“You can’t call anyone a liar?” Judge Patricia Millett asked federal prosecutors, “with a tone of incredulity,” according to The Washington Post report.
Millett, along with Judges Cornelia T.L. Pillard and Bradley Garcia, serves on the three-judge panel of the federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. This week they devoted two hours to the appeal of a federal district judge’s gag order placed on former president Donald Trump.
Under Millett’s questioning, federal prosecutor Cecil VanDevender agreed that under the order Mr. Trump could say that someone testifying against him was “an untruth speaker” but not call that person a “liar.”
“He has to speak ‘Miss Manners’ while everyone else is throwing targets at him?” inquired Judge Millett. “It would be really hard in a debate, when everyone else is going at you full bore.”
She noted that the First Amendment importantly protects inflammatory speech, adding with some exasperation: “Your position doesn’t seem to give much balance at all to the First Amendment’s vigorous protection of political speech.”
Trump’s attorney argued that the current leading Republican presidential candidate has taken advantage of the order’s stay, pending this appeal, by “posting about this case almost incessantly since the day it was filed and they haven’t come forward with a single threat that’s even arguably inspired by any evidence in his social media posts.”
The three-judge panel, at least as The Post reads the hearing’s tea leaves, “indicated it may narrow the order prohibiting the former president from attacking individual prosecutors . . . or from calling potential witnesses against him ‘liars’ in the heat of next year’s campaign.”
It should. Unless the speech is specifically criminal it should be freely allowed. Orange Man should have the same rights we all rightly possess.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “Untruth Speaker, Untruth Speaker”
The primary purpose of the gag order was to cripple Trump’s campaign. I won’t be voting for Trump, nor have I ever voted for him in the past, but anyone not unhinged by hostility to him recognizes that some officials (including judges) in each of these various cases are engaged in a termite conspiracy to stop his candidacy. The alternatives whom the Democrats offer or might plausibly offer as nominees for President in the approaching General Election — Biden, Harris, Newsom, and Michelle Obama — are so terrible that, without some grossly dirty dealings by the Democrats, Trump seems assured of victory.
(And let me note en passant that whoever is President in the next term is rather likely to select the replacement for one of the present three Justices of the Supreme Court who had been selected by a Democrat, and one or two of the Justices who had been selected by a Republican. The Court may thus go from six-three to seven-two or to four-five.)
Why do you think that the 45th president should be treated differently from other citizens who’ve been charged with felonies?
Well, gag orders are more the exception than the rule when felony charges are levelled.
And, in any case, these particular charges were levelled for reasons other than beliefs that the defendant truly committed crimes and that any conviction could withstand appeal.
A similar question, then, might be of why Robert Kennedy should not be gagged, just as soon as charges can be imagined and filed. The answer to that question is obvious, as is the answer in the case of Donald Trump.
“Unless the speech is specifically criminal it should be freely allowed.”
This suggests that the gag order should be dismissed entirely, rather than narrowed. Any speech which is specifically criminal would be covered by existing statutes.