The pro-Trump meme-maker who faced prison time for a social media stunt eight years ago has formally appealed his conviction.
Moreover, he is also urging Republicans in Colorado, Maine, and anywhere else that Democrats want to toss former President Donald Trump off the ballot to sue under the same law that could send him to jail for denying them the right to vote for their candidate of choice.
West Palm Beach resident Douglass Mackey wrote about his appeal over the past weekend.
To recap, as the Tampa Free Press reported last month, U.S. Judge Ann Donnelly sentenced Mackey to seven months in prison in October following a conviction on a charge of conspiring to undermine the 2016 election.
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Federal prosecutors claimed that Mackey, in 2016, worked with other online influencers to deny liberals their votes. Under the X handle RickyVaughn99, Mackey posted for his 58,000 followers memes with phrases like “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.”
Mackey’s meme reportedly prompted roughly 4,900 gullible liberals to submit votes by text or social media.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals.ruled last month that Mackey could remain free pending his appeal, which was filed Friday.
He posted the court records at Substack.
In his appeal, Mackey’s lawyers note that the feds prosecuted him under an 1870 law designed to stop the Ku Klux Klan from intimidating black voters after the Civil War.
His lawyers noted that the government’s pursuit of the case on these grounds was “unprecedented and lawless” because that section of federal law “has never been employed to criminalize political misinformation, despite the practice’s ubiquity.”
The Biden administration is using this pretext to implement a “sprawling political speech code” that “grossly offends the First Amendment.”
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The statute at issue “does not give the Government a roving license to criminalize political misinformation,” Mackey’s lawyers argued. “Consider the repercussions of that interpretation. If deceiving voters ‘injures’ their right to vote, then any such deceit is a crime—and that interpretation is so overinclusive and so chilling that it would readily fail any form of heightened scrutiny.”
“O]nce [the law] is extended to deceptive speech, there is no way to stop it from erecting a ‘Ministry of Truth,’” they added. “The Government’s reading of [this law] would invite prosecution for every hotly debated political rumor and conspiracy theory.”
“Mackey’s work … was textbook First Amendment speech. … Treating that conduct as evidence of criminal intent, as the [trial] court did, … only exacerbates the offense to the First Amendment.”
His legal team noted that a left-wing activist did the same thing as Mackey in the 2106 election and was never prosecuted.
But Mackey did not end there.
The next section of the federal code, he added, allows people to sue if they want to turn the government’s argument in his case to a pro-Trump movement.
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The feds claim that Mackey’s memes “hampered” people’s right to vote. What is it then, he suggested, if a candidate is booted from the ballot.
“Since the decision to kick Trump off the ballot involves state action, GOP voters in Maine and Colorado can file civilly under [the federal code], which contains a private right of action, under the DOJ theory that their right to vote for their candidate of choice is being impeded,” he wrote.
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