Activist's conviction for Hillary Clinton memes tossed by appeals courts

New York Post

3 days ago

A social media influencer who was sentenced to seven months behind bars two years ago for posting anti-Hillary Clinton memes federal prosecutors deemed election interference for misleading voters had his conviction overturned.
Douglass Mackey, 36, posted satirical memes of a fake ad in 2016 falsely indicating voters could stay home and simply text 'Hillary' to a phone number instead of showing up at the polls.
But a three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit concluded that prosecutors failed to prove Mackey was knowingly partaking in a broader conspiracy to hoodwink voters.
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'The case has been remanded to the district court with orders to immediately dismiss. Hallelujah!' Mackey later cheered on X.
4 Many of the memes bore Clinton campaign logos and fine print at the bottom to look authentic.
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4 Douglass Mackey praised the appeals court's decision.
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Mackey had initially been sentenced in October 2023, but was out on bail amid an appeal. His 2016 meme, which was posted shortly before the election, told voters to 'Avoid the line' and 'Vote from home' by texting a phone number.
At the time, Mackey made the post via an alias, 'Ricky Vaughn.' Notably, his account at the time featured a man wearing a MAGA hat and a Bane mask.
Prosecutors claimed some 4,900 unique phone numbers texted the number in the meme.
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Twitter, as it was then called, eventually shut down his account, and he had garnered a spot on MIT's top 150 influencers of that election cycle.
Mackey posted multiple memes that federal prosecutors in Brooklyn cited in the case, accusing him of attempting to suppress votes. Some of the memes included bogus claims that they had been paid for by the Clinton campaign.
Some of the memes deployed the 'Vote from home' line but targeted specific blocs of voters, such as Latinos and African-Americans.
4 Federal prosecutors had been cheered by some Democrats for their 'groundbreaking prosecution.'
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The 36-year-old was accused of conspiring with other social media users in various chat rooms to chart ways to push President Trump's message, prosecutors said.
However, the panel on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was unconvinced.
'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,' Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston wrote in the majority opinion, referring to the statute defining conspiracy against rights.
'The government was obligated to show that Mackey knowingly entered into an agreement with other people to pursue that objective,' the panel added. 'This, the government failed to do.'
Judges on the panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously decided to overturn the charges and sent the case back to the district court with instructions to acquit Mackey.
4 The 2016 election marked the beginning of the more than decade-long Trump era of American politics.
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'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 judges noted.
'Yet the government failed to offer sufficient evidence that Mackey even viewed—let alone participated in—any of these exchanges,' they added, noting 'the government's remaining circumstantial evidence cannot alone establish Mackey's knowing agreement.'