrell@steptoe.com; eabrams@steptoe.com;
news@nowtoronto.com; Chrystia.Freeland <Chrystia.Freeland@parl.gc.ca>
signalhfx@gmail.com; Roger.Burrill@
nasha@nmbarristers.com; josh@chesterlaw.ca; RPineo@pattersonlaw.ca;
smcculloch@pattersonlaw.ca; Michelle.Boutin
<Michelle.Boutin@rcmp-grc.gc.
<blaine.higgs@gnb.ca>; hugh.flemming <hugh.flemming@gnb.ca>;
Roger.Brown <Roger.Brown@fredericton.ca>; Mark.Blakely
<Mark.Blakely@rcmp-grc.gc.ca>; Marco.Mendicino
<Marco.Mendicino@parl.gc.ca>; martin.gaudet
<martin.gaudet@fredericton.ca>
<oldmaison@yahoo.com>; Nick.Carleton@uregina.ca; tara@mdwlaw.ca;
mscott@pattersonlaw.ca; comlaw <comlaw@uottawa.ca>;
eratushn@uottawa.ca; paulpalango <paulpalango@protonmail.com>;
NightTimePodcast <NightTimePodcast@gmail.com>; nsinvestigators
<nsinvestigators@gmail.com>; andrewjdouglas
<andrewjdouglas@gmail.com>; andrew <andrew@frankmagazine.ca>; tim
<tim@halifaxexaminer.ca>; Nicholas.Dorrington@rcmp-grc.
Brenda.Lucki <Brenda.Lucki@rcmp-grc.gc.ca>; Bill.Blair
<Bill.Blair@parl.gc.ca>; Ian.Shugart <Ian.Shugart@pco-bcp.gc.ca>;
info@masscasualtycommission.ca
<Katie.Telford@pmo-cpm.gc.ca>; Viva Frei <david@vivafrei.com>;
drea.humphrey <drea.humphrey@rebelnews.com>;
info@easternshorecooperator.ca
<jcarpay@jccf.ca>; info <info@gg.ca>; Bill.Hogan <Bill.Hogan@gnb.ca>;
info@aboriginallegal.ca; hrgeneral@aboriginallegal.ca;
michael.macdonald <michael.macdonald@
Michael.Gorman <Michael.Gorman@cbc.ca>; office.journalism@ryerson.ca;
patti.sonntag@concordia.ca; iij@concordia.ca; ian.fahie
<ian.fahie@rcmp-grc.gc.ca>; Nathalie.Drouin
<Nathalie.Drouin@justice.gc.ca
mcu <mcu@justice.gc.ca>; Candice.Bergen <Candice.Bergen@parl.gc.ca>;
dbeers@thetyee.ca; abennett@thetyee.ca; pwillcocks@thetyee.ca;
fin.minfinance-financemin.fin
<fin.minfinance-financemin.
<news-tips@nytimes.com>; volokh@law.ucla.edu;
chris.mitchell@reason.com; tips@reason.com; david.g.post@gmail.com;
jblackman@stcl.edu; Elwood, John <John.Elwood@arnoldporter.com>
baude@uchicago.edu; admin@terrorhousepress.com;
mattforney@protonmail.com; sheilagunnreid <sheilagunnreid@gmail.com>;
Newsroom <Newsroom@globeandmail.com>; PREMIER <PREMIER@gov.ns.ca>;
haley.ryan@cbc.ca; djtr <djtr@trumporg.com>
Cc: motomaniac333 <motomaniac333@gmail.com>;
david.wilkins@nelsonmullins.
<bbachrach@bachrachlaw.net>; Dominic.Cardy@gnb.ca; paul@paulfromm.com;
publicaffairs@doc.gov
Subject: Fwd: YO Stewart A. Baker The NSA and the DHS must remember me
I ask again What planet do Yankee lawyers come from???
**External E-mail**
mrathbone@steptoe.com
---------- Original message ----------
From: "Baker, Stewart"<Sbaker@steptoe.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 15:19:34 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: I called you all today correct??? Say Hey to
Mr Moran for me will ya?
To: David Amos <motomaniac333@gmail.com>
I am hiking in the Denali backcountry where there is no cell service
or connectivity of any kind, so I will not be in a position to respond
until August 23 at the earliest. If you need help before then, please
contact Diane French, dfrench@steptoe.com or one of the lawyers who
works with me most frequently -- such as Evan Abrams, Nick Kindrell,
Meredith Rathbone, or Brian Fleming.
---------- Original message ----------
From: David Amos <motomaniac333@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 12:19:25 -0300
Subject: I called you all today correct??? Say Hey to Mr Moran for me will ya?
To: sbaker@steptoe.com, bfleming@steptoe.com, grenigar@steptoe.com,
jabel@steptoe.com, nahuja@steptoe.com, eakhavan@steptoe.com
Cc: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "MinFinance / FinanceMin (FIN)"<fin.minfinance-financemin.
Date: Fri, 26 May 2017 13:26:14 +0000
Subject: RE: Re MONEY Adisory and Mean Old Me versus legions of
crooked lawyers such as the evil Yankee Davd Wilkins who conning NB
right now
To: David Amos <motomaniac333@gmail.com>
The Department of Finance acknowledges receipt of your electronic
correspondence. Please be assured that we appreciate receiving your
comments.
Le ministère des Finances accuse réception de votre correspondance
électronique. Soyez assuré(e) que nous apprécions recevoir vos
commentaires.
---------- Original message ----------
From: David Amos <motomaniac333@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 26 May 2017 09:26:07 -0400
Subject: Re MONEY Adisory and Mean Old Me versus legions of crooked
lawyers such as the evil Yankee Davd Wilkins who conning NB right now
To: premier <premier@gnb.ca>, rick.doucet@gnb.ca, "brian.gallant"
<brian.gallant@gnb.ca>, duane.woods@chaleursawmills.ca
derrickrussell@nb.aibn.com, peterdegraaf@xplornet.ca,
delfor@nbnet.nb.ca, sgriffith@akingump.com,
lawrence.schneider@apks.com, efeldman@bakerlaw.com,
deen.kaplan@hoganlovells.com, msdavenport@djtradelaw.com,
mmoran@steptoe.com, matthew.clark@arentfox.com,
matthew.nicely@hugheshubbard.
dharrison@gibsondunn.com, tbeline@cassidylevy.com,
khm@mowrygrimson.com, wspak@whitecase.com, dcameron@mmmlaw.com,
rweiner@sidley.com, yohai.baisburd@dentons.com,
Joel.Junker@tradelawcounsel.
jcail@akingump.com, devonlumber@devonlumber.ca,
joel.maclaggan@eacantimber.ca, william.amos@parl.gc.ca,
Steven.MacKinnon@parl.gc.ca, Alaina.Lockhart@parl.gc.ca,
michael.godin@fornebulumber.
sales@langevinfp.com, premier@gov.bc.ca, blaine.Higgs@gnb.ca,
bostn@international.gc.ca, Davidc.Coon@gmail.com, David.Coon@gnb.ca,
terry.seguin@cbc.ca, keith.mary@jdirving.com, pfolkins@snbwc.ca,
woodlot@nbnet.nb.ca, nsfpmb@nbnet.nb.ca, odvdm@nbnet.nb.ca,
info@cvwpa.ca, Bruce.Northrup@gnb.ca, PREMIER@gov.ns.ca,
jamiebaillie@gov.ns.ca, steve.murphy@ctv.ca, Jacques.Poitras@cbc.ca,
oldmaison1 <oldmaison1@yahoo.ca>, darouse <darouse@porlaw.com>,
fmcelman <fmcelman@stewartmckelvey.com>
<kelly@lamrockslaw.com>, "chris.collins"<chris.collins@gnb.ca>, "dan.
bussieres"<dan.bussieres@gnb.ca>, "brian.hodgson"
<brian.hodgson@assembly.ab.ca>
<Michael.Duheme@rcmp-grc.gc.ca
<Roger.L.Melanson@gnb.ca>, "Larry.Tremblay"
<Larry.Tremblay@rcmp-grc.gc.ca
<Bobbi-Jean.MacKinnon@cbc.ca>, Kevin.Brosseau@rcmp-grc.gc.ca,
"ian.mcphail"<ian.mcphail@crcc-ccetp.gc.ca>
MulcaT <MulcaT@parl.gc.ca>, "maxime.bernier"
<maxime.bernier@parl.gc.ca>, leader <leader@greenparty.ca>,
"Gerald.Butts"<Gerald.Butts@pmo-cpm.gc.ca>, "Katie.Telford"
<Katie.Telford@pmo-cpm.gc.ca>, "Michael.Wernick"
<Michael.Wernick@pco-bcp.gc.ca
Cc: David Amos <david.raymond.amos@gmail.com>
mdcohen212@gmail.com, publicaffairs@doc.gov,
david.wilkins@nelsonmullins.
andre <andre@jafaust.com>, markandcaroline
<markandcaroline@gmail.com>, "Matt.DeCourcey"
<Matt.DeCourcey@parl.gc.ca>, "Bill.Casey"<Bill.Casey@parl.gc.ca>,
"Bill.Morneau"<Bill.Morneau@canada.ca>, "Hon.Dominic.LeBlanc"
<Hon.Dominic.LeBlanc@canada.ca
<hon.melanie.joly@canada.ca>, jbosnitch <jbosnitch@gmail.com>,
"bob.paulson"<bob.paulson@rcmp-grc.gc.ca>, "Gilles.Moreau"
<Gilles.Moreau@forces.gc.ca>, "Gilles.Blinn"
<Gilles.Blinn@rcmp-grc.gc.ca>, "ht.lacroix"<ht.lacroix@cbc.ca>,
"sylvie.gadoury"<sylvie.gadoury@radio-canada.
https://money.ca/news/2017/05/
Need i say that after I listened to Minister Jumping Jimmy Carrr,
Trudeau The Younger's mindless minion from Manitoba yap on CBC this
morning with the nasty bastard Terry Seguin and say nothing at all, I
called Harry Gill who was too busy to come to the phone again before I
sent this email? Need i say that this email is to remind you all that
at least one Maritimer is paying attention and plenty pissed off and
reminding Trump's lawyer Mikey Cohen of the amount of money his GOP
buddy David Wilkins is sucking out off the dumb liberals in NB to do
nothing worthwhile at all in Washington as his boss Trump plays with
WAR, NAFTA and Tariffs etc?.
---------- Original message ----------
From: "Doucet, Rick (LEG)"Rick.Doucet@gnb.ca
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 01:07:58 +0000
Subject: RE: Final Docs
To: David Amos motomaniac333@gmail.com
Will get right on this.
Always look forward to your brilliant thoughts.
R
Hon.Rick Doucet
Legislative member for Charlotte-the isles
28 Mt.Pleasant Rd.
St.George, N.B. E5C 3K4
Phone / Téléphone : 506-755-4200
Fax / Télécopieur : 506-755-4207
E-mail / Courriel : rick.doucet@gnb.ca
This message is intended for the person to whom it is addressed and is
to be treated as confidential or private communications. It must not
be forwarded unless permission has been received from the originator.
If you have received this message inadvertently, please notify the
sender and delete the message. Then delete your response. Thank you
for your cooperation.
------------------------------
Ce message est destiné à la personne désignée dans la présente et il
doit demeurer confidentiel. Il ne doit pas être réacheminé sans la
permission de l’expéditeur. Si ce message vous a été envoyé par
erreur, veuillez aviser l’expéditeur et effacer le message. Effacez
ensuite votre réponse. Merci de votre collaboration.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/
N.B.'s softwood lumber envoy will seek return of border tax exemption
David Wilkins, who is getting paid about $658,000, says exemption
'just makes good sense'
CBC News Posted: May 23, 2017 6:36 PM AT
"David Wilkins, who was in Saint John on Tuesday afternoon with
Premier Brian Gallant, said his goal is to get a return of the
long-standing exemption on border taxes on softwood lumber exports
from the province."
David H. Wilkins
Partner
david.wilkins@nelsonmullins.
T: 864.373.2231
Poinsett Plaza, Suite 900
104 South Main Street
Greenville, SC 29601
101 Constitution Avenue, NW
Suite 900
Washington, D.C. 20001
T: 202.689.2829
The ghost of the former LIEbrano Minister of Indian Affairs Andy Scott
who I ran against in the election of the 39th Parlaiment and everybody
else and his dog knows that after the sneaky lawyers David Wilins and
Brian Gallant were talking tough about Trump in Saint John I had a lot
to say in Federal Court in Fat Fred City the very next day EH Minister
Morneau, Matt DeCourcey, Chucky Leblanc and Andre Faust?
Your buddy Stevey Boy Murphy of CTV must recall this interview EH Chucky Baby?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Me,Myself and I
David Amos
Published on Apr 1, 2013
Although the Crown Corp commonly known as the CBC/RadioCanada sent its
sneaky reporters to watch Brucy Northrups lawyers whine and cry and
the RCMP?GRC do the same in court in Moncton on the 24th at least the
other Crown Corp the RCMP/GRC sent two of its chickenshit French
members who would not even identify themselves to me in order to
listen to every word and take notes N'esy Pas Bobby Paulson and Hubby
Lacroix?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/
MLA's lawyers ask for dismissal of Windsor Energy defamation suit
Former cabinet minister's lawyers say judge's ruling on seismic
testing permission should also be thrown out
By Jacques Poitras, CBC News Posted: May 24, 2017 6:14 PM AT
"Northrup's lawyer, Fred McElman, argued Wednesday that when the
provincial highway passes inside municipal boundaries — as Route 1
does where Windsor was testing — then permission from both is
required.
Windsor's lawyer Andrew Rouse said the law doesn't mention that scenario.
"If the municipality is to have jurisdiction over that highway, it
must be done explicitly," he said.
