Actor and comedian Tom Arnold is a very outspoken critic of Donald Trump. The former Celebrity Apprentice contestant has said that there is terrible B-roll video evidence of the president, during his days as the face of the show, saying offensive things about everybody and everything. Arnold is a tough foil for Trump in that the two men have shared the same physical space before, and at one time might have passed for whatever Donald Trump considers “friends.” Arnold is also wildly erratic and prone to grand gestures of self-importance, making him something of a comparable nemesis for our current self-important windbag in chief.
Mother Jones reports that Arnold gave them an hour-long security tape purporting to show a conversation Arnold and two Secret Service agents had, during an interview at the actor’s home, on October 25 of this year. In it, the two agents explain to Arnold that his social-media reach is a big part of why they are there to warn him about his statements about the president.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the interrogation came when the two agents explained to Arnold that the Secret Service’s main concern was not that he was personally dangerous but that tweets and Facebook posts can spur others to engage in violent action. One of the agents noted, “We’re not the First Amendment police… You’re free to say whatever you want to say within certain boundaries… In your type of case, what we’re concerned with a lot, too, is the audience it can reach, that it could incite somebody to do something.”
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