Kirkus
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A former federal prosecutor calls for laws regulating lying about stolen elections and other such calumnies. A former member of Robert Mueller’s team of legal investigators, Weissmann enjoys the distinction of having been singled out by Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, for revocation of his security clearance (“Having been out of government since 2019…the entire exercise was a performative show of retribution”) and President Trump himself, who called him a “bad guy”—a step up from Stephen Miller’s “degenerate.” All that’s water off a duck’s back, but what truly bothers Weissmann is the fact that “there is no criminal law that makes Trump’s election fraud lie illegal.” There’s plenty of precedent for legally punishing lying of other kinds: There are perjury laws and laws interdicting lying to Congress and falsehoods told to various financial investigative bodies (some of which figured in Trump’s 34 felony counts). A case of signal importance, testing the edges of the First Amendment, is the Stolen Valor Act, punishing anyone who for personal gain lies about having won, say, the Medal of Honor. And then there are the examples of other countries, to say nothing of most individual American states: Germany’s law that punishes Holocaust denial, Brazil’s imprisonment of Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro for having not just lied abouthis electoral loss but also attempting to mount a coup, with Brazilian law holding that “the right to truthful information in elections supersedes an unfettered right to free speech when deliberate falsehoods are made that threaten the democratic order.” In that spirit, Weissmann proposes amending the Constitution as a safeguard and disqualifying those who perpetrate intentional election denial from running for elected office for some set term of years. And he backs up his case with a strong conviction: “When lies about election integrity go unchecked and become party orthodoxy, we are no longer voting in a democracy.” A convincing argument to extend truth in advertising laws to the presidency. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.