Social media giant Reddit has been ordered to appear before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., as part of a federal effort to unmask anonymous online critics of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month.
Attorneys for the Reddit user say their client’s posts and their anonymity are squarely protected under the First Amendment and that ICE’s use of a grand jury marks a disturbing escalation for the agency after seeing its previous efforts to investigate political speech quashed in court. The subpoena was issued by federal prosecutors in the capital after ICE’s effort to identify the same user failed in a Northern California federal court. (The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington declined to comment on the case.)
This is exactly what Grand Juries are for and why the bar for indictment is so low.
It’s a safeguard to prevent frivolous felony persecution by the State upon individuals.
It is to the Jurors to take one look at the evidence the prosecution presents and to say, nope, this is a BS case.
That’s why it’s so easy to get indictments. Generally, prosecutors only show up with actual evidence of potential wrong doing.
If they show up with nothing, in typical Trump legal team fashion, they will get no indictment.
They seem to think because THEY suck at law, everyone else does too. All competent lawyers left that administration. Believe it or not, plenty of lawyers actually have respect for the institutions they spent their lives training in and working in.
They don’t have to win. They don’t even have to follow through on their threat. They’ve already done what they meant to do and that’s just to intimidate everyone else. There will be plenty of folks who see this and maybe speak out a little less or stop speaking out entirely. Do you think this case is going to get the same exposure after it’s been dropped? They’ll already be onto the next intimidation tactic.