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July 28, 2025 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
47:41
Lawless Lawfare and the Meme Wars. Interviews with Alex Swoyer & Doug Mackey | TRIGGERED Ep.262
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Guys, joining me now, reporter from the Washington Times and author of the new book, Lawless Lawfare, Alex Sawyer.
How are you, Alex?
Hey, good.
I'm great.
Thank you for having me.
It's my pleasure.
So your book is on a topic that we're really all too familiar with.
Yeah.
And then some, I got a lot of firsthand experience.
What made you want to put together, you know, a timeline of the lawfare and what readers, what are they going to take away from it?
Yeah.
So I'm a lawyer and a reporter.
So having gone to journalism school and law school, when I was covering the 2024 election, I was really troubled with what I was seeing.
And it wasn't just me.
I have a little kind of group chat with some of my friends from law school.
We're all lawyers across the country.
And every time there was like a new lawsuit announced against your father or one of his allies, our Trump supporters, we would all just kind of get in our chat and talk about it, share the complaint and just really think like, this is just so far fetched.
These cases, the charges, we were extremely troubled by what we were seeing happening to the courts.
And I thought that that needed to be laid out for the American public.
Really, I make the argument that the lawfare started with Russia, the special counsel investigation, then they kind of snowballed into impeachment.
And then from impeachment, we got to indictments.
And I think it's just very concerning that unfortunately, I worry that that the lawfare might be the new Democrats norm.
Yeah, it certainly seems like that's the case.
I mean, the full title of the book is Lawless Lawfare, Tipping the Scales of Justice to Get Trump and Destroy MAGA.
But in the end, lawfare backfired big time and actually made MAGA stronger.
I mean, I think to your point, right, it wasn't just you guys having that conversation that this seems insane.
It doesn't really check out with anything I've ever actually seen.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
So on that key point, I talked to a pollster in the book, Robert Haley.
And I was like, you know, what a vote when you were out there talking to voters during the 2024 election.
Like, how did this play?
And he was like, they were just so lost.
And I think it actually motivated voters to come support Trump even more because they saw what was happening with the judicial system.
And they're like, this is so un-American.
For example, the hush money trial up in New York, they were like, don't celebrities just pay hush money?
Like, isn't that like what part of like, how is that a crime?
And then, you know, everything going on with the special counsel investigation with Jack Smith, the classified documents case specifically, they were like, well, we see this happening with like Joe Biden, with Hillary Clinton and her use of the private email server.
So like, why is it that Donald Trump is the one that's being indicted and, you know, having to go in and out of courtrooms while he's trying to campaign?
It was extremely troubling.
So yeah, it did not sit well with the voters.
Obviously, the election results show that.
It's just, you know, we hope that the Democrats learned their lesson.
Yeah, I think the mugshot was probably the greatest campaign poster in the history of American politics, which is sort of hard to believe.
Again, it keeps backfiring.
It was that.
I think Laura Trump actually in the book called it Elvis Presley level, which I think that's like totally accurate.
The other image I think that embodies the 2024 election was your father, like after being shot coming up with his fist in the air.
I mean, you know, those are the two images people
think of that's interesting in the sense that that that sort of happened really for the same thing right the lawfare uh so much of it was a disinformation campaign right they created this hysteria trump is literally the greatest threat to democracy ever or the rule of law now is what we're hearing the rule of law democracy you know you know any kind of societal norms i mean you know and when you say that loud enough and you say that often enough you know the derange crazy is like oh my God, there must be some truth to this.
I mean, like everything else, that didn't matter, but it, uh, no question that sort of motivated someone to do literally tried to assassinate him, not once, but twice.
Absolutely.
And like to your point, on if you say something enough and over and over again, I think of Adam Schiff.
I covered Capitol Hill for 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.
And I just remember having to go outside of closed door meetings where he was promising he comes out and he's like, oh yeah, there's evidence of Russia collusion.
Like, just wait, we have it.
And then, you know, what is it?
Almost a decade later, still waiting.
And I think that was one of the most troubling aspects that I saw from the get-go happening to your father.
And then it just, obviously, it just, you know, grew from, it mushroomed from there.
