“No President is Above the Law:” Judge Rules that President Trump Illegally Blocked Critics Access to His Twitter Account
A Federal Judge on this day ruled that President Donald J. Trump had unconstitutionally blocked access to his twitter account by critics of his presidency. “No president is above the law,” Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote, “because all government officials are presumed to follow the law.”
The district court decision had profound implications for President Trump and for the use of social media by all government officials in the future. Trump had made tweets his primary form of communication with the public, often announcing major policy innovations, and also often telling lies, in tweets. Judge Buchwald held that twitter accounts were a public forum, and consequently excluding critics from them violated the First Amendment. The judge, however, refused to issue an injunction against the president.
The plaintiffs in the case included comedian and writer Nick Pappas and Rebecca Buckwalter, an editor for the web site the Daily Kos.
The decision joined a set of early decisions holding that the president is not above the law, involving Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. The Supreme Court overruled President Nixon’s claim of executive privilege in refusing to turn over White House tape recordings related to the Watergate Scandal. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against him on July 24, 1974 and ordered him to turn over the tapes. The content of the tapes led to Nixon’s resignation as president on August 9, 1974.
In the Clinton matter, President Clinton tried to avoid going to trial in a civil suit over Paula Jones’s sexual harassment claims, arguing that it would interfere with his responsibilities as president. The Supreme Court rejected this claim in Clinton v. Jones on May 27, 1997.
On President Trump: Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018)
On President Nixon: Stanley Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (1990)
On President Clinton: Jeffrey Toobin, A Vast Conspiracy (1999)