We have previously discussed the view of Michigan Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade on free speech. We have strikingly different views on free speech. McQuade just published “Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America” and calls free speech our “Achilles heel.” My book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, is out in the coming days with a more robust view of free speech.
McQuade’s call to limit free speech is justified as needed to combat disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. Yet, McQuade just went public with a full-throated defense of what the U.S. government now calls a “conspiracy theory.” She maintains that the Hunter Biden laptop should still be discounted or dismissed as Russian disinformation.
Notably, after the authentication of the computer in federal court, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, filed a motion on withdraw the lawsuit against former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in which claimed that the laptop contained manipulated data.
In her comments, Professor McQuade joins the Post’s Philip Bump as one of the last dogs in this fight. Most media figures have long accepted the view of the U.S. government that the Hunter Biden laptop is “real” and authenticated.
I have previously disagreed with Professor McQuade on issues such as her belief that former president Donald Trump could be charged with manslaughter over the January 6th riot. Yet, those disagreements represent materially different understandings of the operative legal standards. Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe went even further in arguing that Trump could be charged with attempted murder. Academics can disagree on such matters and free speech allows us to hash out our differences.
However, I was still surprised by the effort to resurrect the Russian disinformation claim. Professor McQuade noted that the agent at the Biden trial could not say with certainty that nothing was changed to the laptop before it was obtained by agents from the computer shop. However, FBI agent Erika Jensen said that there was no evidence tampering.
That space, however, was big enough to drive a conspiracy theory through on X:
As noted by @emptywheel, however, questions remain about the chain of custody of the laptop, and [FBI] Agent [Erika] Jensen testified that she was unable to say whether the laptop was tampered with before the FBI obtained it.
And, as @AshaRangappa has noted, even if the content was authentic, it still may have been a Russian influence operation, just like the DNC hack-and-leak operation, designed to sow discord. If so, mission accomplished! […] Therefore, it remains unknown whether Russia was involved with the scheme, and it is still correct to say that the laptop has “all of the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.”
Under this theory, any negative stories found in documents or electronic sources can have “the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation” in any given election. That same skepticism, of course, did not apply to the Steele dossier, which was secretly funded by the Clinton campaign and found by U.S. intelligence as containing possible Russian disinformation.
It is a variation on proving a negative. McQuade and others appear to be arguing that you must prove that there was no Russian involvement before giving weight to the damaging contents of the laptop.
Of course, there still has been no showing of any fake file or email. To the contrary, the most damaging emails on influence peddling and other potential criminal conduct have been verified. Yet, McQuade is repeating the claim that “even if the content was authentic, it still may have been a Russian influence operation.” There is also the more obvious explanation that Hunter abandoned his laptop at a computer shop and it was given to the FBI.
What is striking is how advocates are now abandoning the claims of false emails and files in favor of an argument that it may be true but still disinformation. This is consistent with the positions of many academics and the Biden Administration. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintains this position.
CISA head Jen Easterly declared that her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure would be extended to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes not just “disinformation” and “misinformation,”
but combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
The chain of custody argument continues to be used in Congress despite the federal court and federal agencies recognizing the authenticity of the laptop. The Delaware jury also did not appear persuaded by the claims of Hunter Biden’s defense counsel. It is, in my view, transparently evasive. The issue remains the files on the laptop detailing a massive influence peddling operation and a myriad of criminal acts committed by the President’s son. None of those files have been challenged by evidence of tampering or planting.
Ironically, the continued effort to keep this theory alive seems precisely the type of disinformation that Professor McQuade has cited in justifying limits on free speech.
There are obviously many media and academic figures who are heavily invested in what the government now calls a “conspiracy theory.” I previously discussed how the Bidens have succeeded in a Houdini-like trick in making this elephant of a scandal disappear from the public stage. They did so by enlisting the media in the illusion. Houdini knew the trick would work because the audience wanted the elephant to disappear.
This isn’t free speech…this is Conspiracy against the people of America
time to jail all the Democrats across government, business and media…running conspiracies against America, Trump and Republicans
Democrats are FIGHTING A CIVIL WAR…Republicans aren’t! These people are committing TREASON!
BTW why are foreigner countries allowed to FUND Elected officials and their friends and families? JAIL THE LOT! Bidens and many around them…received MILLIONS FROM CHINA…that is a CRIME!
from her linked bio
McQuade also served as vice chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and co-chaired its Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee. As US attorney, she oversaw cases involving public corruption, terrorism, corporate fraud, theft of trade secrets, civil rights, and health care fraud, among others.
