Rachel Maddow Triggered: AG Barr ‘Has Gone Off the Deep End’ After Sedition Charges Encouraged to Quell Riots

A Wall Street Journal report today said that AG Bill Barr offered up a number of statutes including sedition for federal prosecutors to use in a call last week and pushed them to use federal charges even when state ones could apply.

Rachel Maddow shared the article in a tweet shortly after it was released and said, “The attorney general has gone off the deep end. This is nuts.”

The attorney general has gone off the deep end. This is nuts.https://t.co/wagzxupjDw

— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) September 16, 2020

The rarely used sedition law would charge the demonstrators with plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. Petere Strzok tweeted out that he believed using it would “sacrifice the first amendment.”

Charging violent protest as sedition? When I was a young agent in Boston, a senior agent kept a copy of this form from the 60s as a reminder of the ever-present temptation to sacrifice the first amendment to stifle dissent. It remains powerful today.

https://t.co/d6s4pprroA

Charging violent protest as sedition? When I was a young agent in Boston, a senior agent kept a copy of this form from the 60s as a reminder of the ever-present temptation to sacrifice the first amendment to stifle dissent.

It remains powerful today. pic.twitter.com/9o6y3pMoXt

— Peter Strzok (@petestrzok) September 16, 2020

According to History.com, the United States Congress passed the Sedition Act on May 16, 1918 and it was a piece of legislation designed to protect America’s participation in World War I.

The Sedition Act was orchestrated largely by A. Mitchell Palmer, the United States attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson and designed to target socialists, pacifists and other anti-war activists.

From History.com:

The Sedition Act imposed harsh penalties on anyone found guilty of making false statements that interfered with the prosecution of the war; insulting or abusing the U.S. government, the flag, the Constitution or the military; agitating against the production of necessary war materials; or advocating, teaching or defending any of these acts.

Those who were found guilty of such actions, the act stated, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both. This was the same penalty that had been imposed for acts of espionage in the earlier legislation.

Though Wilson and Congress regarded the Sedition Act as crucial in order to stifle the spread of dissent within the country in that time of war, modern legal scholars consider the act as contrary to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution, namely to the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. One of the most famous prosecutions under the Sedition Act during World War I was that of Eugene V. Debs, a pacifist labor organizer and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who had run for president in 1900 as a Social Democrat and in 1904, 1908 and 1912 on the Socialist Party of America ticket.