"They should have provided for that" in the law."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/
Status quo deemed 'unacceptable' years before Moncton Mountie
shootings, trial hears
Police force charged in connection with shooting deaths of 3 Moncton
officers, wounding of 2
By Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon, CBC News Posted: May 24, 2017 9:00 AM AT
"On Tuesday, an expert on police militarization in the United States,
testified that arming police with high-powered rifles, such as
carbines, can actually reduce safety for the public and officers.
Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University, said if
citizens see officers as occupiers, it can result in more violence."
---------- Original message ----------
From: David Amos <motomaniac333@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 25 May 2017 13:58:50 -0400
Subject: Fwd: Here ya go folks please enjoy the hearing today in
Federal Court and the notes I read from as I argued the Queen's sneaky
little minions who think they are above the law and the rest of us as
well
To: "blaine.higgs"<blaine.higgs@gnb.ca>, "Dominic.Cardy"
<Dominic.Cardy@gnb.ca>, "bruce.northrup"<bruce.northrup@gnb.ca>,
"hugh.flemming"<hugh.flemming@gnb.ca>, BrianThomasMacdonald
<BrianThomasMacdonald@gmail.
"carl.urquhart"<carl.urquhart@gnb.ca>, "Jacques.Poitras"
<Jacques.Poitras@cbc.ca>, "Paul.Lynch"<Paul.Lynch@edmontonpolice.ca>
"Paul.Collister"<Paul.Collister@rcmp-grc.gc.ca
<Paul.Harpelle@gnb.ca>, "peacock.kurt"
<peacock.kurt@
sfine <sfine@globeandmail.com>, newsroom <newsroom@globeandmail.ca>,
"nick.brown"<nick.brown@gnb.ca>, "nick.moore"
<nick.moore@bellmedia.ca>, "dan. bussieres"<dan.bussieres@gnb.ca>,
"Tim.RICHARDSON"<Tim.RICHARDSON@gnb.ca>, "randy.mckeen"
<randy.mckeen@gnb.ca>, premier <premier@gnb.ca>, "brian.gallant"
<brian.gallant@gnb.ca>, PREMIER <PREMIER@gov.ns.ca>, premier
<premier@gov.ab.ca>, "brian.hodgson"<brian.hodgson@assembly.ab.ca>
premier <premier@gov.bc.ca>, "suzanne.anton.mla"
<suzanne.anton.mla@leg.bc.ca>, "serge.rousselle"
<serge.rousselle@gnb.ca>, "david.eidt"<david.eidt@gnb.ca>, Brian Ruhe
<brian@brianruhe.ca>, paul <paul@paulfromm.com>, sunrayzulu
<sunrayzulu@shaw.ca>, patrick_doran1 <patrick_doran1@hotmail.com>, cps
<cps@calgarypolice.ca>, "theresa.may.mp"
<theresa.may.mp@parliament.uk>
"sylvie.gadoury"<sylvie.gadoury@radio-canada.
<ht.lacroix@cbc.ca>, "steve.murphy"<steve.murphy@ctv.ca>,
"don.marshall"<don.marshall@edmonton.ca>, "don.iveson"
<don.iveson@edmonton.ca>
Cc: David Amos <david.raymond.amos@gmail.com>
<brian@murphygroup.ca>, david <david@lutz.nb.ca>, "michael.comeau"
<michael.comeau@gnb.ca>
May 24th
https://archive.org/details/
April 3rd
https://archive.org/details/
---------- Original message ----------
From: NATALIA OLIVEIRA JOHNSTON natalia.johnston@cbc.ca
Date: Wed, 24 May 2017 17:13:10 -0700
Subject: Out of office Re: Here ya go folks please enjoy the hearing
today in Federal Court and the notes I read from as I argued the
Queen's sneaky little minions who think they are above the law and the
rest of us as well
To: motomaniac333@gmail.com
Please note that I'm on annual leave and will return on May 29.
If your matter is urgent, please contact the reception line at 416-205-3216.
--
*Natalia Johnston*
Legal Assistant
to Dustin Milligan, Katarina Germani and Azim Remani
Tel. (416) 205-2306
Fax (416) 205-2723
---------- Original message ----------
From: "MinFinance / FinanceMin (FIN)"<fin.minfinance-financemin.
Date: Thu, 25 May 2017 00:14:35 +000
Subject: RE: Here ya go folks please enjoy the hearing today in
Federal Court and the notes I read from as I argued the Queen's sneaky
little minions who think they are above the law and the rest of us as
well
To: David Amos motomaniac333@gmail.com
The Department of Finance acknowledges receipt of your electronic
correspondence. Please be assured that we appreciate receiving your
comments.
Le ministère des Finances accuse réception de votre correspondance
électronique. Soyez assuré(e) que nous apprécions recevoir vos
commentaires.
http://davidraymondamos3.
Friday, 28 April 2017
Attn Wilbur L. Ross, Jr. I just called about Softwood Tariffs
---------- Original message ----------
From: Premier
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2017 19:02:21 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: [PROBABLE-SPAM] Attn Wilbur L. Ross, Jr. I
just called about Softwood Tariffs
To: David Amos
Thank you for your email to Premier McNeil.
This is an automatic confirmation your email has been received.
Warmest Regards,
Premier's Correspondence Unit
For the Public record these are the documents I attached to my email
about Softwood Tariffs .
https://www.scribd.com/
https://www.scribd.com/
https://www.scribd.com/doc/
Final-Recipient: rfc822; yohai.baisburd@dentons.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Remote-MTA: dns; eu-smtp-inbound-2.mimecast.com
for the domain dentons.com.)
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554 Email rejected due to security policies -
https://community.mimecast.
Last-Attempt-Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2017 12:02:18 -0700 (PDT)
---------- Original message ----------
From: David Amos
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2017 15:02:12 -0400
Subject: Attn Wilbur L. Ross, Jr. I just called about Softwood Tariffs
To: publicaffairs@doc.gov, sgriffith@akingump.com,
lawrence.schneider@apks.com, efeldman@bakerlaw.com,
deen.kaplan@hoganlovells.com, msdavenport@djtradelaw.com,
mmoran@steptoe.com, matthew.clark@arentfox.com,
matthew.nicely@hugheshubbard.
dharrison@gibsondunn.com, tbeline@cassidylevy.com,
khm@mowrygrimson.com, wspak@whitecase.com, dcameron@mmmlaw.com,
rweiner@sidley.com, yohai.baisburd@dentons.com,
Joel.Junker@tradelawcounsel.
jcail@akingump.com
Cc: "David.Raymond.Amos" , Premier , "blaine.Higgs" ,
PREMIER@gov.ns.ca, jamiebaillie@gov.ns.ca, steve.murphy@ctv.ca,
Jacques.Poitras@cbc.ca
https://www.commerce.gov/news/
Wilbur L. Ross, Jr.
Secretary of Commerce and "King of Bankruptcy"
C/o
Office of Public Affairs
202-482-4883
publicaffairs@doc.gov
The documents hereto attached to and from Arnold & Porter and others
should refresh the memories of your Canadian clients and my Yankee
opponents as well.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Amos
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2017 12:18:29 -0400
Subject: I just called about Softwood Tariffs
To: dkoschik@whitecase.com, vdesantis@whitecase.com
Cc: "David.Raymond.Amos"
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/
J.D. Irving Ltd. had advantage in fighting for lower tariff, says Roger Melanson
Irving denies advantage over other companies because of operation in Maine
By Jacques Poitras, CBC News Posted: Apr 26, 2017 6:03 PM A
"The company uses a top Washington law firm, White and Case, that
specializes in international trade."
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Amos
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2017 10:41:14 -0400
Subject: Fwd: FYI I called Mr Stillwell then I listened to the Green
Meanie David Coon on CBC yapping about the Maritime Lumber Bureau and
I called them too
To: duane.woods@chaleursawmills.ca
peterdegraaf@xplornet.ca, delfor@nbnet.nb.ca,
devonlumber@devonlumber.ca, joel.maclaggan@eacantimber.ca,
michael.godin@fornebulumber.
sales@langevinfp.com
Cc: "David.Raymond.Amos" , mdcohen212@gmail.com
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Amos
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2017 08:16:56 -0400
Subject: FYI I called Mr Stillwell then I listened to the Green Meanie
David Coon on CBC yapping about the Maritime Lumber Bureau and I
called them too
To: Bill.Casey@parl.gc.ca, kmerriam@mlb.ca, Premier ,
premier@gov.bc.ca, blaine.Higgs@gnb.ca, bostn@international.gc.ca,
Davidc.Coon@gmail.com, David.Coon@gnb.ca, Matt.DeCourcey@parl.gc.ca,
terry.seguin@cbc.ca, keith.mary@jdirving.com, pfolkins@snbwc.ca,
brian.gallant@gnb.ca, rick.doucet@gnb.ca, woodlot@nbnet.nb.ca,
nsfpmb@nbnet.nb.ca, odvdm@nbnet.nb.ca, info@cvwpa.ca,
Bruce.Northrup@gnb.ca
Cc: "David.Raymond.Amos" , william.amos@parl.gc.ca, Steven.MacKinnon@parl.gc.ca,
Alaina.Lockhart@parl.gc.ca
Maritime Lumber Bureau
P.O. Box 459
Amherst, Nova Scotia
B4H 4A1
Phone: 902.667.3889
Hainesville Sawmill Ltd.
2779 Rte. 104
Middle Hainesville, NB
E6E 1H3
(506) 463-2261
Stillwell didn't know me from Adam and didn't much care and disagreed
with me about Trump's actions. So I told him to cantact the Maritime
Lumber Bureau because they have had my documents since 2005 and they
and the Feds are the ones who dropped the ball dealing with Trump
about softwood tariffs. It was not all Gallant's fault this time but a
lot of the blame can be shouldered by Blaine Higg's and his old buddy
David Alward who is now our top Fed in Beantown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Maritime Lumber Bureau
David Amos
66 views
REPublished on Apr 4, 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Maritime Lumber Bureau 2
David Amos
REPublished on Apr 4, 2013
http://davidraymondamos3.
Tuesday, 14 February 2017
RE FATCA, NAFTA & TPP etc ATTN President Donald J. Trump I just got
off the phone with your lawyer Mr Cohen (646-853-0114) Why does he lie
to me after all this time???
---------- Original message ----------
From: David Amos
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2017 10:51:14 -0400
Subject: RE FATCA, NAFTA & TPP etc ATTN President Donald J. Trump I
just got off the phone with your lawyer Mr Cohen (646-853-0114) Why
does he lie to me after all this time???
To: president , mdcohen212@gmail.com, pm ,
Pierre-Luc.Dusseault@parl.gc.
B.English@ministers.govt.nz, Malcolm.Turnbull.MP@aph.gov.au
pminvites@pmc.gov.au, mayt@parliament.uk, press , "Andrew.Bailey" ,
fin.financepublic-
"CNN.Viewer.Communications.
Cc: David Amos , elizabeth.thompson@cbc.ca, "justin.ling@vice.com,
elizabeththompson" , djtjr , "Bill.Morneau" , postur ,
stephen.kimber@ukings.ca, "steve.murphy" , "Jacques.Poitras" ,
oldmaison , andre
---------- Original message ----------
From: Michael Cohen
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2017 14:15:14 +0000
Subject: Automatic reply: RE FATCA ATTN Pierre-Luc.Dusseault I just
called and left a message for you
To: David Amos
Effective January 20, 2017, I have accepted the role as personal
counsel to President Donald J. Trump. All future emails should be
directed to mdcohen212@gmail.com and all future calls should be
directed to 646-853-0114.
______________________________
This communication is from The Trump Organization or an affiliate
thereof and is not sent on behalf of any other individual or entity.
This email may contain information that is confidential and/or
proprietary. Such information may not be read, disclosed, used,
copied, distributed or disseminated except (1) for use by the intended
recipient or (2) as expressly authorized by the sender. If you have
received this communication in error, please immediately delete it and
promptly notify the sender. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed
to be received, secure or error-free as emails could be intercepted,
corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late, incomplete, contain viruses
or otherwise. The Trump Organization and its affiliates do not
guarantee that all emails will be read and do not accept liability for
any errors or omissions in emails. Any views or opinions presented in
any email are solely those of the author and do not necessarily
represent those of The Trump Organization or any of its
affiliates.Nothing in this communication is intended to operate as an
electronic signature under applicable law.
---------- Original message ----------
From: "Finance Public / Finance Publique (FIN)"
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2017 22:05:00 +0000
Subject: RE: Yo President Trump RE the Federal Court of Canada File No
T-1557-15 lets see how the media people do with news that is NOT FAKE
To: David Amos
The Department of Finance acknowledges receipt of your electronic
correspondence. Please be assured that we appreciate receiving your
comments.
Le ministère des Finances accuse réception de votre correspondance
électronique. Soyez assuré(e) que nous apprécions recevoir vos
commentaires.
http://davidraymondamos3.
Thursday, 27 April 2017
YO Jean-Pierre Blais the Smiling Bastards in Google had my old
Faithful Motomaniac333 deleted today Right after I sent an email to
Dick Tracy and the FEDS
---------- Original message ----------
From: "Gallant, Premier Brian (PO/CPM)"
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:32:01 +0000
Subject: RE: YO Jean-Pierre Blais the Smilling Bastards in Google had
my old Faithfull Motomaniac333 deleted today Right after I sent an
email to Dick Tracy and the FEDS
To: David Amos
Thank you for writing to the Premier of New Brunswick. Please be
assured that your email will be reviewed.
If this is a media request, please forward your email to
media-medias@gnb.ca. Thank you!
http://davidraymondamos3.
Monday, 6 February 2017
Yo Chucky Leblanc RE latest JDI lawsuit Here is scoop for ya the media
won't touch BTW I called your old pal Jeannot Volpe at (506) 737 4436
and left voicemail just so he can't say I talked behind his back N'esy
Pas?