Yeah, I've been waiting for a while since I was the recipient of a lot of the shift IR.
I was like, if you had it, why wouldn't you release it by now?
You know, exactly.
Yeah.
And like now, finally, you know, with DNI Gabbert coming out with what she did this week, I think that's fantastic that they're getting to the bottom of that.
This was a created narrative by President Obama and his high-level intel chiefs.
And unfortunately, you know, it cost the American taxpayer, what, like $40 million of a special counsel probe that was really a waste of time and money.
Well, to me, it was really what they prevented them from being able to do.
I mean, obviously they had a lot of effective wins in the first term.
I think we'll have a lot more this time because they understand the system better.
But so much of that time, you know, energy, the brain suck, the, you know, I think that costs the American people probably a lot more.
It's just sort of hard to enumerate it.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
So the first chapter of the book, I went with the cost of law fair, and that's exactly what I get into.
Steve Bannon actually said that their goal was to prevent that American first agenda from being implemented.
And to a large part, everybody was focused on Russia.
And so he's like, so I guess in part, they succeeded.
And it was unfortunate.
I talked to General Michael Flynn, and he was one of the biggest casualties of that whole Russia narrative.
He, you know, with his phone, obviously we're finding out now, like, was there even a reason?
There was no reason for the sanctions.
And that's what led to the phone call that then like, you know, poured fuel on this fire, this Russia fire.
And he says, you know, somebody like him with his military background, they're usually retired.
They're sitting on a board, making millions.
He's like, I'm having to scratch out a living basically because of the defamation that happened to him and the way that he just became kind of like the image and the face of the Russia investigation when it first started under Mueller.
Very, very unfortunate.
And I know, like, I talked a little bit about, you know, with you and you said what you experienced.
Like Laura Trump also said that everybody in the family, it was so raw.
She said, you know, like even the idea of getting a mortgage, like it was just everything.
Yeah.
It was, yeah, no, the debanking, the deinsurance, the, the, the, everything, it was, uh, it was rough.
But I guess, you know, when I look back, it's sort of, you needed almost those four years, though, for us, created a whole new level of fighter, created, you know, just people that, hey, you know, I'd say there were, you know, two day ones, right?
Where were you in 16 and then where were you on January 7th?
And so, you know, now for the first time, we actually have sort of like a MAGA bench that we didn't have.
And it's like, I'm not so concerned or not as concerned, because they will try to watch sort of the today's Republican Party, which is really an America first MAGA party, you know, revert back to that old school neocon kind of way.
So, you know, I think that was really important.
You actually needed all of that stuff to happen to really codify and solidify, you know, so much of what our party now stands for.
Yeah.
And I think it really exposed that how deep the deep state actually is.
You know, the fact that it's not just, I think people think of it like, oh, you know, politicians, Congress, the executive branch, maybe.
But now with this law affair, it's the judiciary has become part of that.
And that's what's extremely concerning.
You know, as a lawyer, I hate that I can like look at a case and see that it has political leanings, go and see which judge is appointed to the case right after the complaint is filed and have an idea of like how the outcomes are going to go.
What's the judge going to do based on who appointed that judge?
It should not be like that.
That's not, you know, lady justice is supposed to be blind.
And that's one of the things that really, really bothered me with how your father was treated as a defendant.
If anyone in America should be able to speak freely, it should be a defendant, no matter the last name, and facing, you know, the potential of having to go behind bars.
And I did some math after like the four indictments came down.
I think your father had to do at least like 90 campaign rallies while under criminal court gag orders.
And that, that really does not sit there well with me.
Anyone who treasures the First Amendment, anyone who treasures the fact that we have political speech in our country and the idea of free, you know, the freedom to debate should be extremely disheartened by that.
That precedent should have never been, you know, set.
And where was the media?
They should have been challenging that.
Like looking back, the Supreme Court precedent on gag orders, media is usually the one fighting for access.
And where were they?
I think there was one New York blogger I found that actually filed a lawsuit to try to get the gag order lifted on your father in New York.
And it's just, it was incredibly unfortunate.
So was there anything interesting that you found when you were researching the book that may not have been common knowledge on just how far the Democrat Party was willing to go to destroy my father and the country and the movement?
