The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech June 3, 2024 Click here to subscribe to the Daily Media Update. This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected]. In the News Politico: Looming over Trump’s conviction: Reversal by the ‘13th juror’ By Erica Orden and Ben Feuerherd .....Trump is also likely to appeal on the grounds that an expert witness he sought to have testify, a former head of the Federal Election Commission, was restricted by the judge from testifying about whether Trump violated campaign finance laws, said Alexander Reinert, a professor of litigation at Cardozo School of Law. Trump ultimately declined to call the witness, Bradley Smith, and Trump’s remarks on Friday suggested his appeal would concern Justice Juan Merchan’s ruling regarding Smith. Supreme Court New York Times: Civil Liberties Make for Strange Bedfellows By David French .....Attempts to target the free speech of political opponents are often the first sign of a decline into authoritarianism. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1860, after an angry mob shut down an abolitionist event in Boston, “No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech.” “Liberty,” he went on, “is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.” That’s exactly right, and that’s why Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court upholding the free speech rights of the N.R.A. against a hostile attack from a Democratic official in New York has ramifications well beyond New York politics and well beyond the battle over gun rights. By upholding the free speech rights of the N.R.A., the Supreme Court reinforced the constitutional wall of protection against vengeful government leaders, including Trump. The Courts Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): President Donald Trump's Manhattan Convictions are Unconstitutional By Steven Calabresi .....If Buckley v. Valeo was argued to be an obstacle to Trump prevailing, the Supreme Court would today, in 2024, and should today, in 2024, overrule the campaign finance contribution limits of federal election law as violations of the freedom of speech. Groups contributing to election campaigns can pay for advertising to promote candidates, and they can also pay hush money to keep bad or false stories out of the news. The effect either way is to help the candidate. You can contribute money to generate good publicity. And, you can contribute money to avoid bad publicity. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech in both cases. Campaign finance limits prevent speech by people who want to engage in it. They have changed Congress so badly that today Members of Congress spend 70% of their time raising money rather then legislating or meeting with their constituents because of absurdly low campaign finance limits that have not been adequately raised to match inflation since those laws were enacted in the 1970's. The post-Watergate campaign finance laws were and always have been flagrantly unconstitutional in their totality. Federal campaign finance laws are an incumbent protection measure that makes it too hard for challengers to knock off incumbents who have much higher name id and who have franking privileges which allow them unlimited free correspondence with their constituents through the mail. That it is not to mention the power of incumbents to steer pork-barrel spending back to their own states and districts so that they will be endlessly re-elected. Politico: DOJ fears AI tampering with Biden-Hur audio By Jordain Carney .....The Justice Department is seizing on an increasingly common fear as it fights to prevent the release of the audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with former special counsel Robert Hur: It could spawn deepfakes. The concern — raised as part of an overnight court filing late Friday — is the latest step in a multi-pronged legal battle aimed at forcing the Justice Department to release the audio, which Biden claimed executive privilege over last month. “The passage of time and advancements in audio, artificial intelligence, and ‘deep fake’ technologies only amplify concerns about malicious manipulation of audio files. If the audio recording is released here, it is easy to foresee that it could be improperly altered, and that the altered file could be passed off as an authentic recording and widely distributed,” the department wrote in a 49-page filing. Beyond creating AI-generated deepfakes, Bradley Weinsheimer, an associate deputy attorney general at DOJ, argued in an affidavit included in the filing on Friday night that releasing the audio would create a “substantial risk that malicious actors could alter the recording to (for example) insert words that President Biden did not say or delete words that he did say.” Politico: Prosecutors renew bid to gag Trump in classified documents case By Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney .....Prosecutors have renewed their request to a federal judge to order Donald Trump to stop making false claims that the FBI was authorized to kill him when it executed a search warrant at his Florida home in August 2022. The motion Friday from special counsel Jack Smith’s team comes four days after U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon spurned a similar request from prosecutors, using unusually blunt