A formerly anonymous pro-Trump Twitter troll has been charged for his alleged role in spreading disinformation during the 2016 presidential election, with federal investigators saying that he assisted in a misleading scheme to send thousands of texts falsely urging people to vote via text.
The Justice Department announced on Wednesday that it had arrested 31-year-old Douglass Mackey, who went by the online alias “Ricky Vaughn,” a reference to Charlie Sheen’s character in Major League, “on charges of conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election to use various social media platforms to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.”
Mackey, who also used his social media platform to push racist and anti-Semitic tropes to his tens of thousands of Twitter followers before being banned, was arrested Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Florida, and charged in New York.
“There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote,” Seth DuCharme, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said on Wednesday. “With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes. They will be investigated, caught, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
The Justice Department didn’t specifically name which candidate Mackey was trying to harm, but his account was well-known for its pro-Trump, anti-Clinton bent and for pushing conspiracy theories such as “PizzaGate.”
The DOJ said that, as one example of his criminality, Mackey sent a Nov. 1, 2016, tweet of an image featuring a black woman standing in front of an “African Americans for [the Candidate]” sign and that the included image was captioned: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘[Candidate’s first name]’ to 59925[.] Vote for [the Candidate] and be a part of history.”
The fine print also stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by [Candidate] for President 2016.” The DOJ said that the tweet included the hashtags “#Go [Candidate]” and a slogan used by the unnamed candidate.
“On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted ‘[Candidate’s first name]’ or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which was used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by the defendant and his co-conspirators,” the Justice Department said.
An FBI agent penned a 24-page criminal affidavit against Mackey, showing that the bureau had gained access to a number of his Twitter accounts and private messages, including “Fed Free Hatechat” and “War Room” and “Infowars Madman” group chats. The agent said that Mackey’s main “Ricky Vaughn” account was operated from January 2014 through early October 2016, when Twitter suspended it, though he created other short-lived accounts in October and November of that year.
The bureau also listed four unnamed co-conspirator Twitter accounts. The FBI said that Mackey and his associates created online memes that “falsely claimed that supporters of the Candidate could cast a vote in the Election by posing on Facebook or Twitter, or by sending a text message to a specified text code.”
The Justice Department noted that an MIT Media Lab ranking of the top 150 election influencers in early 2016 included Mackey at 107, which the DOJ pointed out was a better rank than NBC News (114), late-night host Stephen Colbert (119), and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (141). Mackey reportedly often retweeted a “TEN_GOP” Twitter account pretending to be the Republican Party of Tennessee but was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller as being run by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency as part of Russia’s election meddling efforts in 2016.
In April 2018, white nationalist Paul Nehlen revealed Mackey’s identity on Gab. Nehlen was crushed by Paul Ryan in the 2016 Republican primary and lost the GOP primary again in 2018. Twitter suspended him in early 2018 after he posted a number of racist and anti-Semitic tweets, and Gab banned Nehlen for “doxxing” Mackey by revealing his personal information.
Loren Feldman, a Los Angeles filmmaker who interviewed “Ricky Vaughn” in 2016 without getting his real name, confirmed with HuffPost that Mackey’s photo matched the man she interviewed. Christopher Cantwell, a member of the alt-right who participated in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was on video chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”, also shared Mackey’s identity online around the same time. Cantwell was separately convicted in September 2020 on extortion and threat charges.
The FBI said that in October it interviewed Nehlen, who confirmed that “Ricky Vaughn” was indeed Mackey, that Mackey had offered his services to his failed campaign, and that he never met Mackey in person but frequently talked with him by phone and email. The FBI said it also spoke with the filmmaker who confirmed it was Mackey, and the “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter account revealed enough personal information about him to make it clear that Mackey was running the account.