TL;DR: McQuade has Stockholm syndrome
She also serves as a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Lawfare, Just Security, Slate, and National Public Radio, and she has been quoted in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Politico, and other publications.
Well she does have the bona fides to spout misinformation, left wing talking points and the Big Lie™
Trump should sue and then JAIL every media person involved in CONSPIRACIES against him and America!
They are KNOWINGLY trying to install Democrat FASCISTS to CONTROL America!
Deceptions pushed on the public to obtain/maintain political power were once universally denounced as propaganda, looked down upon by Americans as the kind of thing that kept totalitarian regimes like the USSR in power.
Now, we have Constitutional scholars like JT not willing to uphold an unbending standard of public honesty for fear of crimping some activist-zealot’s “free speech”. Yes, there are practical questions as to how the public shall assert its right to not be intentionally duped by the power-obsessed amongst us. Following the model of defamation redress, civil lawsuits are the best tool available. Prosecution is a too crude a weapon, and would hand tyrants the ultimate tool of subjugation….that’s why the 1st Amendment was put in place.
1A was never intended to empower political candidates to push out whoppers such as the Blinken-Morell cover-up of Hunter’s laptop, or Trump’s manipulative “We won by a landslide”. It wasn’t put there to allow Ahmad Chalabi to fabricate “WMDs and Al Qaeda” in order to get Uncle Sam to overthrow his arch-rival Saddam Hussein. Nor the Gulf of Tonkin falsehood used to justify aerial bombing of North Vietnam.
When are people going to recognize that public policy blunders are the fate of a morally-confused people who tolerate the intentional spread of falsehoods under some over-expansive theory of 1A? First, we have to recover moral clarity about the responsibilities that accompany public speech. Then, we can look over our legal options to best deter and dissuade public lying — which are going to naturally follow the path of defamation lawsuits.
It’s either that moral clarity and legal toolsmithing — or a future of catastrophic blunders.
When was that “once?” Please list the “once denounced propaganda efforts pushed on the public to obtain/maintain political power.”
The reality is that today, with the free flow of unfiltered, ahem UNFILTERED, information, we see very quickly what the propaganda efforts are and from whom the spout. This first really started after 9/11 and Iraq War II (aluminum tubes, anyone?) and the spread of information has become much more rapid, since. The C-19 absolute $hit$how of lies and propaganda has destroyed any remaining worthiness of trust in the mainstream (ahem FILTERED) media. Establishment media is the canary in the establishment authority coal mine. The death of latter will be much worse than the current death throes of the former.
The worst aspect of all of this, and you touched on it, is the whoring of morality by certain groups in order to preserve their little slice of the establishment pie. For example, want help for poor seniors, gotta vote for indiscriminate wars overseas. The worst, of course, are the pro-abortionsists who will subjugate anyone and everyone in order to preserve their death sacrament. We’ve seen that since they stuck by rapist bill clinton.
So your pleas for moral clarity are laughable.
pbinca said: “1A was never intended to empower political candidates to push out whoppers”
You are a completely phony 1A advocate. 1A was intended to protect the right of an individual to say or write whatever he chose, without any interference whatsoever from government, regardless of any ability to prove its veracity. What you appear to truly advocate is some quisling’s lip service to free speech, while preserving the ability of government, or it’s paid stooges, to ultimately control what the public may read or hear. You are not a friend to the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, you are a duplicitous, dedicated enemy.
Yeah! Who’s running the; Hudson Institute, Brookings Institution, and The Defense Industrial Base – Cabal.
It’s not “Policy”, It’s the Sport of Think Tanks.
Fundamentally They have proven that ‘They cannot make a Morally Correct Decision’.
https://www.hudson.org/
https://www.brookings.edu/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_think_tanks_in_the_United_States
Anonymous said ” …Think Tanks…”
Should more appropriately be known as “Stink Tanks”, like the one my toilet dumps into…
Ms. McQuade’s comments, and the letter signed by the intelligence officials have all of the hallmarks of an American disinformation campaign.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden is dropping his lawsuit accusing Rudy Giuliani and the former New York City mayor’s ex-lawyer of manipulating data found on his infamous laptop. Once the laptop was admitted into evidence in HB’s trial by the DOJ that sort of destroyed his claims against Giulianai.
