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Remember how back in 2016, there was a funny meme going around about how you could text to vote for Hillary? A man named Douglass Mackey was behind that, who has been found guilty of election interference by a jury in New York. The argument goes that this effectively deleted a bunch of votes that should have gone to Clinton. Okay, so how many?
...I'm not an expert on the 2020 allegations of election interference, but come on now, I'm pretty sure those allegations were more than just thousands of votes. And they were dismissed on account of not likely having affected the election. Regardless, the meme was clearly a joke; that 4,900 number seems absolutely paltry and criminally charging him is making a mountain out of an anthill.
More importantly, it's not hard to interpret this in the light of Trump's recent indictment for a matter that also transpired in 2016. Now, I can understand the argument that the reason they didn't try to charge him then was because he was the president, and it would be pretty hard to try to bring charges against the president while he's in office, therefore they waited until he was out. Or, they didn't know that he paid off the porn star until recently. But this? Douglass's tweet was very public and they could've easily charged him all the way back in 2016 if they wanted to. Why are they doing it now?
That actually is not the argument, since he was convicted of conspiracy.
The case is case no 21-CR-80 (NGG). Which means it was filed in 2021. Federal criminal prosecutions are prosecuted by the US Attorney for the district. US Attorneys are appointed by the President and are replaced when a new President takes office. Is it a surprise that the Trump-appointed US Attorney did not prosecute a crime intended to help Trump win the election?
The jury, which heard the actual evidence, apparently found to the contrary; specifically, it found that he intended to deprive people of the right to vote. Has it occurred to you that there might have been more evidence presented than just the memes? Such as group chat logs where participants "discussed how to make the text-by-vote images look convincing" and testimony from one of the co-conspirators?
Why does that matter? People are convicted of attempts to commit crime all the time, after all, when the actual harm done is zero. And a bank robbery that nets only $4900 is even more paltry; should we give the robber a pass? As the theme song to Baretta said, "don't do the crime if you can't do the time."
As I recall, there's a long history of people on both sides of the aisle posting jokes/trolls to try and trick the other side into trying to vote on the wrong place, day, method, etc. As far as I know, this is the first time anybody has ever been prosecuted for it. I percieve this to be blatantly partisan political prosecution, since it's obviously a joke, and many Democrat activists have done similar things, and as far as I know, there has been no attempt to charge any of them with such crimes.
Even if we bend over backwards to the point of breaking spines to be charitable and assume the people driving this prosecution are neutral parties only looking out for the good of the republic, they would have to know that this would be perceived as blatantly partisan in these times. If that was truly their motivation, they ought to charge a couple of Democrats for doing similar things at the same time to avoid any perception of political bias.
Well, there was apparently a good amount of evidence presented at trial that it wasn't meant as a joke.
Like what? That article actually makes me more convinced of my position:
So they jacked up some other internet troll with the same type of bullshit charges who probably couldn't afford good Federal Defense attorneys to protect himself and forced him to testify against others or face prison time, and conveniently gave him anonymity, which sounds like a Sixth Amendment violation to me.
Sounds like a good argument to me!
It doesn't say exactly what kind of testimony any of these "witnesses" offered, but I can't conceive of how it would be relevant to the case. What do Clinton staffers and text message marketers know about this person's motivation or the results of his campaign?
The only thing that could possibly be vaguely relevant to the case is:
Exactly what did they do to "make them look convincing"? The rest sounds like normal political activism that both sides routinely practice to me. I'd have a pretty high bar against finding anything like this prosecution legitimate, and I have yet to see anything that comes anywhere near that.
Why does that matter? It is a conspiracy count, which does not require that they were successful.
It actually isn't, because, as I just said, conspiracy does not require the successful completion of the intended crime.
More importantly, I didn't say that there was sufficient evidence that they were guilty, but rather that there was evidence that it wasn't meant as a joke. If, as you say, this is political activism, then doesn’t that imply that it wasn't a joke?
The "political activism" part was referring specifically to:
Which apparently, according to the article, went to prove that they "weren't really joking".
Yes, this was a conspiracy charge. IMO, the large distance between what was actually done and any vaguely plausible claim of actually influencing an election makes this a blatantly partisan hit job. And IMO, the fact that they must have known it would look like this and made no attempt to make themselves and their campaign look more neutral says that they did it on purpose, that the goal was a chilling effect on Conservative activism.
If I start a chat with my 3 best friends where we talk about how funny it would be to trick Democrats into voting wrong, but never actually do anything, is that a crime in your opinion? What if we were all Democrats and we thought it would be funny to trick Republicans into voting wrong?
What happens when the next Republican President is as enthusiastic and skilled at lawfare as the Biden administration seems to be and start making these kinds of charges against Democrats?
If the Biden administration or the deep state are good enough at this sort of thing, there won't be a next Republican president, or at worst, the next Republican president won't have this sort of control, so it won't matter.
If that ever becomes the case, the Constitution would have been entirely subverted, the Government would be no longer legitimate, and I would support the armed overthrow of the government and all institutions participating in or complicit with the maintenance of that power.
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