Yeah, I mean, so I kind of start with the cost of law there and then Russia.
I go through each of the impeachments.
I go through, I mean, there's so many lawsuits.
I forget about the whole battle trying to get his name off the ballot.
I mean, it's like people are like, oh, yeah, I forgot about that one.
I was like, yeah, I was in the Supreme Court for that too.
One of the things I think is super interesting now that Russia is back in the news this week was I have a career, an Intel career.
It's his name is John Mills.
He went on the record with me in the book.
And in the Russia chapter, he said, you know, I worked under the Obama administration.
I'm, you know, I was apolitical.
But no, no matter what meeting I started going into in 2015, 2016, all of a sudden, Russia was the topic.
And he said, we kind of, some of us like looked at each other like, this is literally out of nowhere.
So it wasn't like, you know, it's just kind of now that some of the stuff that Tulsi Gabbard's releasing, it's like, this is exactly what I have in the book, what he told me.
And it's just head Scratching.
One of the other things I did some research on, and I think is a really good place for people to go look, is the Media Research Center followed some of the coverage of the law fair and the cases against your father.
And it's just so, you know, we all know the legacy media, like it just, it's pretty much dead.
But it's just when you look at what they did, it's wild.
So one of the reports, one of my favorite things to share that's in the book is the coverage of the Fonnie Willis case down in Georgia.
ABC and CBS did 99 stories in April of 2024 on that case.
Never once mentioned that Fonnie Willis, the district attorney, was a Democrat, prosecuting, of course, the leading Republican presidential candidate.
No one even decided like, oh, we should probably mention she's a Democrat.
And here's the kicker.
She was running for reelection.
So like, you would think that's also an important aspect of a story.
So just complete journalistic malpractice.
But, you know, I think that sometimes that you asked about Democrats, that goes hand in hand with the media.
Well, you have that obviously in New York with all the people doing it.
And then you have the judges that were all hand-selected.
And it was always interesting that in New York, it was, you know, the same judge got us, got Steve Bannon, got, yeah, like, I'm like, how is it?
It's supposed to be a random lottery.
And yet, like, literally every time, everyone that Muzmaga end up with the same scumbag.
Like, it, yeah, I guess it shouldn't shock us, but it was happening.
I mean, I guess it's also interesting that really the same cast of villains who launched all of the law fare are some of the ones that are really implicated in a lot of these scandals, like Russia Gate and many others.
And you see the stuff going on with shift these days I keep reading about.
I mean, shift, homie, Letitia James, of course, right?
Those that live in glass houses.
That's the mortgage fraud fun, you know.
But I think it's all going to come out.
And that's one of the things I ask about is like, what can be done to stop this?
And some people say they want public hearings.
They want it to be all out in the open, true transparency for the American people.
Others say that they want to see indictments.
And it looks like that could potentially happen with what we had released this week in terms of Clapper, Comey, and so forth.
One of the interesting suggestions I had, I spoke to Governor Rod Logojevich for the book, and he said he was hoping maybe President Trump would have a commission that he could make bipartisan appointments to that could study this and look at ways to solve our courts from being abused and basically politics taking over the courtroom so this doesn't happen again in the future to somebody.
Jim Jordan also spoke to me, leading the Judiciary Committee in the House.
He had a couple interesting suggestions.
So one, he said that there was legislation they were looking at about if someone like your father or politician were to be indicted in state court, them having that ability to transfer it to federal court where there's a little bit more of, you know, a fair chance.
And I think that would be very smart.
You get out of those deep blue states or even vice versa if it was to happen to Democrats deep red.
You could go to a more fair territory.
Like I always think about your, the hush money trial.
If that happened right outside of Manhattan in Purple County, you would have had a different result or a different judge would have helped too.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So those were some interesting suggestions.
I asked him if he was going to subpoena Jack Smith.
I think a lot of the American people would like to see a hearing where Jack Smith has to answer some questions.
And he left the door open.
Okay, well, that's good.
I mean, as a reporter, we've been talking sort of with the lawyer hat on, but as a reporter, what have you taken away from the events that you've covered over the last decade now and beyond?
