Federal judge hands Trump's critics a win he's going to hate

President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at a September 11th Pentagon Observance Ceremony Wednesday, Sep.11, 2019, at the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)

A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary restraining order against the National Park Service, ordering it to not interfere with a group that had been flying an “8647” flag in Washington, D.C. Common restaurant slang for “eighty-six” goes back nearly a century, the judge noted, saying that it meant “to throw out” or “to get rid of.”

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss issued the two-week restraining order at the request of Accountability Now USA, an anti-Trump group that had been protesting the president “for months at a site in front of the federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue,” Politico reports. The judge “says the banner can’t plausibly be read to threaten violence against President Donald Trump.”

Judge Moss agreed that the group’s goal is to have Trump lawfully removed from office via impeachment, “and that ’86’ is not an unambiguous call to political violence — and certainly not the kind of ‘imminent’ violence that would be necessary to justify restrictions on speech,” Politico noted.

“The Court does not doubt that political violence is on the rise and that it poses a grave threat not just to the targets of the threats but to the country as a whole,” Moss wrote. “But the enormity of that problem does not change the meaning of Plaintiff’s speech, which by any reasonable measure merely advocated for the President’s impeachment and removal from office — that is, ‘to throw [him] out.’”

Anita Carey, an organizer with Accountability Now USA, said that the group was “pleased that the court saw through the government’s baseless accusations about our 8647 flag.”

“We want to lawfully, peacefully, and constitutionally impeach and remove the President from office. We will now resume proudly flying our 8647 flag, and we encourage everyone who agrees with us to do the same,” she said, according to the ACLU of the District of Columbia.

Judge Moss did not mention the Trump DOJ’s case against former FBI Director James Comey, who had posted to social media a photograph of shells arranged in the form of an “8647” message — Comey later deleted the message and apologized, but was indicted in late April. The indictment alleges that any reasonable person would have seen the “8647” message as “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”

Last month Trump called Comey a “Dirty Cop.”

Politico notes that Judge Moss’ “determination underscores questions about the genesis of the charges against Comey.” Comey has denied that his “8647” post was intended to provoke violence.

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