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    The FBI Could Face a Massive Legal Penalty Over What It Just Got Caught Doing

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    The latest Twitter files released by Michael Shellenberger were, though not particularly shocking given what we know about bias at the FBI and the something other than high esteem in which it and America’s other intelligence agencies view the American Constitution and the rights enshrined in it, quite disturbing.

    According to Shellenberger, the FBI not only had an inordinately high number of employees embedded within Twitter, such as former FBI general counsel James Baker, but was using both those employees, its weight as the FBI, and monetary payments to Twitter to get it to crack down on content and/or accounts that it didn’t like, even if those accounts or posts hadn’t broken the Twitter rules.

    In one post, for example, Shellenberger exposed the FBI as having reached out to Yoel Roth in a panicked message just before the Hunter Biden story dropped. The New York Post’s reporting was accurage, it wasn’t a “hacked material,” and the NYP should have been allowed to post it…but instead Yoel Roth and Twitter went along with what the FBI wanted and censored an American newspaper.

    Oh, and James Baker, the “former” FBI employee working for Twitter, was at the center of the NYP and Hunter Biden story, supposedly being the one that convinced Yoel Roth to do what the FBI wanted and censor the story despite it not being in violation of any Twitter rules.

    And that’s not even the whole story. The FBI was also paying Twitter to go along with its demands, as Shellenberger pointed out in post #46 of his Twitter Files thread, saying “The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time. “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021.”

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    Dave Rubin, retweeting Shellenberger’s post with a comment, said “Holy sheep shit. The government was actually paying Twitter to censor people. @elonmusk , maybe there is a way to make Twitter profitable! (Though will cost you your soul.)”

    Here’s the thing: if the government is demanding the censorship, it doesn’t matter if Twitter is a private company. The government cannot achieve an unconstitutional end by washing it through a private entity. So, just as courts are not allowed to enforce race-restrictive clauses for neighborhoods and segregation is verboten,  the FBI can’t be pressuring Twitter to censor protected speech, such as the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story. As an op-ed in the WSJ recently put it:

    “Government remains bound by the First Amendment even when it works through private cutouts. There would be no purpose to a Bill of Rights if government could evade it by using private entities to do its dirty work. As the Supreme Court put it in Frost & Frost Trucking Co. v. Railroad Commission (1926), ‘It is inconceivable that guaranties embedded in the Constitution of the United States may thus be manipulated out of existence.’

    “The First Amendment’s text confirms the unconstitutionality of such workarounds. Any ‘prohibiting’ of the free exercise of religion violates the amendment. In contrast, a mere ‘abridging’ of the freedom of speech is unconstitutional. The government thus violates the latter merely by abridging or reducing it.”

    That’s because of 18 U.S. Code § 241 and 242. Section 241 makes it a crime for “two or more persons [to] conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Section 242 prohibits the creation of any law, regulation, or similar legal rule that “willfully subjects any person … to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

    And the penalties for violation of those two sections of the US Code are quite severe.

    Violation of Section 241 “is punishable by up to ten years imprisonment unless the government proves an aggravating factor (such as that the offense involved kidnapping aggravated sexual abuse, or resulted in death) in which case it may be punished by up to life imprisonment and, if death results, may be eligible for the death penalty.” A violation of Section 242, “ is a misdemeanor, unless prosecutors prove one of the statutory aggravating factors such as a bodily injury, use of a dangerous weapon, kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, death resulting, or attempt to kill, in which case there are graduated penalties up to and including life in prison or death.”

    Those two sections of the US Code sound about exactly like what the FBI was up to when it was pressuring Twitter to censor dissident voices, and the legal penalties for violating that section of the code is very severe…now it remains to be seen if the American Stasi is held accountable, or freely skates away yet again.