What's going on in the media?
And is that even reversible at this point?
So, I mean, the media is such an interesting industry to be in because I think I'm in it as its kind of implosion is happening, right?
Like there's just a change in how people get their news.
And I think it's for the better going to social media for truth rather than necessarily like only having a certain amount of networks that they can zone into and kind of being fed a certain narrative.
From the book, I actually share an interesting story.
I was in Judge Chutkin's courtroom and it was right after the superseding indictment came down.
So your father had won the Supreme Court case on presidential immunity.
Also, there was an obstruction charge that had been kind of kicked off by the Supreme Court with the January 6th defendant that could impact Jack Smith's indictment.
And so I was like looking and like, wow, he like really didn't, you know, reshape this indictment like after you just kind of suffer some losses at the Supreme Court like you might want to.
And I had a little conversation with the reporter next to me who was an NBC reporter.
And I was like, yeah, I just think that's like a huge mistake, you know, strategically as a lawyer.
And he's like, oh no, like that ruling was just so narrow and went on and on.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
This is not a narrow ruling.
Like this is literally like the Supreme Court telling the prosecution that like you can't, this, you don't have enough evidence to bring this type of charge against, you know, not only your father, but all the other January 6th, 300 or so defendants they were trying to bring that one charge against.
Like you, you have to drop it.
And I'm like, are they just so dumb they don't understand?
Or is this just all a narrative that they're trying to push?
You know?
And it was in that same hearing, actually, it was September, when the next step, typically in the process, is for a defendant to have a chance to file a motion to dismiss.
And so, of course, we're like two months ahead of the election, a little under, I think.
And that would have been time, you know, like a couple weeks here for this party to file, a couple weeks.
And Judge Chucken was like, you know, Owen Obama pointy.
Yes, I recognize that usually the next course of action would be for the defendants' lawyers to be able to file their say, but we're not going to do it like that.
And so that's when she went ahead and basically gave the green light to Jack Smith's team to file his oversize motion, which I'm sure you guys recall dropped like October, sometime in October, right?
Like weeks before the election.
And it was obvious they were just trying to get this out there in the public right before people went to the polls.
And it's just so political.
Like she said, I remember the quote, and I kept it in my story.
It was something to the effect of, I'm aware there's an election and I don't care.
And it's like, well, if actions speak louder than words, you obviously care.
Without question.
I mean, as you cover Washington today, how would you sum up the state of the Democrat Party?
I mean, is there a coherent agenda or is it just a hodgepodge of people who hate all things Trump?
You know, what effect did the law fair have on how they plan on conducting themselves?
And perhaps what did it have on common sense Americans?
Well, okay, so twofold with that.
One, I remember after the Iran strikes, there was like all this kind of buzz or push from impeachment for impeachment, right?
Like that was like some talk from like some of the lower level Democrats that was tamped down pretty fast.
So I'm thought, I thought maybe, you know, maybe they saw the law fare and they kind of learned a little bit.
Maybe that might be like a positive.
The other part that I think is just extremely terrifying is that because the Democratic Party is in such disarray and don't really have a strategy or a leader, you have Mandani in New York City coming to Washington, D.C. and having breakfast with some of like, you know, your most top Democrats and like recruiting them, trying to get them to support him.
And he literally wants to take away private housing.
I mean, like, I don't know very many Americans that would say there's any common sense to that.
Nobody even likes to go to the DMV.
Who wants to have a government-run grocery store, right?
It makes zero sense.
Yeah, as someone who has a mother that escaped communism and spent some of my childhood summers in a communist nation, I can assure you it's not going to be good.
But I mean, that's the point.
It doesn't seem to matter to these people.
They don't seem to care or to notice or, you know, it's going to work this time.
I mean, I don't get it.
Yeah, I don't get it either.
I think it's one of those things where you get what you vote for.
You know, unfortunately, I hope that New York doesn't go that way.
I guess time will tell.
It could be like an epicenter for the country to look at and notice, well, that's definitely what we don't want.
And then maybe it benefits Republicans in the midterms and so forth.
I kind of think of something like California with Governor Newsom.
