Will Trump Succeed in Jailing Don Lemon? A Legal Explainer
Constitutional law professor Kim Wehle examines the outrageous prosecution of the former CNN anchor while unpacking the Face Act, the First Amendment, and Trump's ongoing war on free speech.
Just days after former CNN anchor Don Lemon went live – as a journalist – on his YouTube show inside a Twin Cities church while anti-ICE activists disrupted a worship service, President Donald Trump amplified a post calling for the reporter’s prosecution. “A small group of elderly ladies were protesting at an abortion clinic and were given 40 years in prison for violating the FACE Act. I would like to see the same kind of sentence of Don Lemon and the people that broke into the church and did that during services,” read the post that Trump reshared on his social media site.
The protesters apparently chose the church because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, is a high-ranking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official.
Setting aside the glaring factual issues raised by the post Trump shared, that call to prosecute Lemon under the FACE Act is exactly what his Department of Justice is now doing. Late last month, federal agents arrested Lemon, independent journalist Georgia Fort, and seven others on federal charges of conspiring to interfere with “religious freedom at a place of worship” under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. It’s an obscure 1994 law that has historically been used to clamp down on protests outside of abortion clinics. But now the Justice Department is using it to go after two journalists, flying in the face of the First Amendment, on the implicit theory that media coverage of the incident somehow interfered with the religious rights of the churchgoers (which by the way are also protected from government oppression by the First Amendment). If this seems head-spinning, it’s because it is. Trump, once again, is torturing a law enacted for legitimate reasons to shore up his own monarchical power. So what is the FACE Act, what does it have to do with Don Lemon, and does the Trump administration have a case against the former CNN anchor?