If Donald Trump stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue after robbing the Chase Bank branch by passing a note to the teller saying, “Your money or your life,” he’d likely plead the first amendment as his defense: “I was just exercising my rights to free speech!”
Of course, he’d be wrong. Words that criminal defendants have written or spoken are used against them all the time. Perhaps you’ve heard of a confession.
Still, no one should discount the potential resonance in the court of public opinion of Trump’s messaging that he is the victim of a government attack on his first amendment rights. For the best of reasons, Americans prize the constitutional guarantee of free speech.
Hence, it’s worth a bit of a dive into why Trump has no serious first amendment defense in a court of law to the charges set forth in the masterful, 1 August DC grand jury indictment in which he’s charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.
The law puts it this way: “Speech integral to criminal conduct” is not protected speech. UCLA Law professor and first amendment scholar Eugene Volokh has written that “[i]t’s now a standard item on lists of First Amendment exceptions.”
In the imagined robbery at Chase, the threatening note is integral to the crime of walking into a bank and taking the loot.
In parallel, in the DC grand jury’s indictment, Trump’s claims that the election was stolen were integral to the conspiracy, the agreement with others and the acts of working in concert with them to...
THE Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has claimed that a viral comment linked to an X account attributed to its chairman was posted before the original pro-APC post it was respondin...