You know, look at what your father was able to do with California from 2020 to 2024.
I mean, people are waking up and seeing the light.
When they have to live under crazy policies, there is going to be change.
They're going to vote for it.
They're going to have to.
Well, Alex, where do you think this story goes from here and what can we expect from everyone involved?
Yeah, so I hope, I think that there is going to be more and more transparency for the American public.
They're going to be able to see what the Obama administration did to your father.
I think that there's also going to be transparency out of the Biden DOJ.
I think it would be wonderful to, I'm not like a huge fan of special counsels.
I think they waste money.
But I think that, you know, there's something to be said about looking at kind of how all of this came to be, and especially the use of the auto pin with the whole memory issue and like where do we draw the line there?
Because there's some people I'm sure that received pardons that should be held to account for what happened.
Yeah, like I can't imagine that even a Joe Biden, when he was in his right mind, pardoning some of the rapists and the murders.
I'm like, I just don't like, who's pardoning those people?
Like, it would just seemingly be political suicide unless you're just, you know, like a radical Democrat activist and it's like, okay, then maybe it makes sense.
And the other thing I think, too, is like, you know, people are like, should we live in the past and keep investigating the past?
Or should we do we move forward and just forget?
I don't think you can.
The American people want answers.
They want to know what happened because they don't want it to happen again.
And people think, oh, like the welfare impacted President Trump, some of his top-level allies, but it touched everyday supporters.
I talked to a couple in Texas in the book.
They counter-protested Biden's campaign bus, and they ended up having big law and Democrats come after them under the Ku Klux Klan Act, saying that they violated the right to vote.
They had to go to trial.
They had to, obviously the First Amendment was their defense, but they won.
It's still that they chose to Austin, Texas, right?
Like the most liberal area you can bring the case.
But the point is, is it cost this like little couple, you know, in Texas like $300 plus thousand dollars to be able to defend their right to counter protest Biden's campaign bus, like public streets, right?
It's just terrible.
And I think the more that people can read about what happened, it's a lesson learned not to repeat history.
Well, Alex, thank you very much.
Really appreciate it.
Alex Sawyer, thank you for being here.
Everyone, check out the book Lawless Lawfair.
Hopefully we don't have to do a sequel to it, but I imagine we got three more years left, so I imagine it's coming one way or the other.
But like, you know, it is what it is.
We're used to it at this point, but hopefully not, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Thank you so much for having me.
I appreciate it.
And guys, coming up, another victim of Lawfare, Douglas Mackey.
You may know him as Ricky Vaughn.
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Guys, joining me now, Douglas Mackey and his attorney, James Burham.
Guys, I guess a lot of people don't necessarily know the backstory of this.
I was following Doug back when he was Ricky Vaughn on Twitter in 2016.
It was sort of one of the epic sort of the OG MAGA Twitter accounts.
Just awesome stuff.
So that's the backstory.
And then you have the lawfare about it.
So thank you guys both for being here.
But Doug, I'll start with you.
I mean, can you give the audience just a quick refresher on how the Biden DOJ targeted you and then some of the big news you got a few weeks ago?
Yeah, thank you, Don.
Thanks for having me.
So in 2016, I posted a meme, like I said, I was Ricky Vaughn.
It was humorous.
It said, Hillary Clinton voters skip the line, stay home.
Text your vote for Hillary Clinton to 59925.
And sort of my Twitter account at the time got suspended, and this got some media attention, but I kind of forgot about it.
Four years later, seven days after Joe Biden was inaugurated, the FBI came knocking on my door.
They indicted me over this meme saying that I was part of a grand conspiracy to steal votes.
And this dragged on.
I was tried and convicted in 2023.
And we appealed the case.
One of the first sort of minor victories we won was when I won appeal bond.
So the judge wanted me to report to prison, and we had to appeal just to get a bond to stay out of prison for the duration of the appeal.
We got the great news roughly two weeks ago that the court came down with a unanimous decision on appeal of a 3-0 judgment of acquittal.
They didn't just order the case dismissed or remanded for a new trial.
They actually ordered the judge to enter a judgment of acquittal saying that there was no evidence, there was insufficient evidence that I was part of any grand conspiracy to steal anybody's vote.