---------- Original message ----------
From: "Gallant, Premier Brian (PO/CPM)"
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2017 16:10:07 +0000
Subject: RE: Yo Chucky Leblanc RE latest JDI lawsuit Here is scoop for
ya the media won't touch BTW I called your old pal Jeannot Volpe at
(506) 737 4436 and left voicemail just so he can't say I talked behind
his back N'esy Pas?
To: David Amos
Thank you for writing to the Premier of New Brunswick. Please be
assured that your email will be reviewed and if a response is
requested, it will be forthcoming.
Nous vous remercions d’avoir communiqué avec le premier ministre du
Nouveau-Brunswick. Soyez assuré(e) que votre courriel sera examiné
et qu’une réponse vous parviendra à sa demande.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/
'I was pretty sure it was coming': Hainesville sawmill prepares to
close over tariff
Hainesville Sawmill Ltd. will close next week but owner hopeful
business will resume in 6 months
CBC News Posted: Apr 27, 2017 12:12 PM AT
On 8/16/22, David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Deja Vu Anyone???
https://www.scribd.com/doc/
https://www.banking.senate.
https://www.steptoe.com/en/
Stewart A. Baker
Of Counsel
Washington, DC
+1 202 429 6402
vcard
Areas of Work
Privacy & Cybersecurity, Internet, Telecom & Media, National
Security/CFIUS, Export Controls
Stewart Baker's career has spanned national security and law. He
served as General Counsel of the National Security Agency, Assistant
Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, and
drafter of a report reforming the intelligence community after the
Iraq War. His legal practice focuses on cyber security, CFIUS, export
controls, government procurement, and immigration and regulation of
international travel.
At Homeland Security, Stewart created and staffed the 250-person DHS
Policy Directorate. He was responsible for policy analysis across the
Department, as well as for the Department’s international affairs,
strategic planning and relationships with law enforcement and public
advisory committees. From 2006-2009, Stewart led successful
negotiations with European and Middle Eastern governments over travel
data, privacy, visa waiver and related issues. In addition, he led the
Department’s policy effort to reform federal immigration laws, and
transformed the Department’s role in CFIUS, helping to drive the first
rewrite of the CFIUS law and regulations in a generation.
Internet, Telecom & Media
When not in government, Stewart manages one of the nation’s premier
technology law practices. Described by The Washington Post as “one of
the most techno-literate lawyers around,” Stewart’s practice covers
national security, electronic surveillance, law enforcement, export
control encryption, and related technology issues. He has been a key
advisor on US export controls and on foreign import controls on
technology. In 2010 Stewart’s policy memoir, Skating On Stilts: Why We
Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism, was published by Hoover Press.
He continues to comment on these topics at Lawfare.com and the Volokh
Conspiracy, and he hosts Steptoe's Cyberlaw Podcast.
International Trade
Stewart's practice includes issues relating to government regulation
of international trade in high-technology products, and advice and
practice under the antidumping and countervailing duty laws of United
States, European Union, Canada, and Australia. He also counsels
clients on issues involving foreign sovereign immunity, and compliance
with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Stemming from his role at DHS,
Stewart has a deep background in the international implications of US
security policy – from the disputes over US collection of data from
international businesses to the US statutory command that all
containers being shipped to the US be scanned before leaving foreign
ports.
Worldwide Arbitration
Stewart has handled the arbitration of claims exceeding a billion
dollars, is a member of national and international rosters of
arbitrators, and is the author of articles and a book on the United
Nations Commission on International Trade Law arbitration rules.
Appellate
Stewart has had a number of significant successes in appellate
litigation and appearances before the United States Supreme Court. He
developed, and persuaded the Court to adopt, a new theory of
constitutional federalism that remains the most vibrant Tenth
Amendment doctrine of the past 30 years. In addition to having filed
many Supreme Court and appellate briefs, Stewart was appointed by the
Supreme Court to brief and argue Becker v. Montgomery and was
recognized in the Court’s opinion for his “able” advocacy. He founded
the State and Local Legal Center, which represents state and local
governments before the Court; and his writings on appellate and
constitutional issues have been cited in various opinions of the
Court. His brief opposing the federal government in New York v. United
States, 488 US 1041 (1992), was described by Assistant Attorney
General Walter Dellinger as “one of the most influential amicus briefs
ever filed in the Supreme Court.”
https://twitter.com/
UCLA School of Law
@UCLA
·
Feb 10, 2021
.
@VolokhC writes in @tabletmag on the legality of Douglass Mackey’s
2016 meme that aimed to deceive voters.
tabletmag.com
Are Douglass Mackey’s Memes Illegal?
The case of notorious internet troll ‘Ricky Vaughn’
David Raymond Amos
@DavidRaymondAm1
Replying to @UCLA_Law @VolokhC and @tabletmag
YO @JoeBiden @VP @FBI @nytimes @TuckerCarlson @CBCNews @NightTimePod
@JustinTrudeau @JusticeCanadaEN @cafreeland @thecoastguy
@JamesMelville @EcommunistForum @PierrePoilievre @RCMPNB What planet
do Yankee lawyers come from???
https://davidraymondamos3.
youtube.com
Tucker Carlson: No honest person could believe this
Fox News host Tucker Carlson shreds the FBI's raid on former President
Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.' #FoxNews
#tucker Subscribe...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Tucker Carlson: No honest person could believe this
231,291 views
Aug 15, 2022
Fox News
9.8M subscribers
Fox News host Tucker Carlson shreds the FBI's raid on former President
Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.' #FoxNews
#tucker
Subscribe to Fox News! https://bit.ly/2vaBUvAS
Watch more Fox News Video: http://video.foxnews.com
Watch Fox News Channel Live: http://www.foxnewsgo.com/
FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service
delivering breaking news as well as political and business news. The
number one network in cable, FNC has been the most-watched television
news channel for 18 consecutive years. According to a 2020 Brand Keys
Consumer Loyalty Engagement Index report, FOX News is the top brand in
the country for morning and evening news coverage. A 2019 Suffolk
University poll named FOX News as the most trusted source for
television news or commentary, while a 2019 Brand Keys Emotion
Engagement Analysis survey found that FOX News was the most trusted
cable news brand. A 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation survey also found
that among Americans who could name an objective news source, FOX News
was the top-cited outlet. Owned by FOX Corporation, FNC is available
in nearly 90 million homes and dominates the cable news landscape,
routinely notching the top ten programs in the genre. Watch full
episodes of your favorite shows
4,491 Comments
David Amos
Veritas Vincit
https://www.justice.gov/usao-
U.S. Attorneys » Eastern District of New York » News
Department of Justice
U.S. Attorney’s Office
Eastern District of New York
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Social Media Influencer Charged with Election Interference Stemming
from Voter Disinformation Campaign
Defendant Unlawfully Used Social Media to Deprive Individuals of Their
Right to Vote
BROOKLYN, NY – A criminal complaint was unsealed today in federal
court in Brooklyn charging Douglass Mackey, also known as “Ricky
Vaughn,” with conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 United
States Presidential Election to use various social media platforms to
disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their
constitutional right to vote. Mackey was arrested this morning in West
Palm Beach, Florida and will make his initial appearance via
videoconference today before United States Magistrate Judge Bruce
Reinhart at the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach.
Seth D. DuCharme, Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern
District of New York, Nicholas L. McQuaid, Acting Assistant Attorney
General of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and William F.
Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of
Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), announced the arrest and
charges.
“There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to
defraud citizens of their right to vote.” stated Acting United States
Attorney DuCharme. “With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those
who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on
the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their
crimes. They will be investigated, caught and prosecuted to the full
extent of the law.”
“According to the allegations in the indictment, the defendant
exploited a social media platform to infringe one the of most basic
and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution: the right to vote,”
stated Acting Assistant Attorney General McQuaid. “This indictment
underscores the department’s commitment to investigating and
prosecuting those who would undermine citizens’ voting rights.”
“Protecting every American citizen’s right to cast a legitimate vote
is a key to the success of our republic. What Mackey allegedly did to
interfere with this process—by soliciting voters to cast their ballots
via text—amounted to nothing short of vote theft. It is illegal
behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public’s trust in our
electoral processes. He may have been a powerful social media
influencer at the time, but a quick Internet search of his name today
will reveal an entirely different story,” stated FBI Assistant
Director-in-Charge Sweeney.
In 2016, Mackey established an audience on Twitter with approximately
58,000 followers. A February 2016 analysis by the MIT Media Lab
ranked Mackey as the 107th most important influencer of the
then-upcoming Election, ranking it above outlets and individuals,
among others, such as NBC News (#114), Stephen Colbert (#119) and Newt
Gingrich (#141).
As alleged in the complaint, between September 2016 and November 2016,
in the lead up to the November 8, 2016, United States Presidential
Election, Mackey conspired with others to use social media platforms,
including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages designed to
encourage supporters of one of the presidential candidates (the
“Candidate”) to “vote” via text message or social media and thus to
fail to cast their ballots in a legally valid manner.
For example, on November 1, 2016, Mackey tweeted an image that
featured an African American woman standing in front of an “African
Americans for [the Candidate]” sign. The image included the following
text: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘[Candidate’s first
name]’ to 59925[.] Vote for [the Candidate] and be a part of
history.” The fine print at the bottom of the image stated: “Must be
18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of
the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico,
Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by [Candidate] for President 2016.” The
tweet included the typed hashtags “#Go [Candidate]” and another slogan
frequently used by the Candidate. On or about and before Election Day
2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “[Candidate’s
first name]” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which was
used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by the defendant
and his co-conspirators.
If convicted of the charge, conspiracy against rights, Mackey faces up
to 10 years in prison. The charges in the complaint are allegations,
and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
The government’s case is being handled by the Office’s Public
Integrity Section. Assistant United States Attorneys Erik Paulsen and
Nathan Reilly are in charge of the prosecution, with Trial Attorney
James Mann from the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section.
The Defendant:
DOUGLASS MACKEY
Age: 31
West Palm Beach, Florida
Attachment(s):
Download Mackey Complaint
Topic(s):
Civil Rights
Component(s):
USAO - New York, Eastern
Contact:
John Marzulli United States Attorney (718) 254-6323
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/
Twitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. Says
Douglass Mackey, a right-wing provocateur, was accused of spreading
memes that made Hillary Clinton supporters falsely believe they could
cast ballots in 2016 via text message.
By Nicole Hong
Jan. 27, 2021
Douglass Mackey was arrested on Wednesday in what appeared to be the
first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through
the spread of disinformation on Twitter.Douglass Mackey was arrested
on Wednesday in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the
country involving voter suppression through the spread of
disinformation on Twitter.Credit...Andrew Seng for The New York Times
A man who was known as a far-right Twitter troll was arrested on
Wednesday and charged with spreading disinformation online that
tricked Democratic voters in 2016 into trying to cast their ballots by
phone instead of going to the polls.
Federal prosecutors accused Douglass Mackey, 31, of coordinating with
co-conspirators to spread memes on Twitter falsely claiming that
Hillary Clinton’s supporters could vote by sending a text message to a
specific phone number.
The co-conspirators were not named in the complaint, but one of them
was Anthime Gionet, a far-right media personality known as “Baked
Alaska,” who was arrested after participating in the Jan. 6 riot at
the U.S. Capitol, according to a person briefed on the investigation,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing
investigation.
As a result of the misinformation campaign, prosecutors said, at least
4,900 unique phone numbers texted the number in a futile effort to
cast votes for Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Mackey was arrested on Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Fla.,
in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the country
involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on
Twitter.
“With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert
the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of
internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes,” said
Seth DuCharme, the acting United States attorney in Brooklyn, whose
office is prosecuting the case.
Mrs. Clinton was not named in the complaint, but a person briefed on
the investigation confirmed that she was the presidential candidate
described in the charging documents.
A lawyer for Mr. Mackey declined to comment.
Mr. Mackey, who was released from custody on Wednesday on a $50,000
bond, faces an unusual charge: conspiracy to violate rights, which
makes it illegal for people to conspire to “oppress” or “intimidate”
anyone from exercising a constitutional right, such as voting. The
charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
The case will test the novel use of federal civil rights laws as a
tool to hold people accountable for misinformation campaigns intended
to interfere with elections, a problem that has recently become an
urgent priority for social media platforms and law enforcement
officials to stop.
It has become a game of whack-a-mole to police users like Mr. Mackey,
who prosecutors said would simply open new Twitter accounts after his
old ones were suspended. Mr. Mackey used four different Twitter
accounts from 2014 to 2018, the complaint said, always seeking to hide
his true identity from the public.
The Trump Investigations
Card 1 of 7
Numerous inquiries. Since Donald J. Trump left office, the former
president has been facing several different civil and criminal
investigations across the country into his business dealings and
political activities. Here is a look at some notable cases:
Classified documents inquiry. The F.B.I. search of Mr. Trump’s Florida
home appears to be related to a Justice Department investigation into
his handling of classified materials. The inquiry is focused on the
discovery by the National Archives that Mr. Trump had taken 15 boxes
of documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago when he left office.
Jan. 6 investigations. In a series of public hearings, the House
select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack laid out a powerful
account of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. This
evidence could allow federal prosecutors, who are conducting a
parallel criminal investigation, to indict Mr. Trump.
Georgia election interference case. Mr. Trump himself is under
scrutiny in Georgia, where the district attorney of Fulton County has
been investigating whether he and others criminally interfered with
the 2020 election in the state. This case could pose the most
immediate legal peril for the former president and his associates.
Manhattan criminal case. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has
been investigating whether Mr. Trump or his family business, the Trump
Organization, intentionally submitted false property values to
potential lenders. But the inquiry faded from view after signs emerged
that Mr. Trump will not be indicted.
