“With liberty and justice for all.” Those are the final six words of the Pledge of Allegiance. But, as Frederick Douglass once said, “liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.”

And if Special Counsel Jack Smith gets his way, the right to “utter one’s thoughts and opinions” will cease to exist.

Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed Smith’s 165-page brief on Wednesday that, at its crux, alleges that Trump used “false claims of election fraud to disrupt the electoral process.”

“In the months leading up to the election, [Trump] refused to say whether he would accept the election results, insisted that he could lose the election only because of fraud, falsely claimed that mail-in ballots were inherently fraudulent, and asserted that only votes counted by Election Day were valid,” Smith’s pre-election filing claims.

But it’s highly unlikely that any of those things aren’t protected speech. The First Amendment has extremely narrow exceptions for speech that can be prosecuted — and for good reason. Freedom of speech is indispensable to a free society. And with that freedom comes the right to question your government. Prosecuting Americans for questioning the government flies in the face of the First Amendment. Such lawfare prosecutions are designed to chill political speech, leaving only the approved messages of the ruling faction to be permitted.

It’s inherently anti-American, but nevertheless, Smith........

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