For the past few weeks, journalists have been reporting on what they've found in the "Twitter Files"—thousands and thousands of documents they were given access to by Twitter's new owner and CEO, the billionaire Elon Musk. The revelations have been astonishing and deeply troubling, exposing solid evidence of collusion between top executives at the FBI and their cozy counterparts at Twitter.

FBI leadership and Twitter censors conferred constantly about how to shut down political speech based on its content, confirming the suspicions of, well, anyone who was paying attention. And it proves without a doubt that over the past few years, countless Americans have undergone a real violation of their First Amendment rights.

The First Amendment mandates that government can't abridge—meaning limit or censor—speech based on its content. Even if attempting to advance the noblest of causes, government actors must not collide with this constitutional guardrail. The Constitution simply isn't optional. Government officials must treasure it like gold and defend it like hearth and home.

This is the part in the play when some rowdy voice shouts from the cheap seats that "Twitter is a private corporation, it's not government." True enough, but the government can't enlist a private citizen or corporation to undertake what the Constitution precludes it from doing.

The U.S. Supreme Court settled that decades ago with what's known as the law of agency, which allows a "principal" to assign an agent to do something on the principal's behalf. It's a limited transfer of power. And what the government is forbidden from doing it is also forbidden from subcontracting to an agent.

Thus, when Twitter acquiesced to the FBI's urging, it essentially became an agent and of the government, and then wrongfully acquiesced to censor the speech of American citizens.

The evidence is now all out there: The FBI handed out Top Secret security clearances to Twitter employees, ostensibly without the weeks of extensive background checking that I and other top Justice Department officials had to undergo.

Then, FBI officials created a special, secure online portal for Twitter staff, where the two sides could secretly exchange information about who was saying what on the platform and how that speech could be squelched. In this virtual "war room," the FBI made dozens of requests to censor political speech. Twitter chirpily complied.

Talking daily with government agencies through a secure government channel, having a government security clearance, and carrying out orders from the government is what an agent of government does. And that's what Twitter did.

This government-big tech partnership violated the First Amendment, a classic deprivation of civil rights.

The Biden administration and others casually dismiss this troubling arrangement as a rationale to somehow prevent election "misinformation." Yet misinformation is in the eye of the beholder. And since the U.S. Supreme Court has determined that speech in and around elections has more First Amendment protection than any other, government agents meddling in it will almost always be acting unconstitutionally. Indeed, lying about an election may be wrong, but it is fully protected speech. The minute Twitter started cooperating with the FBI, it needed to therefore be protected on the platform.

At the end of the day, it is up to the governed—not the government—to decide what's misinformation. The FBI has zero legal authority to stop it, and by using Twitter as its agent, it violated the free speech rights of the people who were censored.

The violations are even more egregious now that that nearly everyone acknowledges the documents on Hunter Biden's laptop that discussed foreign money being funneled to Joe Biden were legitimate. Yet at FBI urging, Twitter and Facebook limited the reach of that story.

Politics aside, none of this can stand. Congress must promptly undertake a bi-partisan investigation into Twitter's malfeasance as an agent of the state. Americans deserve to know which of their federal employees linked arms with high-tech censors and sneered at the First Amendment. There must be a reckoning.

And if your voice was one of those censored by the cabal of collusion between federal law enforcement and some dirty birds at Twitter, now might be a good time to call a serious-minded lawyer.

James Madison never met Alex Jones. This side of heaven, we'll never know whether the author of the First Amendment would've listened to Jones' outlandish radio show. But Jones now knows that James Madison's hand-crafted First Amendment umbrella protects most—though not all—speech. On Wednesday, a jury awarded the parents of the deadly Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting $1 billion in damages; Jones had called the shooting a hoax and the parents crisis actors. The verdict followed a smaller but just as significant Texas jury verdict against Jones' lies about Sandy Hook.

Jones repeatedly defended himself on First Amendment grounds, arguing that he had a free speech right to his opinion, though he was not allowed to make this defense during the trial. One day he even arrived at court with "Save the 1st" written on a piece of tape he'd used to cover his mouth, and he referred to the trial as a "constitutional-destroying, absolute and total, complete travesty."

Yet for centuries—stretching back to British law, the parentage of American jurisprudence—defamation that causes damages were subject to redress. The jury was convinced that Jones' heartless lies piled grief upon the most unimaginable anguish the families of the Sandy Hook elementary students, when Jones' followers took to harassing them in the most brutal fashion on the internet.