New York State civil inquiry. The New York attorney general’s office
is conducting its own civil inquiry into some of the same conduct as
the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation. The case is focused
on whether Mr. Trump’s statements about the value of his assets were
part of a pattern of fraud or were simply Trumpian showmanship.
Tax returns lawsuit. Since 2019, the House Ways and Means Committee
has been trying to obtain Mr. Trump’s tax returns to investigate his
finances. On Aug. 9, 2022, a federal appeals court ruled that the
panel could gain access to Mr. Trump’s tax returns, though he is
virtually certain to appeal to the Supreme Court/
The goal of Mr. Mackey’s campaign, according to prosecutors, was to
influence people to vote in a “legally invalid manner.”
In 2018, Mr. Mackey was revealed to be the operator of a Twitter
account using the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, which boosted former
President Donald J. Trump while spreading anti-Semitic and white
nationalist propaganda.
Mr. Mackey’s account had such a large following that it made the
M.I.T. Media Lab’s list of the top 150 influencers in the 2016
election, ranking ahead of the Twitter accounts for NBC News, Drudge
Report and CBS News.
What we consider before using anonymous sources. How do the sources
know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have
they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information?
Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources
as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the
identity of the source.
Learn more about our process.
Twitter shut down the account in 2016, one month before the election,
for violating the company’s rules by “participating in targeted
abuse.” At that time, the account had about 58,000 followers. Three
days later, an associate of Mr. Mackey’s opened a new account for him,
prosecutors said, which was also quickly suspended.
It was not clear how Mr. Mackey became connected to Mr. Gionet, or
“Baked Alaska,” who was also a popular social media figure among white
nationalists and far-right activists. A lawyer for Mr. Gionet declined
to comment.
Mr. Mackey is a Vermont native who graduated from Middlebury College.
He worked for five years as an economist at a Brooklyn-based research
firm, John Dunham & Associates, until his termination in the summer of
2016, a company representative said.
The complaint showed a surgical precision in the disinformation
campaign by Mr. Mackey and his four co-conspirators. In private group
conversations on Twitter, they discussed how to insert their memes
into trending conversations online, and dissected changes in wording
and colors to make their messages more effective.
Mr. Mackey was obsessed with his posts going viral, the complaint
said, once telling his associates, “THE MEMES ARE SPREADING.” He and
his co-conspirators joked about tricking “dopey” liberals.
Their effort to misinform voters began after the group saw a similar
campaign intended to deceive voters in the 2016 referendum in Britain
on whether to leave the European Union, also known as Brexit,
according to the complaint.
Mr. Mackey and his associates created their own version, sharing
photos that urged Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to vote for her on
Election Day using a hashtag on Twitter or Facebook. To make the
images look more legitimate, they affixed the logo of her campaign and
linked to her website.
Some of their memes appeared to target Black and Latino voters. One
image had a Black woman standing in front of a sign supporting Mrs.
Clinton, telling people to vote for Mrs. Clinton by texting a specific
number. Mr. Mackey shared a similar image written in Spanish,
prosecutors said.
Less than a week before Election Day, the complaint said, Mr. Mackey
sent a message on Twitter: “Obviously, we can win Pennsylvania. The
key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black
turnout.”
Around that time, Twitter began removing the images with false
information and suspended Mr. Mackey’s account. But the memes had
already taken on a life of their own, prosecutors said, as his
associates continued to share them with a wider audience.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
More on Voting and Misinformation
Russian 2016 Influence Operation Targeted African-Americans on Social Media
Dec. 17, 2018
Inside a 3-Year Russian Campaign to Influence U.S. Voters
Feb. 16, 2018
Nicole Hong covers law enforcement and courts in New York. She
previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a
team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for
stories about secret payoffs made on Donald Trump's behalf to two
women.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 28, 2021, Section
A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Twitter Troll Is
Charged With Fooling 2016 Voters.
To our readers,
Thanks for reading. I’d like to encourage you to support journalism
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Are Douglass Mackey’s Memes Illegal?
The case of notorious internet troll ‘Ricky Vaughn’
by
Eugene Volokh
February 09, 2021
One of Douglass Mackey’s memesTwitter
In 2016, a Florida man named Douglass Mackey (using the online alias
“Ricky Vaughn”) allegedly conspired to distribute a meme aimed at
deceiving pro-Hillary voters.
Four years later, Mackey is now being prosecuted (as to this and as to
other memes) for violating 18 U.S.C. § 241, a federal law that
punishes 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”—namely, the right to vote. Lying
to voters in a way that keeps them from voting, the theory goes, is a
crime.
Is this sort of prosecution constitutional? After all, people often
lie in political campaigns. Candidates do it, activists do it,
political operatives do it. Can election lies simply be outlawed?
Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has never resolved the question. It
hasn’t resolved the big-picture question: When can the government
punish lies? It hasn’t resolved the medium-size question: Can the
government punish lies in election campaigns? And it hasn’t resolved
the particular question: Can the government punish lies about the
mechanisms of voting, and in particular about how to vote?
1.
Let’s start with the big picture. Certain kinds of lies (let’s focus
now on knowing lies, not inadvertent errors) can indeed be punished,
including criminally.
The classic example is defamation: lies that injure reputation.
Criminal libel prosecutions are rare, but they are constitutional—if
the criminal libel statute is limited to knowing lies. Perjury can
similarly be punished. So can fraud, even in otherwise
constitutionally protected contexts (such as charitable
solicitations). As the Supreme Court has held, though “under the First
Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea,” “there is no
constitutional value in false statements of fact.”
But the court has refused to say that all lies are constitutionally
unprotected. In 2012, the court considered the case of Xavier Alvarez,
a local government official in an LA suburb; he had lied about getting
the Congressional Medal of Honor, and was prosecuted under the Stolen
Valor Act, a statute that bans such lies about military decorations.
Unconstitutional, six justices said. (I should disclose that I filed a
friend-of-the-court brief arguing that most lies should be
constitutionally unprotected; but that argument did not prevail.)
And yet the justices didn’t explain where to draw the line. There was
broad agreement that “Laws restricting false statements about
philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and
other matters of public concern … would present a grave and
unacceptable danger of suppressing truthful speech.” “The point is not
that there is no such thing as truth or falsity in these areas or that
the truth is always impossible to ascertain, but rather that it is
perilous to permit the state to be the arbiter of truth.” (That’s from
the dissent, but the concurrence endorsed it, and the plurality’s
opinion was even more speech-protective than the others.)
Yet when it came to more specific lies, whether about one’s own medals
or something else, there was no majority opinion. Four justices (Chief
Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor) took a
broadly speech-protective view. Two more justices (Justices Breyer and
Kagan) concurred with an intermediate view. Three justices (Justices
Alito, Scalia, and Thomas) dissented, reasoning that lies are
generally unprotected. And that has been the court’s last word on the
subject so far.
2.
Lower courts have considered the question more, including with regard
to laws banning knowing lies in election campaigns. Do courts uphold
such laws? I answer unequivocally: yes, and no. In 1985, an Ohio
appellate court upheld the Ohio statute, and in 2000 the Michigan
Supreme Court held that lies by candidates for judicial office could
be punished (though the Michigan rule didn’t involve criminal
punishment).
On the other hand, a 2007 Washington Supreme Court decision struck
down that state’s election lies statute. And since Alvarez, federal
and state appellate courts have struck down the Ohio, Minnesota, and
Massachusetts statutes. All those cases focused on the specific
details of those statutes; but it’s fair to say that those judges were
highly skeptical of the government’s ability to fairly adjudicate such
cases. To quote the Massachusetts case,
[Such a] statute may be manipulated easily into a tool for
subverting its own justification, i.e., the fairness and freedom of
the electoral process, through the chilling of core political speech.
... [T]he distinction between fact and opinion is not always obvious.
... Moreover, even in cases involving seemingly obvious statements of
political fact, distinguishing between truth and falsity may prove
exceedingly difficult. ...
Thus, in the election context, as elsewhere, it is apparent “that
the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in
ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get
itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is
the only ground upon which [the people’s] wishes safely can be carried
out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.”
3.
But what if a law focuses narrowly on one category of election
lies—lies about the details of the voting process, which risk
misleading voters not about the qualities of a candidate or the costs
and benefits of a ballot measure, but about the who, where, when, and
how of voting (e.g., whether one can vote by text)?
In 2018, the Supreme Court offhandedly remarked that “We do not doubt
that the State may prohibit messages intended to mislead voters about
voting requirements and procedures”—at least in the
government-controlled space in voting locations. And while it takes
much more to justify speech restrictions outside government property
than it does to justify restrictions on government property, I expect
that courts would likely uphold a narrow ban on lying about the rules
of the voting process—though I know of no cases specifically dealing
with such narrow bans.
For such lies, “the distinction between fact and opinion” is usually
easy to draw. “[D]istinguishing between truth and falsity” would
generally not “prove exceedingly difficult.” There’s no real concern
about suppressing debate about “philosophy, religion, history, the
social sciences, the arts, and other matters of public concern” or
even just about a particular candidate or ballot measure.
There is a compelling interest in making sure that voters aren’t
deceived into voting in a legally ineffective way, and thus throwing
away their votes. The law would be narrowly focused on preventing such
harm to the democratic process. And five of the justices in Alvarez
(the dissenters and the two concurring justices) took the view that
restrictions on lies should be easier to uphold than restrictions on
other speech.
Now even such a narrow restriction would have some cost. Much humor,
for instance, consists of knowingly false statements being said as
satire or hyperbole. Such statements are usually obviously,
ridiculously false, which is what makes them funny. One classic
example is “Democrats vote Tuesday, Republicans vote Wednesday” (or
vice versa); it’s sometimes offered as an example of deception, but my
sense is that it’s usually a joke, precisely because readers know that
a general election is one day for everyone, rather than different days
for different parties. Many people may have viewed Mackey’s meme as a
joke as well, though the government’s evidence suggests he was hoping
to actually be taken seriously by some voters. (The prosecutors allege
that a small portion of his audience may indeed have been taken in,
but the question in conspiracy cases is whether the defendants sought
to achieve the goal, not whether they actually achieved it.)
Courts have dealt with this “lie or satire?” question in other cases,
often involving libel. Consider New Times, Inc. v. Isaacks, a 2004
Texas Supreme Court case. The backstory was that a 13-year-old had
been arrested and kept jailed for five days on a “terroristic threats”
charge, for writing a story about a school shooting—in response to a
Halloween assignment from a teacher who had asked the children to
write a scary story. The incident drew criticism of the judge and
prosecutor who authorized this.
To the extent it is a precedent, the breadth of the Mackey indictment
is disquieting.
In response, a local alt-weekly published an article that described
the arrest and detention of “diminutive six-year-old” Cindy Bradley,
who was purportedly jailed for writing a book report about
“cannibalism, fanaticism, and disorderly conduct” in Maurice Sendak’s
classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. Adjacent to the
article was a picture of a smiling child holding a stuffed animal and
bearing the caption, “Do they make handcuffs this small? Be afraid of
this little girl.”
The article ascribed these actions to the judge and prosecutor in the
original story, and the allegations got still more ridiculous as the
article went on (satirical articles are often structured this way):
“Cindy was placed in ankle shackles ‘after [authorities] reviewed her
disciplinary record, which included reprimands for spraying a boy with
pineapple juice and sitting on her feet.’” The judge and the
prosecutor sued for libel, and the trial court and intermediate
appellate court allowed the case to go forward (even ordering the
newspaper to pay the plaintiffs’ attorney costs for the appeal): “A
genuine issue of material fact exists,” the appellate court reasoned,
“as to whether a reasonable person could construe the asserted parody
or satire as a statement of actual fact.” It took a further appeal to
the Texas Supreme Court to get the case reversed, unanimously.
So: On one hand, the legal system did end up properly distinguishing a
lie from a joke. On the other, it took years and doubtless a lot of
money to get there, with four judges (the trial judge and three
intermediate appellate judges) ruling one way and the nine Texas high
court judges ruling the other. That’s a sobering reminder of the
danger posed even by laws that ostensibly target falsehoods.
Of course, even “obvious” falsehoods that might be funny or at least
harmless for most viewers could deceive a few—and that deception might
be harmful, especially in a close election. But one can say the same
about libels: The judge and the prosecutor in the New Times case (both
elected officials themselves, by the way) might have been worried that
some readers—some voters—wouldn’t get the joke, even if most would
have.
Now we don’t let the satire tail wag the libel dog: We keep libel law,
coupled with the rule that satirical material shouldn’t be treated as
libelous, rather than jettisoning it altogether. Likewise, we might
have a ban on lies about the mechanics of voting, and trust
prosecutors, judges, and juries to sort the lies from the satire.
Still, there would be some cost to free speech from such a
prohibition, especially since something that’s a joke to 95% of the
people may be taken seriously by 5%.
4.
Narrow and clearly defined statutes that prohibit lies about the
mechanics of how to vote are likely constitutional. Some states have
such statutes (e.g., Missouri’s ban on “Knowingly providing false
information about election procedures for the purpose of preventing
any person from going to the polls”), though even those might need to
be tightened up a bit.
But, to return to Mackey the meme-maker, there is no such clear and
narrow federal statute. Instead, the statute under which Mackey is
being prosecuted bans all 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’s not obvious that deceiving someone into voting in an invalid way
qualifies as “injur[ing]” or “oppress[ing].” But if the statute does
cover deception, then there’s nothing in the text limiting such
deception to speech about the mechanics of voting. Alleged lies about
the government or national security or the economy could also be
prosecuted, if the government thought they were intended to discourage
people from voting. Some might applaud that, on the theory that the
law should do more to punish political lies generally. But as we saw
above, many courts are quite skeptical about general bans on lies in
elections.
Nor can I find any precedent for such prosecutions under this statute.
