(Ken Silva, Headline USA) An Obama-appointed federal judge sentenced Douglass Mackey to seven months imprisonment on Wednesday for posting a meme in 2016 about voting for then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton via text message.
Mackey, who was found guilty of election interference in March over his actions, was also hit with a $15,000 fine.
In the leadup to the 2016 presidential election, Mackey had been operating the popular “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter account that had some 58,000 followers.
He has maintained that the memes were clearly satire, while the U.S. government claims his actions were designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.
Despite the pro-Trump prankster being a victim of a weaponized Justice Department, Mackey threw himself on the mercy of the court in the leadup to his sentencing, pleading for a judge to not send him to jail. In his sentencing memorandum, Mackey claimed that he’s a new man and that his days as the internet troll “Ricky Vaughn” are long gone.
“Three years before the government arrested Douglass Mackey for the charge in this case, he moved to Florida to check himself into an intensive inpatient course of psychotherapy followed by outpatient psychotherapy,” Mackey said in a sentencing memorandum last month.
“The Douglass Mackey who stands before the Court for sentencing is not Ricky Vaughn of seven years ago, but a role model to friends he met in therapy, a brother in faith in his Church, and a devoted husband to his wife, who is expected to give birth to the couple’s first child in November,” the memorandum said.
Mackey still has an appeal pending against his conviction. His lawyer, Andrew Frisch, has said that the case “presents an unusual array of compelling appellate issues. I am optimistic that the conviction will be vacated.”
During the trial, one of the government’s testifying witnesses was an FBI informant who still actively operates anonymous right-wing Twitter accounts. According to prosecutors, the informant operates accounts similar to the Ricky Vaughn account. They claimed that the two worked in tandem to spread “misinformation.”
The informant plead guilty to the same charge that Mackey has been found guilty of. His identity has been protected because he is allegedly still working with the FBI in respect to other Twitter users.
“The [informant] is presently involved in multiple, ongoing investigations and other activities in which he or she is using assumed internet names and ‘handles’ that do not reveal his or her true identity,” prosecutors said during the criminal proceedings.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
