Did you ever like a tweet sent by Donald Trump?

If so, Jack Smith, the special prosecutor going after Donald Trump has you on a list. In fact, he subpoenaed your name from Twitter.

This is where we are. As I wrote earlier this week if you flew into Washington DC on or around January 6th, 2001, the federal government has put you on a special terrorist watch list and may have Air Marshals following you when you fly. It doesn’t matter if you went to the Capitol protest or a job interview, it’s all the same to them. You are a suspect and need watching.

Yesterday we learned that Jack Smith subpoenaed vast amounts of information from Twitter about Donald Trump and his followers, including every interaction people had with his account. You could have loved what he said, hated what he said, sent him a direct message, or quote tweeted him.

Again, it’s all the same to Smith. You are a person of interest.

As part of his war on Trump, Jack Smith collected info on any American who retweeted or favorited Trump tweets. This is such a dystopic nightmare, as is the way it's calmly accepted by so much of the country. https://t.co/p46htXJzNk

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) November 29, 2023

No, I am not kidding. If you ever interacted with Donald Trump’s Twitter account Jack Smith demanded to know who you are and in what way you interacted with Trump on Twitter.

If this sounds like some police state BS, it’s because this is some police state BS.

We wouldn’t know about this but for the fact that Smith was sued and the court sided with the news organizations who argued that it was in the public interest to know what evidence Smith was collecting in order to make his case. The release of the subpoena, which was redacted, gives us a window into the Orwellian pursuit not just of Trump but of all people who have supported him.

Chances are good that you are on some watchlist, it appears, because you like Donald Trump.

Just as the FBI declared that Catholics required monitoring as potential terrorists, and that parents concerned with their children’s schools were labeled extremists, we now know that the mere fact that you are a Republican on Twitter makes you suspect to the federal government.

REPORT: The Department of 'Justice' demanded that Twitter (X) hand over a list of users who engaged with Donald Trump's posts in relation to Jack Smith's J6 investigation.

This means many of you may have been targeted.

Smith demanded Twitter provide data on "all lists of… pic.twitter.com/YSiW6XsV0a

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 29, 2023

We live in a country where censorship is now common, the FBI acts as Joe Biden’s personal Stasi, and the Justice Department and Homeland Security collect names of people on the assumption that where they travel or who they follow on Twitter makes them suspect.

As part of the pretrial motions Trump’s legal team is arguing that the Smith should be forced to make public information that he and the court have kept under seal. Presumably this is information Trump’s team already has through discovery, and on its face it would seem in the public interest that as much as possible the public should be able to see what has been going on in this investigation.

MORE MOTIONS: Trump's lawyers continue to fight Jack Smith/Chutkan attempts to conceal info and proceedings from American people.

New filing asks to make public currently sealed scope of Special Counsel's office and redacted "sensitive materials" in discovery. pic.twitter.com/FEGnqlUM1C

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) November 28, 2023

Any argument that this is a legal case just like any other is absurd. It cannot be anything other than political and in the public interest to make as much public as possible, given that Trump is both a former president and a current leading presidential candidate. The public interest–which the courts are supposed to represent at a fundamental level–cannot be served by keeping the scope of Smith’s actions secret.

Prosecutors claim to represent “the people,” as in “The People vs. …,” and it’s pretty clear that the people have a right to know that their prosecutor is putting everybody who ever supported the president on a list. There is no conceivable argument that this is a purely legal matter–I know I have nothing to do with January 6th in any way, but I likely interacted with Trump and am now in a database held by a special prosecutor.

That is insane. There are likely tens of millions or more Americans who have gotten swept up in Jack Smith’s investigation, and none of us knew anything about it until now.

Over the past year we have learned more than I ever wanted to know about how corrupt our Justice system has become. Secret databases, illegal searches of our electronic information, use of spy tools that were prohibited by Congress. What else is there out there we have yet to learn?

After a New York Times report, the FBI investigated who had paid for a spy tool for use by the U.S. government. The FBI found it was the FBI. https://t.co/FE74zSAIWm

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 1, 2023

Look through our articles over the past year and you will tons of articles about FBI abuses of power, and we all can remember Michael Hayden lying to Congress about the sweeping collection of data of Americans during the Obama Administration. He of course never was prosecuted for perjury, because, well, nobody ever is if they are the “right” sort.

FBI obtained Americans bank records without subpoena: Whistleblowers | Just The News https://t.co/wvVJxR0L6X

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) May 18, 2023

We are well past the point where we can assume the goodwill of the security state. They have made it abundantly clear that they consider vast swathes of law-abiding Americans a threat to be monitored. And I think it’s clear that they don’t consider that threat to be violence or other kinds of law breaking, but a threat to their power.

The tool was used more than 278,000 times, including against crime victims, January 6 riot suspects, people arrested at protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, and — in one case — 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate.https://t.co/jd0dikVvHr

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 19, 2023

So they spy on you.

Chances are good that any particular one of you hasn’t gotten their attention–the trove of data is too large to have people randomly search for your data–but if for some reason they decide they want to look into you they have all this data on hand, and simply ignore the 4th Amendment.

Our constitution was set up with the presumption that the government has no right to look into you without probable cause, but that concept seems foreign to the current denizens of Washington. They simply ignore the constitution and search away.

This is how the Secret Police in communist countries worked.

Lavrentiy Beria, the most ruthless and longest-serving secret police chief in Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror in Russia and Eastern Europe, bragged that he could prove criminal conduct on anyone, even the innocent. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” was Beria’s infamous boast. He served as deputy premier from 1941 until Stalin’s death in 1953, supervising the expansion of the gulags and other secret detention facilities for political prisoners. He became part of a post-Stalin, short-lived ruling troika until he was executed for treason after Nikita Khrushchev’s coup d’etat in 1953. Beria targeted “the man” first, then proceeded to find or fabricate a crime. Beria’s modus operandi was to presume the man guilty, and fill in the blanks later. By contrast, under the United States Constitution, there’s a presumption of innocence that emanates from the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments, as set forth in Coffin vs. U.S. (1895).

No doubt Smith, Christopher Wray, the NSA, and the Justice Department will assure us that we have nothing to worry about if we haven’t done anything wrong. That is the siren song of tyrants. You can prosecute anybody for anything, and even if they lose in court they have bankrupted you and ruined your life.

That is why we have the presumption of innocence, and the 4th and 5th Amendments. It’s not just that the government has the burden of proof to put you in jail, but they have to have probable cause to search through your life to find evidence against you. Otherwise we would spend our lives having to prove we didn’t commit crimes.

This has to stop.