The closest analog, which the Justice Department writes about it in
its Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses guide, is U.S. v. Tobin,
where the government prosecuted a party official for “a scheme to jam
telephone lines for ride-to-the-polls services offered by the opposing
political party” and by the Manchester Professional Firefighters
Association. “The object of the conspiracy was to impede certain
voters from getting to the polls in order to influence what was
perceived to have been a very close United States Senate contest.” A
federal trial judge held that § 241 would cover such conduct. But
Tobin was acquitted by the jury, so there was no opportunity for an
appellate court to consider the legal question. (Under the Double
Jeopardy Clause, the government can’t appeal acquittals.)
To my knowledge, no other court has since considered the issue. And
the Tobin decision didn’t consider a First Amendment argument, since
the government was prosecuting Tobin for his conduct (jamming the
lines) rather than for speech. It’s thus not the strongest precedent
for what the government is now doing in the Mackey case.
And to the extent it is a precedent, the breadth of the Mackey
indictment is disquieting. For instance, urging the Manchester
Professional Firefighters Association to shut down its
get-out-the-vote effort (with no threats or incitement of violence,
but just advocacy) would be advocacy protected by the First Amendment.
But under the trial court’s reasoning—that § 241 bans conspiracies
“with the specific intent to impede or prevent qualified persons from
exercising the right to vote”—such advocacy would in fact be a crime.
Likewise, picketing outside a party’s headquarters, urging party
activists not to show up for the get-out-the-vote effort (perhaps
arguing that the party’s candidate has recently been shown to be a
crook or a racist), would be a crime, too.
What’s more, § 241 isn’t limited to protecting the right to vote; it
applies to “injur[ing]” or “oppress[ing]” people “in the free exercise
or enjoyment” of any constitutional right. Say that people try to
prevent a public speech at a local university by urging university
employees to cancel it. That too would be a conspiracy “with the
specific intent to impede or prevent qualified persons from
exercising” the First Amendment right to speak, or the right to listen
(which the court has held is also protected by the First Amendment).
In First Amendment cases, the court has asked not only whether the
defendant’s speech is theoretically punishable—it has asked whether
the particular law is narrowly tailored to punishing it, and whether
it clearly enough defines what is punished. (This is done under the
“overbreadth,” “strict scrutiny,” “intermediate scrutiny,” and
“vagueness” doctrines.) Section 241 may be adequate for punishing
nonspeech conduct, whether violence or vandalism or tying up phone
lines, or for speech that falls within a recognized First Amendment
exception (such as perjury). But if the federal government wants to
punish speech about elections, even deliberately deceptive speech, it
ought to use something clearer and narrower.
In the Tobin case, there was an appeal of a different charge: Tobin
had also been convicted under a telephone harassment statute, which
banned repeated calls made “with intent to harass.” But the appellate
court reversed that, and added: “Despite the unattractive conduct,
this [telephone harassment] statute is not a close fit for what Tobin
did. If the government thinks this a recurring problem, it better seek
an amendment [to the statute].” Those words ring true for the Mackey
prosecution as well.
Eugene Volokh is a professor of First Amendment law at UCLA School of
Law, and the co-founder of the law professor blog The Volokh
Conspiracy.
https://www2.law.ucla.edu/
Eugene Volokh teaches free speech law, religious freedom law,
church-state relations law, an intensive editing workshop, and a First
Amendment amicus brief clinic at UCLA School of Law, where he has also
often taught copyright law, criminal law, tort law, and a seminar on
firearms regulation policy. Before coming to UCLA, he clerked for
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge
Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related
Statutes (7th ed. 2020) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as
well as over 80 law review articles; his work makes him one of the
most cited law review article authors. He is a member of The American
Law Institute, a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage
Panel, and the founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a Weblog
(independent 2002-2014, hosted at the Washington Post 2014-2017,
hosted at Reason from 2017).
Volokh has argued over 30 appellate cases since 2013 in state and
federal courts throughout the country, and has filed over 100
appellate briefs; his articles have also been cited over 240 times in
judicial opinions.
Volokh worked for 12 years as a computer programmer, has a B.S. in
math-computer science at UCLA (1983), and has written many articles on
computer software. Volokh was born in the USSR; his family emigrated
to the U.S. when he was seven years old.
Areas of research interest
Cyberspace and the law � free speech, privacy, intellectual property.
Free speech.
Expressive association.
Gun control.
Constitutional and legal history.
Sexual/religious/racial harassment.
Law and medicine.
Information privacy.
Affirmative action, including the California Civil Rights Initiative
(CCRI or Prop. 209).
Religious freedom and separation of church and state.
Copyright and intellectual property law.
Same-sex marriage.
Family law.
Restrictions on sexual behavior.
Constitutional law generally.
The Supreme Court.
Criminal justice.
Civil justice.
The Federalist Society.
Media criticism.
Eugene Volokh
Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law
UCLA School of Law
405 Hilgard Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90095
(310) 206-3926
volokh@law.ucla.edu
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD-cxlF7dNI&ab_channel=NewsNation
Trump lawyer says they would unseal warrant and receipt of raid | Rush Hour
999 Comments
Who is Trump attorney Christina Bobb, who met FBI at Mar-a-Lago?
When the FBI stormed former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Monday, agents were confronted by his attorney Christina Bobb, an ex-U.S. Marine and a former anchor on the far-right news network One America News (OAN).
Bobb arrived at Trump’s Florida retreat around 10:30 a.m. to find about 24 FBI agents “rummaging” through the former president’s belongings.
She was the senior legal representative for Trump during the raid at Mar-a-Lago, which is closed for the summer, but was ordered to stay near her car while agents swept through the house, she told OAN on Wednesday.
The attorney has since joined the chorus of people speaking out against what they say is a politically motivated operation against a former president mulling another run for office.
Bobb told OAN the raid was a sham because authorities recently met with the former president, who she said has been “very cooperative” with the investigation.
“I’m a little bit befuddled as to why they would do such a drastic thing, so disrespecting and so dishonoring, other than the fact it’s a political tool,” she said.
Bobb also said there was “not anything there” for the FBI to find, claiming the investigation would not yield any damning results against Trump.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) reportedly obtained a warrant for the search as part of an investigation into allegations that Trump took classified documents home, which he was supposed to turn over before leaving the White House in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.
The DOJ opened an investigation into the matter in April, following a request from the National Archives, which in February said it had obtained 15 boxes of classified material from Trump.
While the president released a statement attacking the DOJ for the search, Bobb has been making media appearances on far-right channels to discredit the investigation and the FBI search of a former president’s home.
Her spotlight in the media comes just months after she joined Trump’s legal team. Prior to that, Bobb had worked at OAN since June 2020. She covered the White House and eventually became a news anchor for the “Weekly Briefing” show.
While working for OAN, Bobb began volunteering to help Trump’s legal team and assisted with the effort to overturn certification of the 2020 election in battleground states, The Washington Post reported.
Bobb, a passionate supporter of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen, also vigorously supported the 2021 Arizona election audit in Maricopa County, even raising money through a fundraising platform for the audit, which ultimately did not find any widespread fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election.
In March, Bobb quit her job at OAN to work for Trump’s political organization Save America.
Bobb said in an interview on the podcast show “Coffee and a Mike” that she decided to leave OAN to “make a bigger difference” doing legal work on “some of the efforts that need to be undertaken with everything happening in the country.”
The former president had also asked her to take the job.
“Which was amazing, that was great,” she said. “He knew a lot of the efforts I was taking, through One America News. … We had a good relationship. I was telling him some of the things I was working on, and he said, ‘Hey, would you want to do that for Save America?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ I jumped at that opportunity.”
Her work includes “election integrity” representation and helping Trump with the Jan. 6 investigation, Bobb said. She was among six Trump lawyers subpoenaed by the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Bobb has a history working under Trump extending back to at least 2019, when she was employed as the executive secretary for the Department of Homeland Security in his administration. She also clerked at the Office of Legal Counsel for the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Before her involvement in politics, Bobb, who has a master’s in law from Georgetown University Law Center, was a judge advocate in the U.S. Marines, representing sailors and soldiers involved in court-martials or administrative separation hearings.
On Wednesday, Bobb’s media rounds on conservative news channels helped fan the flames of those opposed to the raid, doing the work of previous Trump attorneys who robustly defended the president when he came under attack or scrutiny.
Bobb told Real America’s Voice that the latest investigation into Trump “does not carry any weight.”
“It’s not going to hold water and it’s not going to stick,” she said. “They just don’t have a leg to stand on.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwekoMSJ0Ww&ab_channel=DineshD%27Souza
Trump Lawyer Christina Bobb Gives Her First-Hand Account of the FBI Raid on Mar-a-Lago
250 Comments
Attorney Profile
Christina Gabrielle Bobb #259430
License Status: Active
Address: One America News, 101 Constitution Ave NW, Washington, DC 20001
Phone: Not Available | Fax: Not Available
Email: Not Available | Website: Not Available
License Status, Disciplinary and Administrative History
All changes of license status due to nondisciplinary administrative matters and disciplinary actions.
| Date | License Status | Discipline | Administrative Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Present | Active | ||
| 12/4/2008 | Admitted to the State Bar of California | ||
Additional Information:
This media dude cannot remember his own email even after I read it to him
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/6356
Re: Easy Hit on Ted Cruz
https://www.lawfuel.com/blog/who-is-trumps-lawyer-now/
Who Is Trump’s Lawyer Now?
The raid by the FBI on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home has focused the spotlight once again on Trump’s legal situation, but who is his lawyer?
His former lawyer, the eccentric and apparently fading former luminary Rudy Giuliani is no longer acting but it will be Evan Corcoran, the
Corcoran represented Steve Bannon, Trump’s former aid, at Bannon’s trial last month when Bannon was tried for defying a subpoena and was found guilty on two counts of contempt.
The Justice Department is now using a grand jury in Washington to investigate efforts by Trump and his confidantes to create false electors and pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump has called the investigation and the US House Committee investigating the insurrection “a witch hunt,” and a fiery statement on social media following the FBI raid on his house decried America’s new ‘third world’ status and accused hard Left Democrats of attempting to shutter his re-run at the presidency in 2024.
Who Is Evan Corcoran?
M Evan Corcoran is a partner at Silverman Thompson Slutkin White and is a former Assistant US Attorney with a background in white collar crime and civil litigation.
A graduate of Princeton, he acted on a trial $4 billion insurance coverage case that followed the destruction of the World Trade Center. He has had an extensive career handling civil claims, including defending clients like Verizon and Booz Allen in defenses involving anti-trust law, class action defenses and major defense claims.
From 1992 until 2000 he worked as a former US Attorney in Washington DC handling an array of cases and he received special achievement awards, as well as commendations for his work in the US Attorney Office in the Eastern District of Virginia from head of the FBI, and the Attorney General of the United States.
Corcoran almost took a job with the US Department of Justice in 2000, which is now the agency taking action against Bannon and quite probably Donald Trump.
Corcoran was in line to be the second-in-charge at the federal prosecutors office under Tim Shea, who resigned under pressure from the Trump years’ activities when there was controversy over the prosecution of Roger Stone and Trump’s national security advisor Michael Flynn.
The Capitol Riots
Corcoran has been heavily involved in various Trump-related prosecutions apart from Bannon’s case, as he is representing both a police officer charged with obstructing a Justice investigation into the January 6 riots, Michael Riley, and also a man charged with participating in the riots, Frank Scavo.
The Bannon case saw Corcoran involved in a number of exchanges with the Judge over the “complex constitutional issues” that many believed to be a straight forward case relating to failure to comply with the Court subpoena.
The situation related to the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s home will usher in new elevation for a moderately low profile Evan Corcoran as the unprecedented move upon a former president takes center stage in US law and political news.
https://www.silvermanthompson.com/m-evan-corcoran.html
Baltimore, Maryland
Office: 410.385.2225
Fax: 410.547.2432
Trump hires prominent Atlanta attorney for election probe
ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump has hired a prominent Atlanta criminal defense attorney known for defending famous rappers to represent him in matters related to the special grand jury that’s investigating whether the former president illegally tried to interfere with the 2020 election in Georgia.
Drew Findling’s clients have included Cardi B, Migos and Gucci Mane, as well as comedian Katt Williams. His Twitter bio includes the hashtag #BillionDollarLawyer and his Instagram feed is filled with photos of him posing with his well-known clients.
His most recent Instagram post, dated two days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in late June, says his firm is committed to “fighting to restore a woman’s right to choose, which has been destroyed by the Supreme Court,” suggesting his personal views don’t align with those of Trump’s Republican Party. He offered to defend anyone charged under Georgia’s restrictive abortion law free of charge.
After Trump insulted basketball star LeBron James’s intelligence in an August 2018 tweet, Findling called Trump the “racist architect of fraudulent Trump University” in a tweet and ended the post with “POTUS pathetic once again!”
The Findling Law Firm said in a statement released Thursday that it has been hired, along with attorneys Jennifer Little and Dwight Thomas, to represent Trump.
Findling said in an emailed statement that he is a “passionate advocate against injustice” and will “strongly defend” Trump.
“I may differ politically from many of my clients, but that doesn’t change my commitment to defend against wrongful investigations,” Findling said. “In this case, the focus on President Trump in Fulton County, Georgia is clearly an erroneous and politically driven persecution and along with my office and co-counsel, I am fully committed to defend against this injustice.”
Little, a former prosecutor, said in an emailed statement that the attorneys were “handpicked” on Trump’s behalf and that “the composition of our team only adds to the integrity of his defense.”
“A politically diverse group of attorneys with differing perspectives have all come to the same conclusion — there have been no violations of Georgia law,” she said. “We as a team look forward to vigorously defending our client and the Constitution.”
Thomas said he has extensive past experience in special grand jury investigations and is serving as a consultant. Other lawyers who have clients who are connected to the investigation have also reached out to him, he said, but he declined to name them.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis opened the investigation early last year, and the special grand jury was seated in May at her request.
