On Access by David Snyder

The bipolar, bipartisan love/hate for the Wikileaks founder threatens the First Amendment and has clouded the true nature of the fundamental rights at stake. BY DAVID SNYDER—It’s not hard to find people in Washington with strong opinions about Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. But good luck finding someone with an opinion about Assange that hasn’t flipped 180 degrees (and maybe back again) over the past ten years. Assange has managed the rare feat of

BY DAVID SNYDER — When a federal judge ordered President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to disclose in open court the fact that he considers Fox News host Sean Hannity a client, the Trump Era outrage-industrial complex shifted into high gear. Seeing evidence of some nefarious Deep State plot to embarrass Trump and his confederates, conservative commentators criticized Judge Kimba Wood for requiring the information to be disclosed, while many on the Left reacted

BY DAVID SNYDER—The framers of the U.S. Constitution understood the protections of the First Amendment to be a bulwark against the “tyranny of the majority” — a shield to protect those with unpopular views against oppression by a popularly elected majority. President Donald Trump has turned this concept on its head, at least in his rhetoric. His statements have offered the support of the most powerful elected office in the land to views that the

BY DAVID SNYDER —Tucked into a February 13 Washington Post article about internal chaos at the White House is a stunning sentence, slipped in almost as an aside: White House “[s]taffers, meanwhile, are so fearful of being accused of talking to the media that some have resorted to a secret chat app — Confide — that erases messages as soon as they’re read” (emphasis added). The fact that the White House is permanently destroying records