But Alex Jones isn't the only one who's been cut up by the First Amendment and found its protection of free speech turn from a shield into a sword. It's been quite a year for stretching the First Amendment, as the actress Amber Heard discovered in June. Heard, too, frequently referenced the First Amendment during her own much-ballyhooed trial, in which her ex-husband Johnny Depp sued her for defaming him as a wife beater. Heard outlined her understanding of the First Amendment, parroting a line no doubt assembled by one of the lieutenants in her army of publicists, claiming the Constitution gives her "the freedom to speak truth to power."

But there's about as much legal substance in that remark as there are vitamins in potato chips. As in Jones' case, there is a threshold beyond which even the First Amendment does not offer protection. Appreciating our freedom—the highest level ever reached in the history of this globe—means respecting the limits of free speech.

The free speech absolutists will push back on this, but the American tradition has always had limits to free speech. And that's what these trials focus on: specifically, defamation.

The U.S. Supreme Court placed the strongest of girders under this key constitutional precept. In 1964, the high court handed down N.Y. Times vs. Sullivan, which looked at alleged defamation surrounding encounters between Black protestors and the police. The big takeaway from the case was that "debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open." But cruelly lying about innocent victims is not a lawful subject of public debate.

Hence these verdicts.

Of course, a Hollywood melodrama isn't even in the same hemisphere as mocking the murder of children. The Sandy Hook families deserve our sympathy and prayers. The deaths of their children were real. And Alex Jones' big mouth and small character caused real damage.

Still, Wednesday's giant verdicts will be significantly reduced on appeals. Jurors get angry and their hands grow weary adding zeroes at the end of the monetary award—then appellate judges, using state statues that limit recovery amounts, more soberly scratch out a few of the digits. And if Jones doesn't have the money to pay, he won't go away in handcuffs. Refusal to pay might lead to criminal contempt and jail (not prison) but inability to pay will probably lead to more of a shrug.

The Sandy Hook families deserve real compensation, but James Madison would be the first to warn us that these must be the rarest of cases. Free speech, after all, empowers a free nation.

When attorneys try their hand at public relations, they aren't always as successful as they would be in the courtroom, according to Mark Weaver, a consultant with Communications Counsel, Inc.

"Most lawyers write in a style that’s more suitable for court documents and less effective for the public at large," Weaver told Fayetteville Today. "Law school typically changes the way someone thinks and writes, and that usually means lawyers speak and write in ways that are less understood by the masses."

Weaver himself is both a lawyer and public relations professional, but his advice is for everyone, he says.

"I tell my clients that I’m bilingual; I speak English and lawyer," he said. "Because I was a communications professional before I went to law school, I’ve been able to mentally switch gears between what’s appropriate to say in an appellate argument versus what should be said in a newspaper op-ed."

When lawyers insist on writing public relations materials, they often are hurting their own cases, according to Weaver.

"In most crises where my team and I provide communications counsel, there’s at least one lawyer who attempts to muddy the waters with legal jargon, unnecessary nuance or overly defensive points," he said. "When I was a spokesman for the U.S. Department of  Justice, I learned how to convince really smart lawyers to stay focused on the court of law while the communications professionals concentrate on the court of public opinion."

Likewise, public relations professionals should stick to what they're best at.

"Some public relations pros are familiar enough with the law in a given area to explain it to reporters, but all the non-lawyers should leave legal advice to those of us who went to law school and passed the bar," Weaver said.

Lawyers often use a highly academic language, which some refer to as "legalese," according to Criminal Law Consulting.  This language includes legal terms that non-lawyers may not understand. However, when they try to break out of this language while writing PR materials, it is difficult for them to completely abandon the jargon. That is a key component of why lawyers should not act as PR consultants.

Some examples of legal jargon mean something completely different to the average person, Business Insider reported. For example, when the average person hears the term "recess," they think of the half-hour of outside time that elementary school kids enjoy in the middle of the day. For lawyers, this term refers to the break during a trial or court proceeding.

As much as professionals think using big words makes them sound "smart," all professions could learn from using plain language, according to the Nielsen Norman Group. If your goal is for people to read and understand your work, you must make it more readable and accessible to your audience, which are often people outside your specific profession.    

