Federal judge is right: Missouri AG Bailey is the one trampling 1st Amendment rights | Opinion

Here’s an irony for you: Andrew Bailey’s assault on the First Amendment has failed — at least for now — because he talks so much.

You might remember that Missouri’s attorney general last year announced a probe into Media Matters for America, a nonprofit progressive outfit that came under fire from conservatives for its investigative reporting highlighting racist posts displayed on X — formerly known as Twitter — the Elon Musk-owned social network.

Bailey was ostensibly trying to root out “fraud” committed by Media Matters against its donors in Missouri.

But anybody could see that he was using the power of the state as a sledgehammer to suppress criticism of Musk, the world’s richest man and a notable ally to former president Donald Trump.

Indeed, Bailey barely attempted to hide his anti-First Amendment motives.

“Radicals are attempting to kill Twitter because they cannot control it,” Bailey said in his December announcement, “and we are not going to let Missourians get ripped off in the process.”

The ploy was so obvious, in fact, that on Friday a federal judge shut down Bailey’s probe.

The Missouri investigation, Judge Amit P. Mehta wrote, targeted Media Matters “not for legitimate law enforcement purposes but instead for its protected First Amendment activities.”

Exactly. But how did Mehta come to that conclusion?

By paying attention to Bailey’s own inflammatory words that “consistently characterized Media Matters in

ideological terms.”

There was the social media post where the attorney general threatened a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters for its criticism of Musk. There was the press release saying the state investigation was an act against “progressive tyrants masquerading as news outlets.”

And there was the rambling interview that Bailey gave to Donald Trump Jr. in June on the conservative video site Rumble.

“This is absolutely a new front in the fight for the war for free speech,” Bailey told the former president’s son. “This investigation is really critical and again especially as we move into an election cycle in 2024.”

Connecting the investigation to this year’s presidential election was the moment, Mehta wrote, that Bailey “said out loud the true purpose of his investigation.”

It wasn’t fraud after all. Oops.

‘Chilling effect’ on Media Matters reporter

This kind of stuff has real consequences. Mehta noted that Bailey’s investigation has had “chilling effects” on Media Matters and its reporter, Eric Hananoki, who told the court that the probe caused him to self-censor his research and writing, and to limit communications with his editors and other journalists.

Bailey’s attacks “have had an extremely negative effect on my work and on me personally,” Hananoki said in a statement quoted in Mehta’s ruling.

And that’s a problem.

The First Amendment exists to keep the state and federal governments from intimidating their citizens into silencing themselves. What Bailey did in this case simply isn’t supposed to happen.

But it did, which makes it difficult to discern whether the First Amendment actually worked in this case.

Bailey’s investigation has been restrained, yes — but only after Media Matters fought him in court over the last eight months, at great time and expense.

That’s bad for Media Matters.

And it’s bad for Missouri voters and taxpayers who just watched Bailey waste their money in pursuit of an ideological crusade.

The good news is that the crusade failed because Bailey can’t decide whether he really wants to be Missouri’s attorney general or if he’d rather be a conservative media personality.

Online, he often plays the social media cowboy, regularly issuing lawsuit threats against the Biden Administration with silly “not on my watch” pronouncements. And he has appeared on so many right-wing podcasts and interviews with Fox News and Newsmax — and with Donald Trump Jr. — that it’s impossible to keep count of them all.

This time, it tripped him up.

Which makes one thing clear as Bailey seeks the approval of Missouri voters in November: He’s an ideological crusader masquerading as a public servant — and he’s bad at it.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.

This story was originally published August 27, 2024 at 5:02 AM.