Yeah.
And if I remember correctly, I mean, there were left-wing Twitter accounts at the time doing the same thing to Trump voters, like almost verbatim.
Like literally, they took your meme and like made it about Trump and like all nothing ever happened to those guys, right?
It wasn't like this was a general crackdown.
I mean, this just targeted you.
You are a provocative Twitter account.
Again, like I said, definitely one of the funniest that I had seen in that cycle.
That was before it was, I mean, for you, it was just fun, right?
That was before it became sort of a bit of an industry.
Exactly.
We were having fun.
We were trying to support and promote President Trump and get him elected.
There was no stealing of anybody's vote.
So, yeah, you're right.
A liberal comedian named Christina Wong put out a video that said the same thing.
And this is an age-old joke that people make.
You know, Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday.
And I think Jimmy Kimmel did something with this in the 2020 cycle, if I'm not mistaken.
Similar type of joke on national television.
Yeah.
So, James, from a legal perspective, where do you go from here?
I mean, this has been now, you know, four years.
I assume, you know, a lot of money.
You know, what's the next chapter in this story for you guys?
Yeah, look, so it's all about getting justice for Doug.
And I mean, just to lay out how starkly the timeline of his case is, it really, I mean, I don't need to tell you about Lawfare, obviously, and what you guys have had to go through.
But I mean, we're talking about memes before the election.
They charged Doug with the crime two days after Biden was inaugurated.
Two days.
I mean, it was literally like they were waiting until the Biden DOJ came in to bring this thing.
So now we have to get justice for Doug.
Oh, and one other detail that I think you'll like.
Two of the main lawyers that did Doug's appeal, that won the case for him in the Second Circuit, now work for your father at the Justice Department.
So Yakov Roth and Harry Graver are both politicals in the current Justice Department.
So we've actually brought the good guys inside the house again as we try to restore order with A.G. Bondi.
So what happens now?
There's a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act that says you can sue the government when they do bad things to you.
That includes what the government did to Doug here.
As soon as the acquittal is final after July 30th, we're going to file a claim with the Justice Department for a considerable amount of money to get Doug paid back for his legal fees and try to do whatever you can with money to make the man's life right again.
I mean, these guys destroyed his life for four and a half years, and that's going to require, I think, you know, that you really can never make somebody whole for something like that, but we're going to do the most we possibly can.
The second half of justice for Doug is holding accountable the people that did this to him.
So the first way to hold them accountable is make sure Doug's compensated.
The second way to hold him accountable is make sure that the people, the individuals, are held accountable.
And so we're looking at everything we can do.
We're looking at suing the prosecutors and the agents individually.
We're looking at misconduct complaints.
And we're also going to be engaging with A.G. Bondi's team and the rest of the DOJ folks on different things we can do to make sure that these folks that did this to Doug are never able to do this to anybody again and that people like them don't get ideas down the road if God forbid we ever don't control the Justice Department again.
Yeah, I mean, you know, when I'm listening, Hillary Clinton claiming that a guy posting a meme on Twitter in 16, like it was voter suppression.
It was a scheme.
Just like they claimed the Russians were hacking the election and Trump was working as an agent and all of this nonsense.
You know, Doug, when you look back at comments like that, how do you respond now?
I mean, especially, by the way, in lieu of what we found out, you know, over the last week about just how much they were actually conspiring to steal elections, just how much they were actively colluding to subvert the duly elected president of the United States.
Absolutely.
This just became, like you said, much more relevant.
Like you said, Hillary Clinton went on stage at some shindig that globalists go to and said that, oh, by the way, this guy was just convicted and he tried to steal the election.
Okay, go back to 2017.
Senator Amy Klobuchar blew this meme up and put it on the floor of the Senate saying, oh, this is Russia.
Look at this speech.
This is Russia.
This is part of the Russia conspiracy.
And we now know that one of the poor guy that they squeezed, the cooperating witness who was pled guilty to this crime that wasn't even a crime, they were interviewing him saying, are you loyal to the United States?
Are you working for Russia?
They actually believe that this meme came from Russia.
