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A Monroe County resident is suing the Indiana Attorney General’s director of investigations after the resident claims the investigator threatened to pursue legal action against him over certain Facebook posts the resident made that he claims is protected speech under the First Amendment.
The lawsuit was filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana by the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana on behalf of plaintiff Lee Lawmaster.
The complaint names investigator Kurt Spivey as the defendant in his individual and official capacities.
“Government officials cannot treat political criticism as a criminal threat simply because they disagree with it,” Ken Falk, legal director at the ACLU of Indiana, said in a press release. “Mr. Lawmaster did nothing more than express his view that elected officials should be removed from office. Sending a state investigator to his home to warn him that he could be indicted for that speech is exactly the kind of government intimidation the First Amendment forbids.”
Spivey did not immediately respond to The Indiana Lawyer’s request for comment, but a spokesperson for the Indiana Attorney General’s Office said the posts were death threats, not just opinions.
“With death threats against elected officials being very prominent across the nation and in our state, the Attorney General and his family are a top target,” the spokesperson wrote to The Indiana Lawyer. “There are—right now—two people being tried in separate Marion County cases for making violent death threats against the Attorney General. This is real, and our office takes true threats extremely seriously. So, it’s pathetic that the ACLU has once again chosen to champion and defend one of the biggest losers as their client.”
The AG’s office questioned the ACLU’s motives.
“Their mission these days has nothing to do with civil liberty — it’s just communism,” the spokesperson wrote. “We look forward to further draining the ACLU’s bank account by fighting and winning this case, just like we win most cases against this anti-American, deranged organization. This guy didn’t just target the Attorney General. He posted the same ’86’ threats against Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith and U.S. Senator Jim Banks as well. And one read of the Attorney General’s Facebook page shows we get thousands of goofy comments from people all over the United States. So if this office wanted to freeze political speech, why would this be the one comment out of the thousands of haters that we picked? It’s simply ridiculous.”
According to the complaint, Lawmaster expressed his political views and protested the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey for a recent social media post he made depicting the numbers “86 47” by posting the number “86” in the Facebook comment sections of Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith and Indiana Sen. Jim Banks.
The complaint said Lawmaster would write “86” followed by the name of the official whose page he was on to protest the officials’ actions and policies to “urge that they be thrown out and gotten rid of.”
Last month, Comey was indicted for posting an Instagram photo of seashells depicting the numbers, which were interpreted as him making threats to President Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “86” is a slang term meaning “to throw out,” the complaint states.
Lawmaster said he frequently expresses his opinions on the social media pages of elected officials. Regarding the “86” posts in question, Lawmaster did nothing other than post the number on social media, the complaint states.
On May 1, Lawmaster said Spivey came to his house and confronted him about the comments, stating that although he has the right to freedom of speech, Lawmaster allegedly crossed the line by making “threats like that,” referring to the “86” comments.
According to the complaint, Spivey told Lawmaster that if Comey was indicted, the attorney general’s office could “easily indict you over this today.”
Spivey requested that Lawmaster agree to “tone it down a little bit,” and said he hoped he wouldn’t have to come back to speak with him, the complaint states.
Lawmaster argued that his social media comments are protected by the First Amendment and that at no time did he threaten or intend to threaten anyone.
“Inspector Spivey certainly had no basis for concluding that Mr. Lawmaster intended his comments as a threat to anyone,” the complaint said.
Since Spivey’s visit, Lawmaster has “reasonably determined” that he needed to censor himself and has stopped commenting on officials’ social media pages altogether as he’s afraid of criminal retribution, the lawsuit states.
According to the complaint, Lawmaster believes Spivey’s actions were taken maliciously or with callous indifference to his rights and that Spivey’s actions violated the First Amendment. Lawmaster asked the court to enter a preliminary injunction enjoining Spivey from taking action against Lawmaster for his social media posts and award him damages for the irreparable harm that’s been caused.
The case is Lee Lawmaster v. Kurt Spivey, 1:26-cv-00923-SEB-MG.
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