Willis has confirmed since the early days of the investigation that she’s interested in a January 2021 phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. During that conversation, Trump suggested Raffensperger could “find” the votes needed to overturn his narrow loss in the state.
“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said during that call. “Because we won the state.”
Willis last month filed petitions seeking to compel testimony before the special grand jury from seven Trump associates and advisers, including former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. And she has said that she is considering subpoenaing the former president himself.
In addition to representing high-profile musical artists and other entertainers, Findling successfully defended Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill in a racketeering trial that threatened to end his law enforcement career. Hill was acquitted in 2013 on 27 felony charges in an indictment that accused him of using his office for personal gain.
Findling is currently defending Hill against charges in a federal indictment accusing him of violating the civil rights of several people in his agency’s custody by ordering that they be unnecessarily strapped into a restraint chair and left there for hours.
He also defended Mitzi Bickers, a former Atlanta city official was the first person to go to trial in a long-running federal investigation into corruption at City Hall under former Mayor Kasim Reed. A jury earlier this year found Bickers guilty on charges including money laundering, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit bribery. Findling said they plan to appeal.
The Findling Law Firm, P.C. · 3490 Piedmont Road, Suite 600, Atlanta, GA 30305 · (404) 460-4500 · drew@findlinglawfirm.com.
I called Dew Findling His assistant had no comment and dismissed me after she corrected me on how to pronouce his name SO I TOLD HER TO TELL DREW TO ENJOY MY EMAIL then called the other two
http://www.dwightlthomas.com/dwightlthomas.html
Jennifer Little's office did not pick up the phone
Phone: (404) 947-7778
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKZgefrbbU&ab_channel=CNN
Trump responds to AG Garland’s move to unseal search warrant
9,296 Comments
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his buddy Merrick Garland should review this old file beginning with page number 82 https://www.scribd.com/document/2619437/CROSS-BORDER
Our fight over elections is symbolic of a larger national affliction
At the time, voter turnout was weak. So in order to secure a better future for the next generation of Texans, I promoted a statewide program targeted at schoolchildren to encourage their parents to vote.
Our office also championed programs designed to minimize voting fraud. Few, if any, elections are free from mistakes or irregularities but, when identified, we should take reasonable efforts to address those. There are fewer instances of intentional wrongdoing, especially at a level that affects the outcome of an election. Nevertheless, casting a fraudulent vote is the same as stealing a vote, the same as cancelling a legitimate vote cast by a properly registered voter. We must not tolerate fraud in elections. The fact that we have relatively secure elections is no reason to ease efforts to prevent voter fraud. To the contrary, elections work because safeguards work.
Today there is controversy over proposed legislation in Texas that critics argue will make it harder for Texans to vote. The right to vote is one of the most sacred privileges we enjoy as American citizens, and we must protect this privilege from abuse. I support ballot integrity and favor reasonable photo ID requirements. I do not support voter ID laws enacted for the purpose of suppressing voter participation. We should couple ballot security with steps to increase voter participation. State and local officials should make it easy for people who are elderly, infirm or differently abled to secure a photo ID or other acceptable voter ID. State and local officials should actively encourage ethnic minorities to obtain the necessary ID and to vote. Anyone who qualifies for an acceptable ID, but who cannot afford to pay for one, should be provided one free. These and other measures will increase both ballot integrity and voter participation.
Based on multiple examinations and certifications by local, state and federal officials, Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. While there may have been (and likely were) some voting irregularities, there appears to be no evidence of irregularities or voter fraud at a level that would make a difference in the outcome of any state election, and thus to the outcome of the general election. This was confirmed by then-U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, by Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and by a host of state and local officials, many of whom are Republicans. No evidence of massive voter fraud was offered in more than 60 court challenges of the results of the presidential election, including several lawsuits before judges appointed by President Trump.
Yet, skepticism of the Biden victory continues, fueled by the former president and many current Republican officials. As we know, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the third highest-ranking Republican in the U.S. House, was recently ousted from leadership for acknowledging what the evidence supports and for condemning those responsible for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
We should encourage ongoing efforts by state legislators to strengthen voting requirements and procedures for the legitimate purpose of enhancing ballot integrity and voter participation. Republicans’ claim that substantive changes are necessary now, when there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, appear to be driven by a desire to make it more likely they will prevail in the next election. Newly enacted laws or proposed bills seem to have less to do with election integrity and more to do with suppressing the vote of certain segments of the voting population.
Georgia lawmakers, for example, proposed legislation that prohibits persons other than those working at polling places from providing food and water to individuals waiting in line to vote. This prohibition will likely discourage the elderly and sick from waiting in long lines under the hot Georgia sun.
The fight over elections is symbolic of a larger, deep-rooted affliction that burdens our country. Some of our leaders appear incapable of or unwilling to accept basic facts when they run counter to their political interests. We as voters bear some of the responsibility, since we elected those members who refuse to acknowledge the evidence. If we hope to move on from the 2020 election, then we must confront the truth and those who seek to bury it. There is fear that many in Washington and in state capitals around the country do not have the courage, nor the integrity, to make decisions that could potentially jeopardize their political future. The thirst for political control, as the 2022 midterm elections approach, has been corruptive. In a battle between ambition and power versus duty and service, sadly some have chosen their own self-interest over the interests of the American people.
Still, I remain hopeful that we as a nation will come together to address our immigration challenges, improve race relations, achieve criminal justice reform and secure economic opportunity for all. None of this, however, will be achieved until there is agreement on the truth, and acceptance of the results, of the 2020 presidential election.
Alberto R. Gonzales is the former U.S. attorney general and counsel to the president in the George W. Bush administration. He is the dean at Belmont University College of Law in Nashville, Tennessee. Follow him on Twitter: @argonzales
https://www.belmont.edu/law/facultyadmin/faculty-alberto-gonzales.html
Alberto R. Gonzales
After attending the United States Air Force Academy, Alberto R. Gonzales received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rice University and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard University. He was nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the United States Senate as the 80th Attorney General of the United States in February 2005 and served in that capacity until September 2007. He has worked as a partner at a major Houston law firm (Vinson & Elkins) and held government positions as a Justice on the Texas Supreme Court, Texas Secretary of State, General Counsel to the Governor of Texas and Counsel to the President of the United States. Judge Gonzales has also served as a Visiting Professor and minority/veteran recruitment consultant at Texas Tech University.
Presently Judge Gonzales is a member of the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions, the Commission for Uniform Legislation, and the American Law Institute. He also serves on the board of directors for the United Way of Metropolitan Nashville. Previously he served as an appointee to the Tennessee Governor’s Commission for Judicial Appointments and the Governor’s Management Fellows Executive Committee.
For his many accomplishments and years of public service, Judge Gonzales has been recognized as a Distinguished Alumnus of Rice University and received the Harvard Law School Association Award, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Director’s Award and the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service. His work in the Hispanic community and his achievements as a role model have also earned him recognition as Hispanic American of the Year by HISPANIC Magazine and one of The 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America by TIME Magazine.
Judge Gonzales became Dean of the law school in 2014 and presently holds the Doyle Rogers Distinguished Chair of Law. An endowed “distinguished” chair is a permanent tribute to the person whose name it bears. Belmont University’s Doyle Rogers Distinguished Chair of Law is named in honor of attorney Doyle Rogers. A graduate of the University of Florida and its Levin College of Law, Mr. Rogers was the senior shareholder in the prominent law firm of Alley, Maass, Rogers & Lindsay, P.A., in Palm Beach, Florida. Mr. Rogers practiced successfully as a lawyer in South Florida for over 50 years and passed away in January 2016.
Dean Gonzales teaches Constitutional Law, First Amendment Law, National Security Law, and Separation of Powers at Belmont Law.
Areas of expertise: National and international affairs, constitutional law, national security law, separation of powers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl9B4phBEII
Merrick Garland announces FBI filed motion to unseal Trump warrant
9,309 Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjghzSSt3fg Felicidades, es un buen ejemplo. 5:25 Se deja ver que hay muy buenos resultados Saludos desde la Cd.. de world los mortales abian apreciado tan hermosa mujerTìm Hiểu Về Kiếm Thu Nhập Thêm Từ Việc Rằng Là Làm Tiếp Thị Sản Phẩm - Chị Anh Gió Vlogs
69 Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9S5K0ACMhU&ab_channel=FoxNews
This may be the first step to tyranny: Trump lawyer
5,239 Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrNrQviSTUM
Trump attorney speaks out on the Mar-a-Lago raid
https://www.floridabar.org/directories/find-mbr/profile/?num=109481
Lindsey Halligan
109481
511 SE 5th Ave
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301-2984
Office: 561-417-1120
https://www.floridabar.org/mybarprofile/109481
Broward
17
04/15/2014
None
University of Miami School of Law, 2013
Young Lawyers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt8oqb2mO4c
Former FBI special agent: Here's why agents searched Melania's closet
3,733 Comments
Contact FBI John
For all news media and entertainment industry inquiries, or to book John for speaking, consulting, continuing education or training, please call 866-FBI-John (866-324-5646), email john@FBIJohn.com or complete the form below.
About FBI John
FBI Special Agent (Ret.)
With Pope Francis at the Vatican
John Iannarelli was an FBI Special Agent for more than 20 years, during which time he served as the FBI’s National Spokesperson, was a member of FBI Cyber Division Executive staff, on the FBI SWAT team, and was an Assistant Special Agent in Charge overseeing all Criminal, Cyber, and Counter Intelligence Investigations.
John participated in many extensive investigations, including:
During his FBI tenure, John was the recipient of the FBI Director’s Distinguished Service Award, for which he was selected from the ranks of the Bureau’s 35,000 employees. John is also the recipient of an Honorary Doctor of Computer Science in recognition of his contributions to the field of cyber investigations.
San Diego Police Department
A former San Diego Police Officer and a graduate of the University of San Diego School of Law, to include international studies at Oxford, England, John is an attorney admitted to the practice of law in California, Maryland and Washington, DC.
- Disorderly Conduct – Humorous stories from life inside the FBI.
- How to Spot A Terrorist Before It’s Too Late – Help everyday persons recognize and prevent mass shootings and terrorism before they occur
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- The Eighty Thieves – the non-fiction story of the first American P.O.W.s of World War II in Japan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FJhpSvLkYU&ab_channel=CBCNews
Informant tipped off FBI about documents at Trump estate, WSJ reports
187 Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgEWZYdkRGA&ab_channel=ABCNews
What we know about the FBI's search of Trump's Florida home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgEWZYdkRGA&ab_channel=FoxNews
Judge Jeanine: Trump search warrant was subterfuge to take him down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJPvK7PxbHk&ab_channel=FoxNews
Kayleigh McEnany: This just pours fuel on the fire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eew0L-KCXo8&ab_channel=FoxNews
Rand Paul: FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago is an ‘attack on the rule of law'
11,432 Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jEYOHhnBF0&ab_channel=FoxNews
Lara Trump reacts to Merrick Garland signing off on Mar-a-Lago raid
6,076 Comments
---------- Original message ----------
From: "Donald Trump Jr."<contact@email.donaldjtrump.
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2022 13:43:56 -0600
Subject: STAND WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP
To: david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
This is sad.
As you know, my father’s beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, was RAIDED by the FBI. This is unprecedented, Friend. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before.
Biden and the Democrats are following in the footsteps of all the 3rd world Communist Dictators that the Left worships. Their out-of-control Department of Justice is ripping this Country apart with how they're openly targeting their political enemies.
This is NOT OK, Friend.
He will NEVER stop exposing the Truth about the radical LEFT. And, he will NEVER stop his mission to SAVE AMERICA.
President Trump needs to know you are with him during this critical time, Friend.
!["[This] is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats" - Donald J. Trump](http://ci4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/LRidiXUJmeXz2vpmrt7UvEisPknodIRDSDmnt8AYzKtDYuWQeZaHYiDNxg50kFfk227bhJbI2ocaQzdqsiRUEN10X0rLmZxtwvicuAOIHIPuT7h_3Bx9iBgYjnVx65O_0axEUywCZmSEOdjPScWzMLOh5KFePIT6FJQ-Zr0Jbg=s0-d-e1-ft#https://image.email.donaldjtrump.com/lib/fe2d11727364047f731178/m/1/c8468511-f446-445f-a154-7c822819141f.png)
Thank you,
Donald Trump Jr.
Contributions to Save America JFC are not deductible for federal income tax purposes.You are receiving this email at david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Save America JFC, PO Box 13570, Arlington, VA 22219
We believe this is an important way to reach our grassroots supporters with the most up-to-date information regarding the efforts of Save America and President Trump, and we’re glad you’re on our team. President Trump is calling on YOU to take the next step and become an Official Trump Day One Club Member. You can activate your membership by following this link.
Thank you for joining Team Trump. It’s because of grassroots supporters like YOU that we’ve been able to consistently call out the Fake News media EVERY SINGLE TIME they try to spread misinformation or outright LIES about the important work President Trump is doing to SAVE AMERICA. Reaching grassroots supporters directly is CRITICAL if we’re going to Save America from Joe Biden and the Left. But, in order to do that we need to provide supporters with the most up-to-date information on all of our efforts.
TEXT TRUMP to 88022 to start receiving text messages from President Trump.
You can also sign up to receive text messages from Team Trump, members of the Trump family, and even the President himself. If you would like to opt out of important campaign updates like this, please follow this link. If you would like to give feedback to the President, follow this link. It’s because of the commitment and support from real Patriots, like YOU Friend, that we will SAVE AMERICA! Thank you again for your generous support. If you'd like to change your subscription status follow this link.Privacy Policy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKkk5Ipef_A&ab_channel=BBCNews
Donald Trump will not oppose bid to unseal FBI search warrant - BBC News
1,577 Comments
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-search-legal-woes-1.6545661
Donald Trump's current legal woes, explained
Georgia election and New York business probes ongoing, but scope of federal inquiries are unclear
The focus of the investigation was not immediately clear and law enforcement officials as of mid-Tuesday morning had not commented. Here is a look at some of the probes and lawsuits that Trump faces.