So this whole thing, Germany.
Do you think that, though?
Like, knowing what you know now, do you think that?
Or do you think, you know, they just didn't care?
And it was like, it was just a convenient, everything was Russia.
I mean, I was an agent of Russia.
Trump was an agent of Russia.
I guess he needed the money.
It never really made a lot of sense to us.
I think everyone, certainly who are sort of as sort of vocal as we were during that time and since, always knew it was BS, right?
Just like, of course, COVID came from the lab in Wuhan that studied the exact virus in question at ground zero of the outbreak of the virus.
But it didn't matter.
If you said that, even if it was the most obvious, even if it was obviously the most plausible solution, you were still canceled and crushed.
I don't know which would be worse that they actually believe this or if they were just cynically using it.
I don't know which would be worse.
Yeah, I'd almost be like, How did we have people that stupid if they actually believed it?
I mean, you know, at least the other way, you can be like, Okay, you know, sometimes, you know, I wish we played the game the way that they do because that would stop this nonsense.
But as long as they're going that hard and we're not, they're going to keep doing it.
Exactly.
That's what we need to do.
We need to push back here and not just let this, you know, bygones be bygones here.
And, you know, just on this witness that Doug was talking about, this guy microchip, I mean, one of the things that the Biden Justice Department did that the left is very good at is what I call law enforcement theater.
So they do things that's innuendo.
It's a lot of suggestion.
And so this guy, they had testify anonymously.
Okay, that's what you do when it's like El Chapo, okay, and you've got the secret witness from Sinaloa, okay?
Not when you're talking about Ricky Vaughn with the tweets about voting for Hillary Clinton with a text message.
Why do they do it?
Because it makes it look more sinister.
It makes it look like this is some big, nefarious MAGA plot that's there.
This guy's in jeopardy.
And all that stuff is ways that they make people who didn't do anything wrong, like Doug, look guiltier.
And it's the same thing with Russia.
And I'm glad that Tulsi Gabbard's there and is able to share all the stuff she has with that about us.
James, what motivates you to take on this fight, too?
What does accountability look like for the prosecutors who launched this witch hunt?
What does real justice look like?
I mean, is this disbarment?
Is it just fines, censure?
How does that work in legalese?
Yeah, so look, I mean, I've done my fair share of criminal defense work before, and I really get upset when the government overreaches.
I have never seen the government overreach like it did in Doug's case, where they literally tried to put him in prison for a meme.
I mean, we have a constitutional right to send memes.
This country was founded on memes.
When I first heard about it, and again, I'd followed Doug for years before.
I literally thought it was a joke.
I was like, I literally thought it was a meme.
I'm like, are you serious?
You're going after a Twitter account?
Like, it's.
Yeah, dude.
I mean, Thomas Paine was like a meme ster in the founding era.
Anyway, it's just crazy.
So that's why I wanted to get involved.
I knew Doug before when the case first launched, and I've talked to him for a long time.
So that's why I'm here.
And look, in terms of accountability, we need to follow the facts where they lead.
There's a lot about this case we don't know.
When you're a criminal defendant, you have very few tools to figure out what's going on on the government side.
I mean, as you know, as you guys have seen, because you had to deal with all this nonsense.
And so one of the things we're going to be doing is engaging with the Attorney General and Dag Blanche and soon-to-be associate AG Stanley Woodward and Ed Martin and all the other folks at DOJ to make sure that we actually figure out what happened here.
What was going on?
Why did they do it?
And what are all the different remedies we have to hold these people accountable?
But yeah, we're not going to stop at anything until we make sure that there is never another case like this again.
Ever.
Doug, what's your life been like during all of this?
I mean, how has it impacted your career, ambitions, your day-to-day life?
Can you still be a general in the meme wars?
You're like, you know what?
I'm just, I've had enough.
Well, that's how it was for a long time.
You know, I was I basically had to go radio silent on Twitter before the case and I couldn't do anything.
I mean, it was very difficult because, you know, I had my fiancé at the time and we had to eventually just say, hey, we're going to get married here because we can't wait forever for this case.
We got married right before.
And then we found out the trial, we got married in January 23.
We found out the trial was going to be in March.
