A new lawsuit alleges that President Trump continues to block critics on Twitter, despite a two-year-old court order saying that as a public official, he cannot suppress people’s opinions, Bloomberg reports (via Yahoo).
Representing five people who have been blocked from viewing tweets posted by Trump, The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed a lawsuit Friday against Trump and White House deputy chief of staff for communications, Daniel Scavino.
“The president lost this battle more than two years ago when a federal court held that his practice of blocking critics from his Twitter account violates the First Amendment,” Katie Fallow, a senior staff attorney at the New York-based institute, said in a statement. “It shouldn’t take another lawsuit to get the president to respect the rule of law and to stop blocking people simply because he doesn’t like what they’re posting.”
The Institute is representing freelance writer and blogger Ellen Brodsky; caregiver Darragh Burgess; Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University; Megan Ackerman, a digital specialist with the American Federation of Teachers; and Elizabeth West, a New York actor.
While Trump unblocked most people he had blocked after he lost the 2018 lawsuit, Trump has continued to block people he had blocked before taking office as well as those not covered by the initial lawsuit.
“Because of their criticism of the President, they have been prevented or impeded from viewing the President’s tweets, from replying to those tweets, from viewing the discussions associated with the tweets, and from participating in those discussions,” the group said.
In 2017, the US Department of Justice, then overseen by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, determined that Trump’s tweets–both on his POTUS account and his personal account–were official presidential declarations subject to the Presidential Records Act. As such, no one can be blocked from seeing those tweets.