Douglass Mackey was sentenced in federal court in October 2023 to seven months in prison for participating in a conspiracy to interfere with the rights of voters to vote in the 2016 Presidential Election.
Mackey used Twitter to disseminate messages to prospective voters for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton that said they could cast their vote by sending a text message to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York said.
Mackey, using the pseudonym “Ricky Vaughn,” directed his message at Black Americans, in particular, including an image of a Black woman standing in front of a sign that said, “African Americans for Hillary.” The ad said: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history,” the U.S. Attorney’s office said in its statement about Mackay’s sentence.
The ads duplicated the design of the ads created by the Clinton campaign.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/nyregion/douglass-mackey-trump-sentencing.html
In December 2023, Donald Trump Sr. and his son Donald Jr. attacked Mackey’s conviction by accusing President Joe Biden of violating Mackey’s First Amendment rights.
Biden was not the prosecutor or judge.
He did not comment on the case.
Mackey’s conviction was not a First Amendment issue.
CNN reported that Mackey “was under federal investigation for conspiracy to suppress votes in the 2016 presidential election.”
Donald Trump Sr. takes the First Amendment so personally that he believes it only belongs to him and to those who agree with him.
Donald Trump Jr., the more verbal, more odious, more creepy version of mini-me, the son of Dr. Evil in Austin Powers, praised Mackey on his How I Made it On My Own, with Donald Trump Jr. podcast, by calling Mackey “maybe my favorite Twitter account of all time.”
Of course he was.
Fox News talk show host Tucker Carlson and right-wing propagandist, felon Dinesh D’Souza, onetime boyfriend of Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, also perpetuated the conspiracy that Mackey was sent to jail for “mocking Hillary Clinton on the internet” and not for “conspiracy to suppress votes in the 2016 Presidential Election.”
SEE DINESH D’SOUZA
SEE LAURA INGRAHAM
Newsweek magazine fact checked Tucker Carlson’s and Dinesh D’Souza’s claim and found that what they said was not correct.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-doug-mackey-going-jail-mocking-hillary-clinton-1842695
USA Today also fact checked the claim and also said it was “false.”
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, agreed.
“He was prosecuted not for criticizing Hillary Clinton but for deliberately conveying false information about how one can vote for Hillary Clinton in a way the jury concluded was intended to try to keep people from going to the polling places,” Volokh said.
CNN described Mackey’s presence on social media as having “a well-known history of pushing deeply racist, antisemitic, anti-Muslim and homophobic content online.”
CNN said that Mackey had “shared racist caricatures of people of color, amplified demeaning stereotypes and belittled entire groups with racial slurs. He used the N-word in multiple posts, and he described Black people as ‘feral.’”
In addition, he frequently used Nazi-era smears, including, according to CNN, “a comment about decorating a cake with a Jewish slur, a reference to putting Jews in gas chambers and praise for Hitler.”
He wrote the following in December 2015:
“The jews (sic) fear that Donald Trump is Hitler because they know that they have done great evil in America. They fear justice will be done.”
Among those defending Mackey was GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
A Ramaswamy spokesman said Ramaswamy “was unaware of the racist content in Mackey’s” social media posts, the New York Post reported.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/nyregion/douglass-mackey-trump-sentencing.html
Mackey has appealed his conviction.
It is the only thing appealing about him.
