The previous administration prosecuted the man for an election joke made in 2016.
The Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals vacated the conviction of Douglass Mackey, who was prosecuted by President Biden’s administration for election interference, and ordered his case be dismissed. Mackey had posted a meme in 2016 joking that people could text their votes in for then-candidate Hillary Clinton.
Mackey was accused by the DOJ of “conspiring to injure citizens in the exercise of their right to vote.” He was convicted by an Eastern New York District jury in 2023 and sentenced to seven months in federal prison. The sentence was paused during his appeal.
The appellate court stated, “The mere fact that Mackey posted the memes, even assuming that he did so with the intent to injure other citizens in the exercise of their right to vote, is not enough, standing alone, to prove a violation of Section 241. The government was obligated to show that Mackey knowingly entered into an agreement with other people to pursue that objective.”
“This the government failed to do. Its primary evidence of agreement, apart from the memes themselves, consisted of exchanges among the participants in several private Twitter message groups—exchanges the government argued showed the intent of the participants to interfere with others’ exercise of their right to vote,” the ruling continued. “Yet the government failed to offer sufficient evidence that Mackey even viewed—let alone participated in—any of these exchanges. And in the absence of such evidence, the government’s remaining circumstantial evidence cannot alone establish Mackey’s knowing agreement. Accordingly, the jury’s verdict and the resulting judgement conviction must be set aside.”
Mackey responded to the decision, stating, “I would like to thank God, thank my family, thank my beautiful wife, attorney Andrew Frisch, the incredible attorneys at Jones Day, and YOU—the friends who prayed and donated and spread the word since day one.”
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Sources: Reuters,
