The context was an April 2023 discussion with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, where Hillary is reportedly a professor.

"Democracy requires at least a minimal level of trust," said Hillary with the semblance of a straight face.  "So if we are going to turn our politics over to people who — maybe just for the heck of it — are making up stuff to misrepresent leaders, or maybe because they know they can achieve it if they do, then where does this stop?"

Mackey's crime was to pass along a meme he found online titled, "Save Time, Avoid the Line."  This meme, said Hillary, who knows something about election subversion, "went from speech to action meant to subvert the election."  Graced with a picture of a smiling Hillary, the meme then directed readers to text their vote to a given number.  Try as hard as they might, prosecutors could not find not a single one of the "thousands of people" Hillary claimed to have been affected by this transparent joke.

"He was one of the main people running memes against me in 2016," said Hillary.  Mackey was no such thing.  A 27-year-old Middlebury College grad living in New York City at the time, Mackey was an unconnected and unpaid Trump-supporter.  He tweeted under the handle "Ricky Vaughn," the Charlie Sheen "Wild Thing" character in the baseball comedy Major League.

Although Mackey did not take himself seriously, the Biden DOJ obviously did.  Seven days after the 2021 inauguration, more than four years after the purported crime, ten law enforcement officers, four of them FBI, made an unannounced 7 A.M. visit at his residence and led Mackey away in handcuffs.  It was not until his arraignment that he had the slightest idea what he was being accused of doing.