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If someone had told you even 10 years ago that you could be indicted by the federal government and go to prison for 10 years for making fun of Hillary Clinton on social media, you would not have believed it.
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It's a free country.
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We have free speech.
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But it turns out not only is that possible, it has likely become much more common because the actual war is over information.
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One of its first casualties is a man called Doug Mackey, who during the 2016 election made fun of Hillary Clinton on Twitter.
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And then a few years later, found himself the subject of a federal raid, an indictment, and then a conviction.
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It's a shocking story.
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It's hard to believe it's happening in this country, but it is.
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And to prove it, Doug Mackey joins us now.
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Doug, thanks so much for coming on.
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Thank you, Tucker.
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So I've never even seen you in person before.
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You have not, I don't think, spoken about this publicly, or at least very often since it happened.
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So give us just a quick background on who you are.
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I read, I think, in BuzzFeed that you were a dangerous white nationalist militant.
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Are you?
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No, no, not at all.
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You don't see it.
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Where are you from?
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I grew up in Vermont.
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In Vermont?
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Yes.
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Not a hotbed of white nationalist militancy.
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And where'd you go to college?
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What were you doing during the 2016 election, et cetera?
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I graduated from Middlebury College, which is also in Vermont.
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Yep.
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And then I moved to New York.
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I lived there about six years.
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That's where I was at the time of the election, the 2016 election.
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What were you doing?
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So I had just left my job, but I was previously an economic researcher.
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Hmm.
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So first like a Wall Street firm or something like that?
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Something like that, corporate America.
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Yes.
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So what were you doing during the 2016 election?
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So I was posting a lot of stuff on Twitter under a pseudonym about the election.
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Hmm.
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What kind of stuff?
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Pro-Trump memes, jokes, all kinds of links, that kind of thing.
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Why were you doing that?
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Just purely out of passion.
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Oh, so you like Trump?
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I like Trump.
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That's right.
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Why?
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I thought he was a breath of fresh air for the country.
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I think that his analysis of the problems with the country, with the ruling class of the country, I liked what he was saying, and I thought he had a positive vision for the country.
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Where were you politically before the 2016 election?
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I was sort of conservative.
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Previously, I was sort of libertarian.
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But earlier in my life, I was sort of apolitical.
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So you weren't a lifelong political activist?
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No.
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But you got excited about Trump and you decided to support him on social media.
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At the time, did you think that was your constitutional right?
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Yes, absolutely.
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Why'd you think that?
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Well, I thought that this was America.
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I thought they'd wait a First Amendment.
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Okay.
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Due process rights.
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That we could criticize people in our ruling class.
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It looks like you thought wrong.
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So let's get specific about what you did, the crimes, the felonies that you committed on Twitter.
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I want to put this up.
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You posted this on Twitter.
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This is a meme.
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It says, save time, avoid the line, vote from home.
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And it's got a picture of Hillary Clinton.
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Text Hillary to this number.
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Did you make this meme?
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No, I didn't.
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Oh, you didn't create this?
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No.
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Where'd it come from?
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I found it on 4chan.
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Okay, so it was floating around the internet.
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Yeah, these kind of memes were floating all over the place.
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And you posted it on Twitter.
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What was the point of that?
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Well, pardon my French, but it was called a shit post.
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We talked about this a lot at the trial.
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I testified.
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Just sort of a joke, rile up everybody, muddy the waters.
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And mostly just because I thought my audience would find it funny.
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Did they?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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I find it hilarious.
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You're obviously from Northern New England.
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You have a very dry sense of humor.
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Very dry.
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Yeah, I noticed that.
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I noticed that.
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So did you get a sense when you posted that that that was a crime or that it would be perceived as a crime?
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No.
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Absolutely not.
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So we have to, and I want to play this.
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This is from Hillary Clinton.
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This is from this April, so long after you were indicted, long after you went on trial.
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And this is Hillary Clinton describing that meme.
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There was just a trial in Brooklyn where a guy who had been one of the main, I guess he was one of the main people running memes against me in 2016, he went from what you could consider free speech.
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I mean, both Nancy and I have pretty thick skins.
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People say all kinds of things about us.
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But he went from that to running a very deliberate effort to mislead people about where and how to vote.
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So it went from speech to action meant to subvert the election because thousands of people who they targeted through their algorithms, oh, I can text my vote for Hillary Clinton.
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So Hillary Clinton, I want to deconstruct that in some greater detail in a minute, but Hillary Clinton apparently took that very seriously.
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You were using, quote, algorithms to subvert the election with that meme.
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I don't even really know what she means by that.
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I don't know how, I guess you post something and it gets taken up into algorithms.
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I'm not exactly sure.
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I was surprised that she said that.
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Did you have personal algorithms that you used?
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No.
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Okay.
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No.
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It's just copy, paste, and click a button.
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Yeah.
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So like everyone else on social media, you see something funny, you post it.
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That's right.
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Okay.
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So describe the rest of your career on Twitter.
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So you're enthusiastic about Trump.
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I assume, are you being paid to post these things?
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No.
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Nobody's paying me.
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You're just a random guy who's amusing the hell out of yourself by pushing your candidate on social media.
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That's right.
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That's exactly right.
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So then what happens?
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How long were you on Twitter?
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Until 2018, mid-2018.
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Okay.
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But this criminal tweet is from 2016.
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So at any point, did you think that you'd committed a crime or that others would think that you'd committed a crime?
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No.
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When did you discover that you were considered a felon by the U.S. government?
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Well, I had eight to ten law enforcement agents come and lock on my door at 7 a.m. seven days after Joe Biden was inaugurated.
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Did you have any warning that this was coming?
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No, no warning.
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So what were you doing at 7 in the morning?
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I was sleeping.
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So you're asleep, you hear a knock, and then what happens?
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And then the FBI?
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Are you Doug Mackey?
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Yes.
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What's going on?
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Like, I asked them, they said, we have a warrant for your arrest.
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I said, what for?
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For what?
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They didn't tell me until I got to the courthouse.
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Did they cuff you?
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Yes.
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The FBI threw handcuffs on you at your home at 7 in the morning and didn't tell you why.
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Yes.
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Did you have any idea why?
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No, I had no idea.
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What was going through your mind?
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I knew that politicians could be vindictive, and the federal government sometimes could be influenced by those politicians, and I know that they can sort of get very creative with federal statutes.
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If I was the enemy of their candidate, then I thought maybe they could cook something up.
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But this was an entire election cycle later.
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That was the weird part.
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But I knew that we had just had a transition of presidents.
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So.
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So, seven days after Biden gets inaugurated, you get arrested for a tweet four years earlier.
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Yeah.
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Young dear people say the news is full of lines.