U.S. v. Mackey: A Biden DOJ Conspiracy Theory Shredded.
Posted by Ed Folsom, July 14, 2025.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Government Exhibit #720 pic.twitter.com/M2NwUXzXMt
— Douglass Mackey (@DougMackeyCase) July 9, 2025
United States v. Mackey, decided by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on July 9, 2025, shreds a Biden DOJ conspiracy theory. It also scores a small, after the fact, victory over the Biden Administration’s partisan weaponization of government against a guy who dared to mock the pieties of progressivism.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals tells us that Douglass Mackey was a self-described Twitter “shitposter.” He began posting on Twitter in 2014, using the handle “Ricky Vaughn.” All of Mackey’s posts under this handle displayed an avatar of Ricky Vaughn, a character Charlie Sheen once played in the movie Major League, wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat.
During the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, certain memes circulated on Twitter using Hillary Clinton campaign branding, urging people to, “save time,” “avoid the line,” and “vote from home,” by texting “‘Hillary’ to 59925.” On November 1, 2016, Mackey tweeted 2 such memes, one in English and another in Spanish, from his “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter account. On November 2, Mackey retweeted another account’s tweet of the English language meme that he had posted the day before.
Mackey’s two tweets and his retweet all bore his Ricky Vaughn avatar wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. The retweet also contained the hashtag #MAGA. How likely is it that anyone viewing these tweets or retweet could have believed they were really from Hillary’s campaign urging people to vote for her by text? As the Mackey opinion points out, “A [Twitter] user might…have posted or reposted such memes for purely satirical purposes.”
In any event, Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, and Donald Trump won. Douglass Mackey heard nothing from the feds throughout Trump’s term in office. But when Trump ran for a second term in 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, he lost to Joe Biden.
Biden was sworn into the presidency on January 20, 2021. The very next day, January 21, 2021, more than four years and two months after Mackey made his Hillary meme tweets, the United States government issued a criminal complaint against him, alleging that he had violated 18 United States Code section 241, in 2016, by conspiring with others to “injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of…the right to vote.”
Mackey was later indicted for this offense in the Eastern District of New York. In March of 2023, a jury convicted Mackey and the presiding judge sentenced him to serve 7 months of incarceration. By this token, he might have been convicted and sentenced to 7 months in prison if the memes had told people to vote for Hillary by mental telepathy, or by chanting her name three times loudly in the shower, instead of by text.
Mackey appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed his conviction on July 9, 2025, holding: “Here, no rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.” The Biden Administration’s DOJ had its conspiracy theory, but even taking all evidence presented at trial in the light most favorable to the prosecution, no rational jury could possibly have found Mackey guilty of the conspiracy that the government charged him with.
Biden’s DOJ brought its case against Mackey early in the Administration’s full-court-press against criticism. In the 2016 election, Mackey had been an influential social media “shitposter” in the enemy camp. It was necessary to make examples of influential social media shitposters in the enemy camp, to put them in jail, to cancel them and deter others who might dare to speak against Democrat Party line orthodoxies and pieties. For example, I posted previously, here, about the Administration’s well-documented, heavy-handed efforts to shut down all social media questioning of the 2020 election results or its Party line on all matters related to COVID-19.
The Biden Administration weaponized the criminal justice system against dissidents, ensuring that examples of the dangers of dissent were on display everywhere. In this time frame, Biden’s Department of Justice trotted out an obscure section of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, enacted in the wake of the Enron accounting scandal to address matters of financial fraud, exposing participants in the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol to a prison sentence of up to 20 years. This was far beyond the penalty available under law for any of the crimes these people actually committed, but examples had to be made. This particular brand of weaponized prosecutorial overreach continued for more than three years until the U.S. Supreme Court finally shut it down, ruling it contrary to law, on June 28, 2024 in Fischer v. Unites States.
Did you wish to be hauled off and imprisoned like Doug Mackey or a J6er, maybe even four or more years after the fact? Or did you prefer to go about your life unmolested? The message was clear – dissent could cost you a price much dearer than you might previously have believed.
But by that point it should already have been easy to see what happened to people who dared to challenge or mock progressivism in power. Back on July 27, 2016, Donald Trump had the temerity to mock Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party line on Russia’s alleged “hacking” of DNC’s emails, saying this about the thousands of emails that Hillary illegally kept on her private server as Secretary of State (emails she claimed had somehow innocently been deleted — Oops):
“I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing…I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
It was an amusing quip to many who were not on Hillary’s team, suggesting as it did that Hillary was full of crap. After all, the potential for government secrets to fall into enemy hands was a chief problem with Hillary keeping emails on her private server. Yet when candidate Trump suggested that the Russians, whom Hillary and the Democrats claimed had managed to “hack” the DNC’s emails, might also have acquired the emails that Hillary at some point deleted, and so be able to “find” them, he was immediately accused of encouraging Russia to “hack” Hillary’s already dissappeared emails, as if prospectively.
Purely coincidentally, of course, a mere 4 days after Trump’s display of cheekiness, the FBI opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation that dogged Trump and his administration for years, running in tandem with a media campaign painting him as a Russian agent who had “colluded” with Russia to “hack” the 2016 election. Every day, we were told that the smoking gun evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia was about to drop, any minute now. It never did, because there was no such thing.
The “Trump-Russia-Collusion” campaign only began to taper off after April of 2019, when Robert Mueller’s report was released finding no evidence that Trump or those around him colluded with Russia. Then, in December of 2019, Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report was released, criticizing the slipshod nature of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the Hillary campaign-commissioned Steele Dossier that underpinned both it and the Trump/Russia collusion hoax for roughly three years.
So, while United States v. Mackey is a victory against that one instance of government weaponization, it is only a small victory. Far too many were crushed before the weaponizers temporarily lost their power to weaponize.
All that they understand is power, and when they have it, this is invariably how they use it, even when they smile like Zohran Mamdani. For them, holding power will always require that the dangers of party-line-deviation must be made palpable to those over whom they rule.
When, as now, they don’t hold all the power that they covet, they bray incessantly that existential dangers to the “rule of law” are all around us, dangers from which only they can save us. But they refuse to submit themselves, personally, to the limits of the rule of law. After all, why should such limits apply to them when they are on the right side of history? And yes, Ketanji Brown Jackson (see here), and yes, Indira Talwani (see here), that most definitely includes you.
Related post:
