Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy said Thursday that Twitter could be charged under the theory Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg espoused in the case against former President Donald Trump about suppressing damaging stories.
Trump is currently on trial after Bragg secured an indictment on 34-counts centered around a $130,000 payout to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign as part of a confidentiality agreement. Fox News host Martha MacCallum compared the Daniels case to how Twitter and other social media companies suppressed the October 2020 report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop, asking McCarthy if that would warrant prosecution. (RELATED: Jonathan Turley, Leo Terrell Say Bragg’s Team Still Hasn’t Proven Trump Committed Crime)
“If it were prosecutable to suppress stories, would you than expect the Department of Justice would have to prosecute Twitter and the White House for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story?” MacCallum asked McCarthy.
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Twitter blocked the New York Post from accessing its account and suspended other accounts in October 2020, including the personal account of then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, claiming that the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop violated its “hacked materials” policy. The Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed the authenticity of some of the laptop’s contents that month.
“If you are going to have a country where we have one system of justice that applies to everyone, sure,” McCarthy said in response to MacCallum’s question. “But, you know, the answer here would be to not bring the prosecution against Trump because it is invalid, not to stretch the law and to vary fraught areas of the First Amendment and political speech, you know, what we ought to be doing here is retrenching and saying, you know, number one it’s inappropriate to go after the first criminal prosecution of a former president on something this complex and fraught is ridiculous.”
“Secondly it would matter if Trump was actually charged with violating the campaign-finance laws,” McCarthy continued. “He’s charged with business records falsification violations that didn’t occur until 2017 under a theory that Bragg is going by that Trump stole the 2016 election. So we are supposed to believe that he committed a theft in 2016 by a stream of conduct that took place from February to December of 2017. It just doesn’t make legal or factual sense.”
Prosecutors had former media executive David Pecker of the National Enquirer on the stand Monday, Tuesday and Thursday to detail how the publication purchased the rights to stories involving Trump, and then didn’t publish them.
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