language to fault them for failing to make an adequate effort to resolve the issue with Trump’s lawyers before coming to the judge. The new motion, filed Friday evening, makes the same central argument: that Trump’s claims about an approval to use deadly force pose a danger to FBI agents who took part in the search or are connected in other ways to the pending criminal case in which Trump is accused of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence and obstructing an investigation into the subject... In the new filing, the prosecutors list a series of social media posts and political fundraising emails where Trump has made inflammatory and false claims, like “Biden’s DOJ was authorized to shoot me!” and “Joe Biden was locked & loaded and ready to take out me & put my family in danger.” Just the News: Complete eradication': COVID treatment contrarians sue feds, Big Tech, disinfo cops for censorship By Greg Piper .....Acting out of ideological and financial "anti-competitive animus," federal agencies, Big Tech and purported anti-disinformation groups collaborated to squelch publishers that promote narratives at odds with COVID-19 treatment orthodoxy, a new First Amendment lawsuit alleges. The federal complaint by Natural News publisher Webseed and its companion Brighteon Media, whose holdings include websites for original and aggregated video and artificial intelligence large language models, joins other anti-censorship lawsuits against the State Department and its Global Engagement Center, NewsGuard and social media. It makes similar allegations as suits against State by the conservative Daily Wire and The Federalist, whose presiding judge greenlit most claims and granted expedited legal discovery earlier this month; NewsGuard by left-leaning Consortium News; and journalist Alex Berenson against the former Twitter. Free Expression Newsmax: De-Banking of Trump Lawyer a Sign of Control to Come By Patrick M. Brenner ..... Imagine a scenario where citizens' political opinions, legal activities, and social engagements are silently scored and systematically used to grant or deny essential services. This is not just a hypothetical situation in China; it could become a reality here. Such a system might seem unthinkable in the United States, which champions the principles of freedom of expression and individual rights. Yet, the actions taken against Eastman suggest we are edging closer to a society where financial institutions can implement opaque, unregulated policies that sanction individuals for their political views. These institutions, which wield immense power over the nation's economic lifeblood, operate with alarming autonomy and minimal oversight. Candidates and Campaigns New York Times: Trump Joins TikTok, the App He Once Tried to Ban By Michael Gold .....Donald J. Trump has joined TikTok, the social media app that he tried to ban during his presidency but that he more recently has embraced as he and his campaign try to reach younger voters before November’s general election… Mr. Biden’s campaign joined the app in February as part of its efforts to help improve the president’s flagging support among young voters. Its videos are largely a steady stream of anti-Trump content. So far, its account has 335,600 followers, while Mr. Trump’s has 1.4 million. An internal analysis within TikTok found nearly twice as many pro-Trump posts as pro-Biden ones on the platform since November: There were 1.29 million pro-Trump posts to 651,000 pro-Biden posts. The States OPB: Oregon lawmakers spend $5.4 million to prep for oncoming campaign finance rules By Dirk VanderHart .....Oregon lawmakers are spending more than $5.4 million to help elections officials revamp their system for reporting campaign finances and clear a massive backlog of languishing election complaints, in preparation for new rules set to shake up state politics. The money, approved Friday morning, is a crucial bit of unfinished business left after lawmakers’ scramble earlier this year to pass a package that will limit the money Oregon political campaigns can accept beginning in 2027, among a host of other changes. That surprise proposal, House Bill 4024, was the product of hurried negotiations between business, labor and so-called good government groups. But it came together too late for elections officials to get a clear picture of what it would cost to put into place. Reason: This Journalist Was Arrested, Strip-Searched, and Jailed for Filming Police. Will He Get Justice? By Billy Binion .....Prosecutors in Texas last week dismissed the criminal case against a journalist who, in 2021, was arrested, strip-searched, and jailed for filming police. But his lengthy legal battle is in some sense just beginning and once again demands we probe the idea that real journalists are entitled to a different set of rights than the public. That's because Justin Pulliam, the man in question, is a citizen journalist. He is not employed by an outlet. Rather, he publishes his reporting to his YouTube channel, Corruption Report, which, true to its name, is unapologetically skeptical of state power and supportive of transparency. Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. For email filters, the subject of this email will always begin with "Institute for Free Speech Media Update." 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