At a seminar at Harvard’s Institute of Politics this past week, Corey Lewandowski issued a defense of the several months that he spent as a paid political commentator at CNN while also receiving severance payments from the network campaign. “I had the privilege of serving with CNN for about three or four months and providing insight to the Trump campaign, which I think I probably have a comparative advantage over anybody else in the audience other than … Kellyanne [Conway],” Lewandowski said at the event. “I think bringing a perspective of serving 18 months inside a campaign to the viewership of CNN is something that’s worthy of the viewership to understand the thought process of how Donald Trump makes decisions. And if you don’t think that’s service to the viewership of CNN, I think maybe you haven’t done your homework.”
Weeks before signing off on the tax story, Baquet himself told attendees at (another) Harvard conference that he’d risk jail time to publish Trump’s tax returns. That sentiment carried over into this week’s Harvard session, in which Lewandowski said: “We had one of the top people at the New York Times come to Harvard University and say, ‘I’m willing to go to jail to get a copy of Donald Trump’s taxes so I can publish them.’ Dean Baquet came here and offered to go to jail. You’re telling me he’s willing to commit a felony on a private citizen to post his taxes, and there isn’t enough scrutiny on the Trump campaign and his business dealings and his taxes?”
“It’s egregious,” Lewandowski continued. “He should be in jail.”
That statement arose from a typical Trumpite melange — disrespect for the Constitution combined with a failure to grasp the facts. There’s no felony that attaches to publishing true facts that are in the public interest, as the New York Times did with the tax story. The reference to law-breaking in Lewandowski’s outburst may relate to a federal statute on disclosing another person’s tax information, but as many have noted, that doesn’t apply to the situation at hand. Presumably like his boss, Lewandowski just wants to punish a critic.
Asked about Lewandowski’s remark, Baquet emailed the Erik Wemple Blog, “I’m actually on vacation. But happy to recommend a good book on the first amendment since he clearly needs to understand the role of the independent press.”
Would that Lewandowski had set the week’s only three-alarm First Amendment fire. But the president-elect may have outdone him with his tweet from earlier in the week:
As this blog noted, CNN spilled about 20,000 words of punditry straightening out the constitutional and factual lapses in that small and extraordinarily ignorant assemblage of words. The most telling stretch of coverage took place when CNN host Chris Cuomo asked Jason Miller, the spokesman for Trump’s transition team, whether he’d concede that flag-burning was legal. “But Chris, it’s completely ridiculous … it’s terrible and it’s despicable,” replied Miller. Pressed again on the question, Miller said, “No, we can completely disagree that this issue. … absolutely should be illegal.”
With his pushback, Miller was failing Free Speech 101, which holds that the First Amendment protects expression that others — and perhaps most members of society — find repulsive. Or, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes more memorably put it, “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” The case that yielded those words bears some relevance to the public-square discussions of the Trump era. It concerned whether the courts could deny U.S. citizenship to one Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian-born woman, because of her pacifist views. The majority in the 1929 case U.S. v. Schwimmer argued that it could do so, but Holmes dissented.
Have a look at how Justice Pierce Butler framed the issue in his majority opinion: “Taken as a whole, [the record] shows that [Rosika Schwimmer’s] objection to military service rests on reasons other than mere inability because of her sex and age personally to bear arms. … The fact that she is an uncompromising pacifist, with no sense of nationalism, but only a cosmic sense of belonging to the human family, justifies belief that she may be opposed to the use of military force as contemplated by our Constitution and laws. And her testimony clearly suggests that she is disposed to exert her power to influence others to such opposition.” We cannot have dissent in this country!
It’s no wonder that Holmes’s thoughts won the history contest. Anyone who knows anything about the First Amendment knows that it’s not there to protect people singing the national anthem with their hands on their heart or professing their reverence for the Founding Fathers.
Thus far the Trump people haven’t proven themselves among that lot. The reigning view of free expression continues to be that of a business mogul. As head of a sprawling profit-seeking organization, Trump hasn’t been an agent of the First Amendment, which applies to government-led abridgment of free expression. Business owners are free to shoehorn their employees into non-disclosure agreements; use libel law to stifle opponents; and otherwise strong-arm their way toward good PR.
Trump has done all those things and more, as the Erik Wemple Blog and many others have documented. Even as he campaigned for president, Trump has threatened legal action against the Associated Press and the New York Times. He has stiff-armed media organizations on credentials, vowed to loosen libel law to make it easier for guys like him to sue media outlets, ridiculed media outlets and individual reporters at rallies, and much more.
Asked in a recent New York Times interview whether he’d make good on his threat on libel laws, Trump answered, “I think you’ll be happy.”
On the one hand, we have a passel of documented affronts to the First Amendment; on the other, we have (another) vague assurance that all’s well. Time to pray for the First Amendment.
