Norton is the Rothgerber chair in Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Boulder.
When regular people lie, sometimes their lies are detected, sometimes they're not. Legally speaking, sometimes they're protected by the First Amendment – and sometimes not, like when they commit fraud or perjury.
But what about when government officials lie?
I take up this question in my recent book, "The Government's Speech and the Constitution." It's not that surprising that public servants lie – they are human, after all. But when an agency or official backed by the power and resources of the government tells a lie, it sometimes causes harm that only the government can inflict.
My research found that lies by government officials can violate the Constitution in several different ways, especially when those lies deprive people of their rights.
Consider, for instance, police officers who falsely tell a suspect that they have a search warrant, or falsely say that the government will take the suspect's child away if the suspect doesn't waive his or her constitutional rights to a lawyer or against self-incrimination. These lies violate constitutional protections provided in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
If the government jails, taxes or fines people because it disagrees with what they say, it violates the First Amendment. And under some circumstances, the government can silence dissent just as effectively through its lies that encourage employers and other third parties to punish the government's critics. During the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission spread damaging falsehoods to the employers, friends and neighbors of citizens who spoke out against segregation. As a federal court found decades later, the agency "harassed individuals who assisted organizations promoting desegregation or voter registration. In some instances, the commission would suggest job actions to employers, who would fire the targeted moderate or activist."
And some lawsuits have accused government officials of misrepresenting how dangerous a person was when putting them on a no-fly list. Some judges have expressed concern about whether the government's no-fly listing procedures are rigorous enough to justify restricting a person's freedom to travel.
When a person or agency backed by the power and resources of the government tells a lie, it sometimes causes harm that only the government can inflict.
But in other situations, it can be difficult to find a direct connection between the government's speech and the loss of an individual right. Think of government officials' lies about their own misconduct, or their colleagues', to avoid political and legal accountability – like the many lies about the Vietnam War by President Lyndon Johnson's administration, as revealed by the Pentagon Papers.
Those sorts of lies are part of what I've called "the government's manufacture of doubt." These include the government's falsehoods that seek to distract the public from efforts to discover the truth. For instance, in response to growing concerns about his campaign's connections to Russia, Donald Trump claimed his predecessor that Barack Obama had wiretapped him during the campaign, even though the Department of Justice confirmed that no evidence supported that claim.
Decades earlier, in the 1950s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy sought both media attention and political gain through outrageous and often unfounded claims that contributed to a culture of fear in the country.
When public officials speak in these ways, they undermine public trust and frustrate the public's ability to hold the government accountable for its performance. But they don't necessarily violate any particular person's constitutional rights, making lawsuits challenging at best. In other words, just because the government's lies hurt us does not always mean that they violate the Constitution.
There are other important options for protecting the public from the government's lies. Whistleblowers can help uncover the government's falsehoods and other misconduct. Recall FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, Watergate's "Deep Throat"source for The Washington Post's investigation, and Army Sgt. Joseph Darby, who revealed the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And lawmakers can enact, and lawyers can help enforce, laws that protect whistleblowers who expose government lies.
Legislatures and agencies can exercise their oversight powers to hold other government officials accountable for their lies. For example, Senate hearings led McCarthy's colleagues to formally condemn his conduct as "contrary to senatorial traditions and … ethics."
In addition, the press can seek documents and information to check the government's claims, and the public can protest and vote against those in power who lie. Public outrage over the government's lies about the war in Vietnam, for example, contributed to Johnson's 1968 decision not to seek reelection. Similarly, the public's disapproval of government officials' lies to cover up the Watergate scandal helped lead to President President Richard Nixon's 1974 resignation.
It can be hard to prevent government officials from lying, and difficult to hold them accountable when they do. But the tools available for doing just that include not only the Constitution but also persistent pushback from other government officials, the press and the people themselves.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.