Correction: “Satanic disinformation campaign”.
The irony is that Prof McQuade, the 51 former intelligence officers, Tony Blinken, Joe Biden, social media firms, and the progressive “journalists” all have and many are still serving the interests of the Russian GRU in a far greater capacity than any foreign agency could hope for – all seemingly without pay. I think that this episode will be studied by foreign intelligence agencies for a long time seeking to replicate it.
More evidence of either 1 Trump lives free range in their heads or 2] we need Ashleigh Merchant for U.S. Attorney General https://tinyurl.com/39ya8kjp
She would clean house
She is radicalized. This is classic with those in cults or destructive mind controlling groups. Deprogramming is fundamentally a matter of presenting truth and fact in a sequential manner. That explains, in part, her irrational stance.
How do we know that the laptop wasn’t created and planted by aliens from outer space? Try to prove me wrong. See all things are possible so there can not be any truth. End of discussion.
Who can argue with that?
It is all about narrative control. From FDR to Carter, there has been a single media narrative. This started changing when Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, allowing political talk radio. Today there is still one major media narrative, but there are internet competitors promulgating different views. The Establishment is panicking that they are losing the narrative control they had for 90 years. They still have the advantage that swing voters mostly get the official narrative, as the swing voters are busy and have no time for alternative media.
Silence her. No more adherence to rules only on one side. The dishonest, totalitarian Left must be silenced.
How would the fiction section at the library be classified?
Another laptop denier?
I’m sorry but “double downs”???
American troops could invade Russia if they were invited by the legitimate opposition, if a Charles de Gaulle of Russia can be identified.
You going to be the first to cross into Russia?
Oh, it’s you again. How predictable.
Still calling for an escalation to WWIII from the safety of your basement, behind a keyboard while wanting to send poor minorities to fight and die for what exactly?
Have you ever benefited from soldiers dying in battle? Why do you have the right to type your comments? Did you fight for that right yourself?
I at least stepped on the yellow foot prints and have my DD214 under Honorable conditions. I put my skin in the game. That gives me a lot more right to type my comments, than you.
So no one who fought for rights can have and exercise any rights? That doesn’t make any sense.
Then millions of people cannot vote or write a book, because they haven’t fought in a war.
I fought in 3 wars, you spastic idiot non savant. And watched brothers die. How about that?
And I don’t think you are even serious, you’re just attempting to disrupt the conversation, with your stupid suppositions and ridiculous hypotheticals.
So yes, fvcktard, we all have more right.
No, you don’t.
Great news!
Biden is signing a 10 year agreement to supply military assistance to the Ukraine!
You, your children and maybe even grandchildren will have a chance to step up, enlist in a combat MOS, fight and die in Biden’s next forever war!
Get little Johnny or Jane a toy gun and tell them to “Take that hill!”
“… Yet, those disagreements represent materially different understandings of the operative legal standards. …”
Ahaaaa YES! – Now we have a Cage Fight!
Liberal Loon Legal Anylst for Radical Dem Left news MSNBC, no surprise, Russia Russia Russia Mislinfo Misinfo – that is all they have to run on. the so called legal analyst just another NUT JOB
One could surmise that “Information” has reached a religious status, where the belief system competes with logical analysis. This gives it post-modernistic overtones. Of the many new sects of the information religion are Mal, Dis, and Mis. Older sects include the True, False, and Provable. McQuade’s argument seems to view the newer versions are or were inevitable, and the only way to combat or confine them is through censorship. However, censorship is a slightly convoluted form of malinformation, which works by disallowing alternate information forms. That is, the statutory denial of information is malinformation.
Its broad interpretation is that it could be applied to science as well, (Oops, already done – vaccines, et al), climate, and energy.
Free speech requires an educated populace, not a malleable public as we have become.
The upshot here is that information religion becomes a solid topic within the philosophy of information.
Evidently Professor McQuade does note teach the Law of Parsimony.
They who call for limitations on free speech mean for YOU to be so deprived. Not THEM. THEY will be on the reviewing stand watching the military parade whilst YOU stand in line waiting for the delivery of stale bread.
These days, I count myself lucky to get stale bread while the war parade burgeons by.
Exactly! It is much the same with people who go on endlessly that the planet needs a smaller population. I’ve never seen one of them publicly announce that “In order to be the good example, I’m going to commit suicide” (and then do it). They, themselves, are far too important to what they expect to be a smaller population to be lost….