Election interference conviction of pro-Trump Twitter troll Douglass Mackey overturned

John Annese, New York Daily News on Jul 9, 2025

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NEW YORK — A federal appeals court has overturned the criminal conviction of pro-Trump-right Twitter troll Douglass Mackey, who posted fake ads telling Hillary Clinton supporters they could vote in the 2016 election by text message.

Mackey was convicted in March 2023 of election interference, after a Brooklyn Federal Court found, after five days of fraught deliberation, finding him guilty of conspiracy against rights.

On Wednesday, a three-judge Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prosecutors didn’t present sufficient evidence he had entered into any sort of conspiracy when he posted several meme images on Twitter, and that his presence in online chat rooms didn’t prove he was working with others.

“To begin, the government presented no evidence that Mackey participated in the conspiracy’s formation,” Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston wrote in the 41-page decision. “Notably absent from this evidence was a single message from Mackey in any of these direct message groups related to the scheme.”

Of the three judges on the panel, two are George W. Bush appointees, the third a Joe Biden appointee.

“The government conceded that Mackey downloaded his text-to-vote tweets from 4chan. It failed to establish, in accordance with its theory of the case, that Mackey became aware of the text-to-vote memes in the War Room (group chat) and tweeted them pursuant to a conspiracy launched there,” the opinion reads.

“That theory was possible, but so was an alternative one: that Mackey became aware of the memes independently and decided on his own to post them.”

Mackey was sentenced to seven months behind bars in October 2023, but he remained free on bail pending his appeal.

He maintained he was merely “s—posting,” not conspiring to interfere with voting rights, and told the jury, “It’s not that I didn’t think it would work. I wasn’t trying to get it to work.”

“We are overjoyed that the second circuit saw the insufficiency of the case and validated the defense that we advanced at trial,” his lawyer, Andrew Frisch said Wednesday.

Mackey, a former Manhattan resident living in West Palm Beach, Fla., made a name for himself as the Twitter user “Ricky Vaughn,” posting under the avatar of Charlie Sheen’s character from the movie “Major League” wearing a MAGA hat.

During the 2016 elections, he posted images that looked like Hilary Clinton campaign ads, including one fake ad showing a Black woman next to the words, “Avoid the line. Vote from home” and a text message code.

His Twitter posts included anti-Black and and anti-woman remarks.

A representative of the U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella declined comment Wednesday.