Former prosecutor pursued by Trump calls for crackdown on election lies: 'Lying can be held to account'

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: The Guardian

Sun 24 May 2026 07.00 EDT
Last modified on Sun 24 May 2026 07.33 EDT


Politicians must be held accountable if their lies damage democracy, according to a former US federal prosecutor and FBI general counsel who was pursued by Donald Trump.

The US must be “as creative as possible” and introduce sweeping structural reforms if it escapes its current “mess”, said Andrew Weissmann, laying out a proposal for a legislative crackdown on election deceit.

“Lying can be held to account,” argued Weissmann, a senior figure in former FBI director Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and Trump’s links to Moscow. The former federal prosecutor remains a prominent voice against Trump and his assault on US institutions and justice, as a professor and analyst for liberal cable network MS Now.

Speaking from Paris, where he teaches for NYU, Weissmann said: “If we ever get out of this mess, what systemic reforms can we do? Because I think we tried going back to the old norms [under Joe Biden] and thinking that was going to be enough, and maybe it will be, but I just have been thinking a lot about, structurally, what we can do differently. “I think the circumstances in the United States have made it imperative that we be as creative as possible.”

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/24/andrew-weissmann-donald-trump-liars-kingdom

[Marie Marie]

1. I love Andrew Weissman. He is blessed with intelligence and decency - two

qualities Trump will never possess.

[onenote]

2. I strongly suspect that such a law wouldn't survive constitutional scrutiny.

The three justices that dissented from the decision striking down the Stolen Valor Act were Alito, Scalia and Thomas. But when it comes to lying in connection with political discourse, I doubt they'd reach the same conclusions given how it might be used against their political allies.

The six justices that concluded the Stolen Valor Act was unconstitutional included a plurality consisting of Kennedy, Ginsburg, Roberts, and Sotomayor, with a separate narrower opinion concurring from Breyer and Kagan.

The plurality opinion went to lengths to distinguish different categories of speech and the rationale for criminalizing false statements in some situations but not others. A key statement from that decision, which I believe Jackson, Kagan and even Sotomayor would agree, and which Roberts signed onto, makes the following point: "Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth. See G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) (Centennial ed. 2003). Were this law to be sustained, there could be an endless list of subjects the National Government or the States could single out." And that same opinion made another point that is part of longstanding Constitutional jurisprudence:The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth. See Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 377 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring) (“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence”). The theory of our Constitution is “that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919) (Holmes, J., dissenting). The First Amendment itself ensures the right to respond to speech we do not like, and for good reason. Freedom of speech and thought flows not from the beneficence of the state but from the inalienable rights of the person. And suppression of speech by the government can make exposure of falsity more difficult, not less so. Society has the right and civic duty to engage in open, dynamic, rational discourse. These ends are not well served when the government seeks to orchestrate public discussion through content-based mandates."

I think that Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett would point to that principle as a way of ruling against any attempt to criminalize political discourse.

[reACTIONary]

3. And,. It should not...

.... that would really exacerbate the politicalization and weaponization of the DOJ. And it won't be their candidates who are being prosecuted. It will be ours.

[Grins]

5. Propose it anyway!

“Thou shalt not lie!” And watch the Republicans vote it down.

(If that should ever happen, my fear is Democrats will completely blow their chance to use it to hammer Republicans.)

[Chemical Bill]

6. One of his points is that it is unlawful to lie to law enforcement.

Local LEOs, FBI, or regulatory agencies. It absolutely should be for politicians who are speaking to their constituents. None of that should be considered free speech.

Of course you are correct about our current Supreme Court.

[delisen]

4. Lying must be held accountable

King by school board members in the Pasadena Unified School District. Is now a huge issue and the public is engaged in using both the law and public opinion to demand accountability.

[CaptainTruth]

7. "Politicians must be held accountable if their lies damage democracy"

Well, Trump lied 30,000+ times during his first term... & he got a second term.

We're not doing very well with that "held accountable" stuff.