Missing documents
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in February notified Congress that it had recovered about 15 boxes of White House documents from Trump's Florida home, some of which contained classified materials.
The Democrat-led oversight committee in the U.S. House said at that time it was expanding an investigation into Trump's actions and asked the archives to turn over additional information. Trump previously confirmed that he had agreed to return certain records to the archives, calling it "an ordinary and routine process."
The Capitol riot
A congressional panel probing the Jan. 6, 2021, assault by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol is working to build a case that he broke the law in trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
Vice-chair Liz Cheney has said the committee could make multiple referrals to the Justice Department seeking criminal charges against Trump, who accuses the panel of conducting a sham investigation.
In a March 2 court filing, the committee detailed Trump's efforts to persuade his vice-president, Mike Pence, to either reject slates of electors for Democrat Joe Biden, who won the election, or delay a congressional count of those votes.
Trump's efforts likely violated a federal law making it illegal to "corruptly" obstruct any official proceeding, or attempt to do so, David Carter, a California federal judge, said earlier this year.
In the March 2 filing, the committee said it was likely that Trump and others conspired to defraud the United States. That law criminalizes any effort by two or more people to interfere with governmental functions "by deceit, craft or trickery."
In addition to Trump's efforts to pressure Pence, the committee cited his attempts to convince state election officials, the public and members of Congress that the 2020 election was stolen, even though several allies told him there was no evidence of fraud.
Democrats said in a June hearing of the Jan. 6 committee that Trump, a Republican, raised some $250 million US from supporters to advance fraudulent claims in court that he won the election, but steered much of the money elsewhere.
This raises the possibility that he could be charged with wire fraud, which prohibits obtaining money on "false or fraudulent pretences," legal experts said.
Supporters of former president Donald Trump rallied in support of him after the FBI operation on Monday. Some legal experts worry about the anger that could be unleashed if Trump were ever to be indicted. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
The committee cannot charge Trump with federal crimes. That decision must be made by the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland. It is known that a search warrant was obtained in connection with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who the committee has heard was instrumental in seeking out Trump-friendly electors to replace those of Biden.
While the Justice Department has a decades-old policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted, there is no such protection for former presidents or presidential candidates.
Lawrence Douglas, professor of law at Amherst College in Amherst, Mass., told CBC News recently that the committee has brought out "pretty powerful evidence" of "a conspiracy to defraud the United States and ... the corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding."
Expert weighs political and legal aspects to Jan. 6 committee hearings
Legal experts who spoke to Reuters as well as Douglas — who predicted in a book that Trump would not quietly cede an election loss — said the stakes are enormously high.
Prosecuting a candidate could nonetheless have political implications and arouse the type of anger seen on display on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump, as he has done after being acquitted in the Senate following two impeachments, could claim vindication if a prosecution is not successful.
Georgia pressure campaign
A special grand jury was selected in May to consider evidence in a Georgia prosecutor's inquiry into Trump's alleged efforts to influence the state's 2020 election results.
The investigation focuses in part on a phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, on Jan. 2, 2021.
Trump asked Raffensperger to "find" the votes needed to overturn Trump's election loss, according to an audio recording publicly released.
Legal experts said Trump may have violated at least three Georgia criminal election laws: conspiracy to commit election fraud, criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, and intentional interference with performance of election duties.
New York probes
Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has been investigating whether Trump's family real estate company misrepresented the values of its properties to get favourable bank loans and lower tax bills, though after two top lawyers who had been leading the investigation resigned in February, the probe's future was thrown into question.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James is conducting a civil investigation examining whether the Trump Organization inflated real estate values. Trump and two of his adult children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, agreed to testify in the probe starting on July 15.
Trump was in New York on Monday and not at his Florida estate, but it's unclear if his deposition is imminent or had taken place.
With files from CBC News
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---------- Original message ----------
From: "Donald J. Trump"<contact@email.donaldjtrump.
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2022 08:13:39 -0600
Subject: MAR-A-LAGO: RAIDED
To: david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, was raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.
Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before, and it’s important that you know that it wasn’t just my home that was violated - it was the home of every patriotic American who I have been fighting for since that iconic moment I came down the Golden Escalators in 2015.
I stood up to the Radical Left’s corruption. I restored power to the people and truly delivered for our Country like we have never seen before. The establishment hated it.
Now, as they watch my endorsed candidates win big victories and see my dominance in all polls, they are trying to stop the Republican Party and me once more. The lawlessness, political persecution, and Witch Hunt, must be exposed and stopped.
As long as I have your support, I will continue to fight for the Great American People. I need every single red-blooded American Patriot to step up during this time.
Thank you,
Donald J. Trump
45th President of the United States
You are receiving this email at david.raymond.amos333@gmail.
Save America JFC, PO Box 13570, Arlington, VA 22219
We believe this is an important way to reach our grassroots supporters with the most up-to-date information regarding the efforts of Save America and President Trump, and we’re glad you’re on our team. President Trump is calling on YOU to take the next step and become an Official Trump Day One Club Member. You can activate your membership by following this link.
Thank you for joining Team Trump. It’s because of grassroots supporters like YOU that we’ve been able to consistently call out the Fake News media EVERY SINGLE TIME they try to spread misinformation or outright LIES about the important work President Trump is doing to SAVE AMERICA. Reaching grassroots supporters directly is CRITICAL if we’re going to Save America from Joe Biden and the Left. But, in order to do that we need to provide supporters with the most up-to-date information on all of our efforts.
TEXT TRUMP to 88022 to start receiving text messages from President Trump.
You can also sign up to receive text messages from Team Trump, members of the Trump family, and even the President himself. If you would like to opt out of important campaign updates like this, please follow this link. If you would like to give feedback to the President, follow this link. It’s because of the commitment and support from real Patriots, like YOU Friend, that we will SAVE AMERICA! Thank you again for your generous support. If you'd like to change your subscription status follow this link.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-raid-florida-fbi-1.6545362
Trump says FBI agents have raided his Florida home
Justice Department spokesperson would not confirm if attorney general authorized a search
Though Trump released a lengthy statement Monday saying agents were searching his Mar-a-Lago estate, a U.S. Justice Department spokesperson said they had no comment when asked if Attorney General Merrick Garland had authorized the search.
A person familiar with the matter said the action was related to a probe of whether Trump had taken classified records from his White House tenure to his Florida residence.
Trump says the FBI broke into a safe on his property, an action he described as "persecution."
"After working and co-operating with the relevant government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate," Trump said in his statement Monday.
Supporters of Trump stand outside his Mar-a-Lago home after Trump said that FBI agents raided it, in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday. (Marco Bella/Reuters)
Trump added: "These are dark times for our Nation ... Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before."
The Justice Department launched a preliminary investigation into Trump's removal of records to the Florida estate, a source familiar with the matter told The Associated Press in April.
That investigation comes after the U.S. national archives and records administration in February notified Congress that it had recovered about 15 boxes of White House documents from Trump's Florida home, some of which contained classified materials.
The U.S. House of Representatives oversight committee at that time announced it was expanding an investigation into Trump's actions and asked the archives to turn over additional information.
Jan. 6 committee hearing
The alleged raid on Mar-a-Lago comes as Trump considers a third White House bid. The action, which the FBI and Justice Department did not immediately confirm, marks a dramatic escalation in law enforcement scrutiny of Trump.
Though a search warrant does not suggest that criminal charges are near or even expected, federal officials looking to obtain one must demonstrate that they have probable cause that a crime occurred.
All this comes as a congressional panel continues to probe the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Its vice-chair, Liz Cheney, has said the committee could make multiple referrals to the Justice Department seeking criminal
charges against Trump.
Trump, in turn, has accused the panel of conducting a sham investigation.
Trump says FBI raided his Florida home
In a March 2 court filing the committee detailed Trump's efforts to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to either reject slates of electors for Democrat Joe Biden, who won the election, or delay a congressional count of those votes.
Trump's efforts likely violated a federal law making it illegal to "corruptly" obstruct any official proceeding, or attempt to do so, according to David Carter, the California federal judge overseeing the case.
Trump could also be charged with "seditious conspiracy," a rarely used statute that makes it illegal to overthrow the U.S. government by force.
To prove this, prosecutors would need to show that Trump conspired with others to use force, said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former federal prosecutor.
With files from CBC News, AP, Reuters
Trump says he declined to answer deposition questions in Trump Organization probe
Former president had sought to avoid testifying in 3-year-old investigation
"I declined to answer the questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution," Trump said in a statement, noting that he was acting on "the advice of my counsel."
The New York civil investigation, led by Attorney General Letitia James and ongoing for three years, involves allegations that his company the Trump Organization misstated the value of prized assets like golf courses and skyscrapers, misleading lenders and tax authorities.
Trump released his statement just two hours after departing Trump Tower in Manhattan for the appearance at the attorney general's office.
Trump lost all legal challenges in his bid to avoid giving testimony. It was planned for last month but was delayed after the July 14 death of his first wife, Ivana Trump.
James, a Democrat, has said in court filings that her office has uncovered "significant" evidence that Trump's company "used fraudulent or misleading asset valuations to obtain a host of economic benefits, including loans, insurance coverage and tax deductions."
Trump children testified previously: sources
The Republican billionaire's deposition — a legal term for sworn testimony that's not given in court — was one of the few remaining missing pieces, the attorney general's office had said.
Two of Trump's adult children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, testified in the investigation in recent days, two people familiar with the matter said. The people were not authorized to speak publicly and did so on condition of anonymity.
Trump had the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and decline to answer questions from James's investigators.
Trump blasted the practice of taking the Fifth on the campaign trail in September 2016, while talking about his opponent Hillary Clinton's investigation involving her use of a private email server while secretary of state.
"You see the mob takes the Fifth," Trump said. "If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?"
New York Attorney General Letitia James speaks at a news conference in New York City on June 6. James has been pursuing a civil probe of Trump Organization since 2019. (Mary Altaffer/The Associated Press)
Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg and Trump's son Eric each invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 500 times when questioned by James's lawyers during separate depositions in 2020, according to court papers.
Trump in his statement again characterized the attack as politically motivated, while attacking James's record as attorney general.
"I once asked, 'If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?'" he said. "Now I know the answer to that question. When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors, and the Fake News Media, you have no choice."
Allegations of shifting valuations
James alleges the Trump Organization exaggerated the value of its holdings to impress lenders or misstated what land was worth to slash its tax burden, pointing to annual financial statements given to banks to secure favourable loan terms and to financial magazines to justify Trump's place among the world's billionaires.
The company even exaggerated the size of Trump's Manhattan penthouse, saying it was nearly three times its actual size — a difference in value of about $200 million US, James's office said.
WATCH | Right-wing figures, Republicans rally around Trump:
Raid on Trump’s home sparks outcry from supporters
Trump has denied the allegations, explaining that seeking the best valuations is a common practice in the real estate industry.
Once her investigation wraps up, James could decide to bring a lawsuit and seek financial penalties against Trump or his company, or even a ban on them being involved in certain types of businesses. The Trump Foundation was previously dissolved in a probe overseen by James, with Trump paying a $2 million US fine for its misuse.
FBI operation reverberates
Trump's deposition occurred two days after FBI agents searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida as part of an unrelated federal probe into whether he took classified records when he left the White House.
Anti-Trump protesters stand in front of Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday. The FBI search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate marked a dramatic and unprecedented escalation of the law enforcement scrutiny of the former president, angering most Republicans. (Seth Wenig/The Associated Press)
Republicans have staunchly supported Trump after the operation, sometimes with incendiary language. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis characterized the law enforcement activity as "another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime's political opponents," referring to the Biden administration, and some members of Congress called for the dismantling of the FBI.
While James has explored suing Trump or his company, the Manhattan district attorney's office has long pursued a parallel criminal investigation, although it appears to have stalled after a new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, took office in January.
A grand jury that had been hearing evidence disbanded. The top prosecutor who had been handling the probe resigned after Bragg raised questions internally about the viability of the case.
On Friday, Weisselberg and the Trump Organization will be in court seeking dismissal of tax fraud charges brought against them last year in the Manhattan district attorney's criminal probe. Weisselberg and the company have pleaded not guilty; he is accused of collecting more than $1.7 million in off-the-books compensation.
With files from CBC News
U.S. politics engulfed in threats following police search at Trump's home
Former Republican U.S. attorney general calls angry reaction to Mar-a-Lago search 'outrageous,' urges calm
Raid on Trump’s home sparks outcry from supporters
A Republican former U.S. attorney general is pleading with his fellow Americans: cool down the ill-informed speculation threatening to engulf the country's politics.
The police search at Donald Trump's Florida residence has prompted a surge in inflammatory rhetoric reminiscent of the volatile weeks after the last election.
It's included violent threats against officials, vows of political retaliation against the FBI, comparisons to Nazi rule and social-media musings about civil war.
Alberto Gonzales is urging people to withhold judgment until we learn more about what actually prompted Tuesday's hours-long search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
The attorney general under George W. Bush told CBC News he feels sympathy for his former department: the Justice Department avoids, as a general rule, discussing investigations, in part to protect the reputation of its target.
Former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, pictured in 2016, has urged Americans to allow the Justice Department to conduct its investigation of Trump without threats. (Mark Humphrey/The Associated Press)
Since there is no guarantee charges will be laid following a search, Gonzales said, it's unfair to a suspect to rush out and describe what you were investigating.
This, he concedes, puts his former department at a disadvantage by creating an information vacuum that in this case is being quickly filled with speculation.
