Judge Rules RFK Jr. Can Bring Lawsuit Against Federal Agencies in Censorship Case

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can continue to pursue his lawsuit, which alleges a violation of his First Amendment rights, against multiple U.S. government agencies.
There is evidence to show that Kennedy has been “directly censored in the past,” he wrote on Tuesday, adding that there is a “substantial risk” that “in the near future,” he will “suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant, and redressable by the injunction they seek.”
Under the high court’s Murthy v. Missouri order, “a court must make specific findings that a particular defendant pressured a particular platform to censor a particular topic before the platform suppressed a particular plaintiff’s speech on that topic,” Doughty also wrote.
He argued that Kennedy and his Children’s Health Defense organization “were specifically targeted” by government agencies over alleged misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines.
“The Court finds that there is further risk for future risk injury here because Kennedy is a 2024 presidential candidate,” Doughty wrote. “For example, if, hypothetically, the FBI saw a piece of information related to the 2024 presidential election posted by the Kennedy campaign on social media that it deemed to be ‘misinformation,’ then it reached out to [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], who worked closely with [social media firms], who then removed the posts, Kennedy would be censored by the action of one Government Defendant in response to another.”
The justices, in a 6–3 ruling, specifically overturned a lower court’s 2023 decision that various federal officials likely violated the First Amendment, which protects against governmental abridgment of free speech, in a case brought by the states of Missouri and Louisiana as well as five individuals.
Prior to the Supreme Court’s action, the New Orleans-based Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had issued an injunction constraining such contacts by the administration. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who authored the Supreme Court’s ruling, wrote that the two Republican-led states and the other plaintiffs lacked the required legal standing to sue the administration in federal court.
Should the court find that “some of the Kennedy Plaintiffs might still have standing notwithstanding Missouri, dissolution of the injunction is prudent so that this Court can reevaluate the situation with the benefit of additional briefing,” they wrote. “If the Court enters such a ruling, the government would ask the Fifth Circuit to remand … to allow this Court to dissolve the injunction.”
The Epoch Times contacted the DOJ and Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense for comment on Thursday but received no reply by publication time.