The week of the trial, I found out that my wife was pregnant.
The October of that year, my wife had to be hospitalized.
It was a difficult pregnancy.
I had to jump on an airplane to go up and be sentenced in Brooklyn, New York.
As soon as I touched down on the ground, my wife called me and said, the doctor said we have to do an emergency C-section tonight at 8 p.m.
And obviously there was nothing I could do except go to the sentencing the next day and fly back the next day.
And my son was born.
And then we spent months in the NICU.
I can't go travel abroad overseas to visit my wife's family.
It's been extremely difficult.
Not to mention when the FBI comes and knocks on your door and people hear about this and it's on Rachel Maddow's show that night.
I mean, I wonder how she got the inside information there.
Then you can only imagine even your close friends and family are saying, what in the world did you do here?
Now, I'm fortunate that a lot of them, as they saw the facts of the case, they realized this was not a real case.
There was no crime.
And I didn't actually do anything wrong.
But it was extremely difficult, missed opportunities.
I missed friends' weddings.
The list goes on and on.
Very difficult personally.
And four and a half years of my life on pretrial supervision.
And they wanted two more years of probation after seven months of imprisonment.
So this, it just, it's, it, it's hard to even explain how this drags on and on and on.
And can I just underscore the fact that they arrested him is totally crazy.
Even if you take the rest of this at face value, which obviously you shouldn't, this is a nonviolent offender who obviously would self-report.
It's an awful lot like executing a forcible search warrant at the former president's residence in Florida.
It's just classic, heavy-handed Gestapo tactics to intimidate people and scare them.
Yeah, when they showed up at Mar-a-Lago with the FBI's hostage rescue team, when they've been cooperating with the legal counsel and the others, back and forth for months, if not years, that's there to deliver a message.
I mean, how did they single you out, Doug?
I mean, you weren't the only person posting memes in 2016.
I mean, there's probably a lot more meme warriors these days than then.
You were on the leading edge, but why'd they pick you?
Well, this is once again pure animus, I believe, against MAGA because they said this guy had the biggest account.
He was the most effective.
He got the most under our skin.
And they actually even, you know, they, you know how these people operate.
They were leaking to Reuters.
They were leaking to New York Times.
So what they told Reuters was that we were going to bring a case against this one guy because he had the loudest voice.
And we could say maybe his memes actually impacted the election, which, by the way, is crazy if they actually believe that.
But not only that, they thought that if they came and arrested me, that somehow I was going to, you know, they were going to, this would lead to some trail of some foreign conspiracy or something.
And they actually thought that they were going to be able to start rolling up other people.
Little did they know that, you know, I didn't cooperate with them at all.
There was no grand conspiracy.
And even when they squeezed this other guy, they weren't able to find anything there other than sort of a poor sap who didn't have the fortitude to stand up against the federal government.
There was no trail to Russia or some great conspiracy.
The fact is, as we all know, it's simply that Hillary Clinton lost the election and these memes.
I mean, the only way that we actually influenced the election was mostly just using her own words against her.
So and the idea, we just amplified what Donald, what your, what your father was saying, what President Trump was saying on the campaign trail.
There was nothing nefarious about any of this.
James, you know, from a legal procedure perspective, what's the process from here?
You know, what else do we need to know?
What do we have to keep an eye out to make sure that justice is done here?
Yeah, so I have total confidence in the DOJ team that will receive our requests.
The first step is an administrative process at DOJ.
So we're going to file a claim on Doug's behalf.
As soon as the acquittal is final, the district court should enter the final acquittal at the end of July, beginning of August.
And then we'll go to DOJ and we'll submit a claim on his behalf.
And hopefully we'll be able to work it out with them in relatively short order.
They've been such warriors for the president and everything else.
I am totally confident that they're going to be great here.
So that's the process.
Awesome.
Well, I wish you guys the best of luck.
This kind of stuff shouldn't be happening anywhere in the world, let alone in America.
So Douglas, James, thank you so much for taking the time.
We'll definitely keep following the story, and I look forward to seeing those who did you wrong get what's coming to them.
Thanks, Don.
Really appreciate it.
Be well, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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