"There's a lot here we don't know yet.… People need to wait. People need to be patient. I have a great deal of confidence and faith in the department. I'm not saying it doesn't make mistakes from time to time. It does, it may. Nonetheless, I would give the benefit of the doubt to the department. Let the department move forward and do its job."
Such calls for patience are falling flat.
Heated rhetoric, threats increase
The nation is awash in furious speculation from every strata of American society, from anonymous accounts to high-ranking members of Congress.
Why did FBI agents scour the former president's home for classified documents? How sensitive were they? Did Trump show them to anyone? Did any non-Americans see them? Is it connected to a broader investigation? Is it a smear job to stop Trump from running for president again?
Is this all about mishandled documents? Authorities aren't talking and Trump has refused to release the search warrant, which could offer clues.
Republican politicians have largely closed ranks around the former president and threatened everything from defunding the FBI to grilling law enforcement at committee hearings.
They compared the raid to a foreign dictatorship tactic. They raised money off it, soliciting donations to fight alleged persecution.
They channeled the rage of the grassroots supporters who idolize Trump, like one protester outside Mar-a-Lago who told Reuters on Tuesday: "You feel like you might be in Venezuela or China or Russia or even in Hitler's Germany."
Researchers of online chatter say the intensity of anger has spiked to levels resembling the environment before the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.
It includes talk of murdering the judge who reportedly authorized the search warrant, along with the heads of the FBI and the attorney general.
Online calls for civil war
Alex Friedfeld, an investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League, said regular citizens are hearing from conservative opinion-makers that America is slipping into tyranny and they'll be targeted next.
And the response, he said, has been an instant surge in violent rhetoric across multiple online platforms, especially smaller websites without teams of content moderators.
Former president Donald Trump gestures as he departs Trump Tower on Wednesday in New York, on his way to the New York attorney general's office for a deposition in a civil investigation. (Julia Nikhinson/The Associated Press)
"It's large amounts of people openly fantasizing about using violence to target their perceived enemies," Friedfeld said in an interview.
"People are saying they're fed up, that it's time for a civil war, that they have to fight back now, otherwise they'll live in tyranny."
One difference from Jan. 6, he said, is there's no physical rallying point, no place for a mob to gather right now.
This is an aerial view of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday. (Steve Helbe/The Associated Press)
That will change if Trump ever gets charged.
A police lieutenant in one U.S. city told CBC News that colleagues are already having informal discussions about how to secure the courthouse if there's a Trump-related case there.
'Lock and load'
Friedfeld said it's an obvious risk. He predicted that prosecutors would have their personal information leaked on the internet and would face a deluge of threats.
"Everyone on the prosecution will need to be protected," he said. "Physical security is going to be paramount.… There will be people advocating for violence against the people trying to prosecute Trump."
What’s next for Trump following FBI raid?
Another researcher, Daniel Jones, said the inflammatory rhetoric comes from three groups.
One he describes as entertainers — media personalities who crave attention. In that category he includes Fox News prime-time shows excoriating "Biden's FBI."
"We're seeing things like, 'Lock and load.'… 'This is a civil war,'" said Jones, the lead investigator in the U.S. Senate's report on torture in the CIA, and a researcher with the non-profit, non-partisan group Advance Democracy.
"[We're seeing] direct threats against that judge [who reportedly signed the warrant]… [And stuff like], 'Attorney General Merrick Garland should be executed and assassinated.'"
Republican calls for defunding FBI
The third and final group he identifies, the one he calls most disappointing, comprises mainstream politicians who should know better.
Some Republicans have been repeating Trump's line that perhaps police planted evidence at his home.
It's not just prime-time Republican talking heads calling for defunding the FBI. Even some members of Congress are talking that way.
That includes the Georgia Q-Anon peddling firebrand, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told One America News Network she's thrilled by how many of her lawmaker colleagues are siding with her.
"I usually fight with my Republican colleagues, because I don't think they're strong enough," she said.
"But I am hearing things that I am so happy to finally hear come out of their mouths. Because when we take back the majority and we are in control in the House of Representatives, we are going after the Department of Justice; we're going after the FBI. We'll control the budget that funds everybody's program and everybody's paycheques."
'A federal judge authorized this search'
Republicans on Capitol Hill say the outrage is not merely performative, as a public declaration of fealty to Trump in order to placate their grassroots.
They say they truly believe authorities, and the media, aggressively target conservatives while ignoring transgressions from Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton.
The most senior Republican in the House of Representatives had a message about what his party will do if it wins a majority in this year's midterm elections and gains power over congressional committees.
Donald Trump pleads the fifth amendment before the New York State attorney general
Party leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy said in a statement that he would call Garland to committee hearings and demand he preserve all documents about the case.
Another Republican lawmaker, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, told Fox News that his party will scrutinize the actions of law enforcement.
"You better have explanations ready," he said. "Because you cannot weaponize our institutions for political gain. That is the destruction of democracy."
The eruption of outrage underscored the extent to which the Republicans are truly, deeply Donald Trump's party now.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush's attorney general offered his faint plea for people to trust law enforcement.
"A federal judge authorized this search," Gonzales told CBC. "That means something, as far as I'm concerned."
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U.S. Justice Dept. seeks to unseal warrant following search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago home
Attorney General Merrick Garland personally approved search warrant for raid of former president's home
The U.S. Justice Department asked a judge on Thursday to make public the warrant that authorized an FBI search of Donald Trump's Florida home, after the former president attacked the search as an act of political retribution.
Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed on Thursday that federal agents had searched Donald Trump's Florida estate amid a probe that sources have said is focused on whether the former president illegally removed records from the White House as he was leaving office.
Garland, the nation's top law enforcement official, said he had personally approved the decision to order the search.
His confirmation was highly unusual. U.S. law enforcement typically does not discuss ongoing investigations. But it came after Trump himself announced the search on Monday night, alleging that it was an act of political retribution by Democratic President Joe Biden.
Garland said the Justice Department had asked a court to publish a sealed search warrant "in light of the former president's public confirmation of the search, the surrounding circumstances and the substantial public interest in this matter."
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks at the Justice Department Thursday about the motion to unseal a search warrant for a raid at former president Donald Trump's Florida home earlier this week. (Susan Walsh/The Associated Press)
It was not clear whether Trump's legal team would object to the release of the warrant, which could shed light on the nature of the investigation.
In a statement on his Truth social network, Trump said: "My attorneys and representatives were -fully, and very good relationships had been established. The government could have had whatever they wanted, if we had it."
The unprecedented search marked a significant escalation in one of the many federal and state probes Trump is facing from his time in office and in private business.
Trump says FBI raided his Florida home
FBI agents visited Trump's property earlier this year to investigate boxes in a locked storage room, according to a person familiar with the visit. The agents and a Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran, spent a day reviewing materials, the source said.
A second source who had been briefed on the matter told Reuters that the Justice Department also has surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago in its possession.
Man dead after attempt to breach FBI office
An armed man who tried to breach the FBI's Cincinnati office was shot and killed by police after he fled the scene, leading to an hour long standoff Thursday afternoon, the Ohio Highway State Patrol said.
The man, who has not been identified, was shot after he raised a gun toward police at around 3 p.m. ET, said Lt. Nathan Dennis, a patrol spokesperson.
Federal officials said the man "attempted to breach" the visitor's screening area at the FBI office and fled when agents confronted him. After fleeing onto Interstate 71, he was spotted by a trooper and fired shots as the trooper pursued him, said Dennis.
The suspect left the interstate north of Cincinnati and abandoned his car, exchanging gunfire with police.
The area near Center and Smith roads was closed for hours during a standoff Thursday in Clinton County, Ohio, after an armed man tried to breach the FBI's Cincinnati office and fled north on the highway. (Nick Graham/Dayton Daily News via The Associated Press)
Authorities threatened after Mar-a-Lago raid
Attacks on the FBI's integrity erode respect for the rule of law, its director said on Thursday.
"Unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI erode respect for the rule of law and are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others," Christopher Wray said in a statement.
There have been growing threats in recent days against FBI agents and offices across the country since federal agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. On Gab, a social media site popular with white supremacists and antisemites, users have warned they are preparing for an armed revolution.
Trump supporters rallied in support of him after the FBI operation on Monday. Some legal experts worry about the anger that could be unleashed if Trump were ever to be indicted. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)Federal officials have also been tracking an array of other concerning chatter on Gab and other platforms threatening violence against federal agents.
The FBI on Wednesday also warned its agents to avoid protesters and ensure their security key cards are "not visible outside FBI space," citing an increase in social media threats to bureau personnel and facilities. It also warned agents to be aware of their surroundings and potential protesters.
The warning did not specifically mention this week's search of Mar-a-Lago but attributed the online threats to "recent media reporting on FBI investigative activity."
With files from The Associated Press
U.S. federal judge unseals search warrant used on Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate
FBI recovered documents labelled 'top secret,' according to court papers
A property receipt unsealed by the court shows FBI agents took 11 sets of classified records from the estate during a search on Monday.
The seized records include some that were marked classified as top secret and also "sensitive compartmented information," a special category meant to protect the nation's most important secrets that if revealed publicly could cause "exceptionally grave" damage to U.S. interests. The court records did not provide specific details about the documents or what information they might contain.
The warrant details that federal agents were investigating potential violations of three different federal laws, including one that governs gathering, transmitting or losing defence information under the Espionage Act. The other statutes address the concealment, mutilation or removal of records and the destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations.
The property receipt also showed federal agents collected other potential presidential records, including the order pardoning Trump ally Roger Stone, a "leatherbound box of documents," and information about the "President of France." A binder of photos, a handwritten note, "miscellaneous secret documents" and "miscellaneous confidential documents" were also seized in the search.
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Trump's attorney, Christina Bobb, who was present at Mar-a-Lago when the agents conducted the search, signed both property receipts — one that was two pages long and another that is a single page.
In a statement earlier Friday, Trump claimed that the documents seized by agents at his Florida club situated on the estate were "all declassified," and argued that he would have turned over the documents to the Justice Department if asked.
While incumbent presidents have the power to declassify information, that authority lapses as soon as they leave office and it was not clear if the documents in question have ever been declassified. And even an incumbent's powers to declassify may be limited regarding secrets dealing with nuclear weapons programs, covert operations and operatives, and some data shared with allies.
Trump kept possession of the documents despite multiple requests from agencies, including the National Archives, to turn over presidential records in accordance with federal law.
Trump's Mar-a-Lago is seen in Palm Beach, Fla., on Wednesday. (Steve Helbe/The Associated Press)
The Mar-a-Lago search warrant served Monday was part of an ongoing Justice Department investigation into the discovery of classified White House records recovered from Trump's home earlier this year. The Archives had asked the department to investigate after saying 15 boxes of records it retrieved from the estate included classified records.
It remains unclear whether the Justice Department moved forward with the warrant simply as a means to retrieve the records or as part of a wider criminal investigation. Multiple federal laws govern the handling of classified information, with both criminal and civil penalties, as well as presidential records.
'The public's clear and powerful interest'
U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, the same judge who signed off on the search warrant, unsealed the warrant and property receipt Friday at the request of the Justice Department after Attorney General Merrick Garland declared there was "substantial public interest in this matter," and Trump backed the warrant's "immediate" release. The Justice Department told the judge Friday afternoon that Trump's lawyers did not object to the proposal to make it public.
In messages posted on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote, "Not only will I not oppose the release of documents ... I am going a step further by ENCOURAGING the immediate release of those documents."
The Justice Department's request is striking because such documents traditionally remain sealed during a pending investigation. But the department appeared to recognize that its silence since the search had created a vacuum for bitter verbal attacks by Trump and his allies, and that the public was entitled to the FBI's side about what prompted Monday's action at the former president's home.
"The public's clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred under these circumstances weighs heavily in favour of unsealing," said a motion filed in federal court in Florida on Thursday.
FBI, Justice Department stay mum
The information was released as Trump prepares for another run for the White House. During his 2016 campaign, he pointed frequently to an FBI investigation into his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, over whether she mishandled classified information.
To obtain a search warrant, federal authorities must prove to a judge that probable cause exists to believe that a crime was committed. Garland said he personally approved the warrant, a decision he said the department did not take lightly given that standard practice where possible is to select less intrusive tactics than a search of one's home.
FBI and Justice Department policy cautions against discussing ongoing investigations, both to protect the integrity of the inquiries and to avoid unfairly maligning someone who is being scrutinized but winds up ultimately not being charged. That's especially true in the case of search warrants, where supporting court papers are routinely kept secret as the investigation proceeds.
In this case, according to a person familiar with the matter, there was substantial engagement with Trump and his representatives prior to the search warrant, including a subpoena for records and a visit to Mar-a-Lago a couple of months ago by FBI and Justice Department officials to assess how the documents were stored. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Justice Department under Garland has been leery of public statements about politically charged investigations, or of confirming to what extent it might be investigating Trump as part of a broader probe into the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The department has tried to avoid being seen as injecting itself into presidential politics, as happened in 2016 when then-FBI Director James Comey made an unusual public statement announcing that the FBI would not be recommending criminal charges against Clinton regarding her handling of email — and when he spoke up again just over a week before the election to notify Congress that the probe was being effectively reopened because of the discovery of new emails.
The attorney general also condemned verbal attacks on FBI and Justice Department personnel over the search. Some Republican allies of Trump have called for the FBI to be defunded. Large numbers of Trump supporters have called for the warrant to be released hoping they it will show that Trump was unfairly targeted.
"I will not stand by silently when their integrity is unfairly attacked," Garland said of federal law enforcement agents, calling them "dedicated, patriotic public servants."
Earlier Thursday, an armed man wearing body armour tried to breach a security screening area at an FBI field office in Ohio, then fled and was later killed after a standoff with law enforcement. A law enforcement official briefed on the matter identified the man as Ricky Shiffer and said he is believed to have been in Washington in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol and may have been there on the day it took place.
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