In a famous dissent from 1988, Justice Antonin Scalia had some prescient remarks that seem newly relevant in the wake of an FBI raid on Mar a Lago, private home of former President Donald Trump Monday night, authorized by President Joe Biden's Department of Justice. "Nothing is so politically effective as the ability to charge that one's opponent and his associate are not merely wrong-headed, naive, ineffective, but, in all probability, 'crooks,'" wrote Scalia. "And nothing so effectively gives an appearance of validity to such charges as a Justice Department investigation and, even better prosecution."

We all knew Scalia was brilliant, but who knew he was psychic?

In a clash of coincidence apropos to our times, it was the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Scalia's death in 2016 that Merrick Garland fancied for himself. But President Obama's nomination of Garland vaporized when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell withheld confirmation hearings until newly elected President Trump could appoint Neil Gorsuch. This snub gives Garland, already under fire for appearing to use the Justice Department to further President Biden's political agenda, the strongest of motives to retaliate against Donald Trump by using the law enforcement resources available to him.

Not so coincidently, Garland is the only one with access to the immense power of federal prosecution that can be harnessed in the fashion about which Justice Scalia warned.

Motive and opportunity don't always equate to misdeed, but such portentous alignment deserves scrutiny.

Let me be clear: If there is solid evidence that any former president has committed a serious crime, he must be held to account. That's the rule of law. But when the former president is an all-but-certain political opponent of the president, then the Attorney General must recuse himself and appoint a special prosecutor. To date, this has not been done. As a result, the credibility and trust that allows federal prosecutors to do their important work is imperiled.

President Biden has so far denied knowing or approving of the raid on Mar a Lago. But there is evidence that Garland and his team are acting with partisan motives—evidence they themselves appear to have leaked.

When I was a young spokesman at the Justice Department, it was clear in our practice and policy that no one at the department was permitted to tell reporters the details or even the basis of a sealed search warrant. Indeed, since nearly all federal investigations involve taking evidence before a grand jury that operates in secrecy, releasing anything from that chain is likely illegal.

And yet, as early reports about the FBI raid of Trump's home took shape, someone in the Biden administration with detailed knowledge leaked to news outlets that the predicate for the search was purported to be classified documents in Trump's possession. And this happened despite the fact the search warrant affidavit had not (and still has not) been made public.

This leak itself was improper and may have violated federal law governing Justice Department release of classified grand jury information—which is ironic, given the allegations against Trump.

Every sentient American knows our nation is strained and divided in ways not seen for many decades. This tension wasn't caused by Donald Trump, but his current situation is the most searing of flashpoints in our political cauldron. If the tens of millions of our countrymen who support Trump's re-election in 2024 see federal prosecutors and FBI as nothing more than partisan agents of the least popular chief executive in generations, our national fabric may rip beyond repair.

Every sentient American knows our nation is strained and divided in ways not seen for many decades. This tension wasn't caused by Donald Trump, but his current situation is the most searing of flashpoints in our political cauldron. If the tens of millions of our countrymen who support Trump's re-election in 2024 see federal prosecutors and FBI as nothing more than partisan agents of the least popular chief executive in generations, our national fabric may rip beyond repair.

Libby Krieger was recently named a full-time consultant with Ohio-based firm Communications Counsel, Inc.

“I am most excited to learn more about communications strategy with crisis and political work from the team's combined 80+ years of experience,” Krieger, who has been helping CCI with projects since November 2021, told North Columbus News. “We have many great clients, and I see it as a privilege to be able to facilitate them effectively communicating their stories.”

Krieger began working for the national communication consulting company in January on a part-time basis and became full-time in May after graduating from Grove City College with a degree in political science and communication arts. Prior to becoming a consultant, she wrote about a wide range of social and political issues with her work appearing in various media outlets including Right Side Broadcasting Network, The Daily Wire, Conservative Review, and Campus Reform, according to her Muck Rack page.

“My experience in conservative media and broadcast journalism has given me insight into the news cycle, which I think will serve our clients well as we intend to help them interact with the media,” Krieger told North Columbus News.

As a part of the CCI team, Krieger is responsible for providing crisis communications, public relations and political consulting.

“Ever since I was seven, my family was running political campaigns for my father as PA State Representative and Court of Common Pleas Judge,” Krieger told North Columbus News. “I think my lived political experience will cue me into some of the strategies that we recommend for our political clients.”

Krieger currently serves as a part-time Marketing Fellow for the Institute for Faith and Freedom. Under that role, which she has held for the past two years, she interviewed Former Attorney General William Barr.