His Twitter trail could be a gift to lawyers for the news industry during leak investigations into articles that made the president mad enough to pick up his Android and tap, Tap, TAP!
It could provide great grist for legal arguments that the investigations are less about prosecuting damaging leaks than they are about punishing journalists.
.. his new book, “The Soul of the First Amendment,” which he called “really a story of American exceptionalism.” It argues that the United States’ protections for free speech are the best in the world, at least as of now.
.. he helped argue the conservative side of the Citizens United case, which allowed corporations and unions to spend more freely in elections.
.. things have been much worse. There were days when censorship was rampant and real reporting could land you in prison, right here in the United States. For instance, as Mr. Abrams’s book notes, it was not all that atypical when, in 1901, a Chicago court sentenced the managing editor and a reporter at The Chicago American to jail for an article that was critical of one of its decisions.
.. by the second half of the last century, the courts had begun to view “the First Amendment in an expansive and generally highly protective way.” It started with liberal jurists and eventually spread to the conservative jurists as well
.. Gawker, which a Florida jury hit with a $140 million verdict in an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit last year. Without the financial wherewithal to fight on through the appeals process, its owners went into bankruptcy and sold to Univision.
Why Is Trump Fighting ISIS in Syria?
There are actually two ISIS manifestations.
One is “virtual ISIS.” It is satanic, cruel and amorphous; it disseminates its ideology through the internet. It has adherents across Europe and the Muslim world. In my opinion, that ISIS is the primary threat to us, because it has found ways to deftly pump out Sunni jihadist ideology that inspires and gives permission to those Muslims on the fringes of society who feel humiliated — from London to Paris to Cairo — to recover their dignity via headline-grabbing murders of innocents.
The other incarnation is “territorial ISIS.”
.. Not only will virtual ISIS, which has nodes all over the world, not go away even if territorial ISIS is defeated, I believe virtual ISIS will become yet more virulent to disguise the fact that it has lost the territorial caliphate to its archenemies: Shiite Iran, Hezbollah, pro-Shiite militias in Iraq, the pro-Shiite Assad regime in Damascus and Russia, not to mention America.
.. We could simply back off fighting territorial ISIS in Syria and make it entirely a problem for Iran, Russia, Hezbollah and Assad. After all, they’re the ones overextended in Syria, not us. Make them fight a two-front war — the moderate rebels on one side and ISIS on the other. If we defeat territorial ISIS in Syria now, we will only reduce the pressure on Assad, Iran, Russia and Hezbollah and enable them to devote all their resources to crushing the last moderate rebels in Idlib, not sharing power with them.
.. I don’t get it. President Trump is offering to defeat ISIS in Syria for free — and then pivot to strengthening the moderate anti-Assad rebels. Why? When was the last time Trump did anything for free?
.. ISIS is a Sunni terrorist group that plays as dirty as Iran and Russia.
.. where is Trump’s Twitter feed when we need it? He should be tweeting every day this message: “Russia, Iran and Hezbollah have become the protectors of a Syrian regime that uses poison gas on babies! Babies! Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Assad — poison gas enablers. Sad.”
Trump’s View of Syria: How It Evolved, in 19 Tweets
To understand the magnitude of Mr. Trump’s reversal and the history of his public stances on one of the world’s bloodiest civil wars, one need look no further than the president’s Twitter account.
Twitter Sues the Government to Block the Unmasking of an Account Critical of Trump
Twitter sued the federal government on Thursday to block the unmasking of an anonymous account that has posted messages critical of the Trump administration and has claimed to have ties to a government agency.
.. Jenny Burke, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security Department, which, with Customs and Border Protection had issued the summons, declined to comment.0
.. “To unmask an anonymous speaker online, the government must have a strong justification,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, an A.C.L.U. attorney involved in the case. “But in this case the government has given no reason at all, leading to concerns that it is simply trying to stifle dissent.”