The Hunted Becomes the Hunter

Douglass Mackey is out for justice—for himself and for America

Douglass Mackey is a free man. Almost a decade after he posted some innocuous memes that made Hillary Clinton big mad and nearly five years after the Biden DoJ came knocking at his door because of those memes, a bipartisan panel of judges finally dismissed his absurd, unprecedented conviction for interfering in the 2016 election. But the thing isn’t over. Now it’s Mackey’s turn. The hunted becomes the hunter.

Last Monday, on Donald Trump Jr.’s show, Mackey announced his intention to sue the pants off the US government for its years of baseless persecution. Although the Biden DoJ failed to send him to prison, the process itself was punishment, designed to sap his will to live and his financial resources and make him wish he was dead.

Mackey’s been through hell—more than most could ever handle.

To pursue justice, Mackey has retained big-shot attorney James Burnham, who recently served as general counsel for DOGE, and as general counsel to the president, the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division and the Attorney General’s office.

Mackey had previously suggested he would sue the DoJ after the case was overturned (assuming it was), but by hiring Burnham, he’s sending a clear message. Burnham is a serious guy—a very serious guy—who knows just how to handle a case like this and, most importantly, how to win.

During the interview with Don Jr., Burnham laid out the strategy he would pursue against the DoJ. The main priority, of course, is to secure some kind of fitting compensation for Mackey, whose entire life has been turned upside down for the better part of a decade. Before the Biden DoJ came for him, he had already endured high-profile media hounding and doxxing that led him to up sticks and move state to Florida in an attempt to reclaim his life and some privacy. It’s always hard to quantify intangibles like—I don’t know—feeling the federal government wants to annihilate you because of your political views, or even tangible things like missing the birth of your child, but I’d say millions of dollars is a good ballpark for what was done to Mackey. Mackey spent millions in legal fees, which he’ll be looking to recoup, but Burnham will also want to put a figure to all the lost opportunities, reputational damage, misery and stress as well.

The second part of the strategy will be more personal and involve suing individual attorneys for their role in the case, as well as lodging misconduct complaints with the bar. The DoJ is a huge faceless government department, sure, but it was individual lawyers with faces—bound, supposedly, by professional standards not to mention the law—who made the persecution real.

The third part is the most intriguing, because it signals the determination of Mackey and his counsel to understand the full extent of the Biden regime’s corruption and to prevent any US citizen from ever suffering the same treatment. Burnham will work with Attorney General Bondi and the DoJ to uncover exactly who greenlit the case against Mackey and why, and who, ultimately, needs to be held responsible, as well as how that can be done.

“We’re not going to stop at anything until we make sure there is never another case like this again, ever,” Burnham told Don Jr.

It’s worth remembering just how absurd the Mackey case actually was. Mackey was the man behind a popular Twitter account called Ricky Vaughn, named after the baseball-hat-wearing Charlie Sheen character. Vaughn was widely judged to have been one of the most influential pro-Trump accounts during the 2016 election. The MIT Media Lab, for example, ranked Vaughn as being more important than NBC News, Stephen Colbert and the Drudge Report in its list of the 150 top influencers of the election.

The actual memes that got Mackey in so much trouble were obviously satirical in nature: a series of fake posters that enjoined African American and Latino voters to cast their votes by text or by Twitter or Facebook hashtags. One of the memes featured an African American woman next a banner saying, “African Americans for Hillary: Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925. Vote for Hillary and be part of history.”

It’s never been possible to vote by text message or social-media hashtag. During the trial, the prosecution couldn’t even show that a single person who had seen the meme had not cast a legitimate vote or had their rights infringed in any way. Not one person. Mackey didn’t even make the memes either. He saw them on 4Chan. He just reposted them.

Still, Mackey had to be guilty of something somehow, and the DoJ picked Title 18 USC Section 241 to prosecute him under, stretching the meaning and intention of the Section to breaking point and beyond.