The Trump administration's aggressive response to the demonstrations and riots that have broken out in U.S. cities following the police killing of George Floyd continues apace, with U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr reportedly suggesting that prosecutors charge demonstrators with sedition.

Barr, according to a story published today by The Wall Street Journal, encouraged prosecutors on a conference call last week to charge violent protestors with federal offenses wherever possible. The attorney general encouraged the use of sedition charges even in contexts when state charges would apply, reports the Journal, which spoke to several people familiar with the call.

Federal sedition law makes it a crime for two or more people to "conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force" the U.S. government, and it comes with a potential penalty of 20 years in prison....

Both Trump and Barr have both pointed to antifa and other leftist radicals to justify an aggressive federal response to violence at protests around the country.

Left-wing groups aren't the only ones being subjected to a federal crackdown. In late August, the FBI conducted a truly absurd sting on two Boogaloo Boys (an ideologically heterodox movement that predicts a coming civil war) who attended demonstrations in Minneapolis. The feds accuse them of trying to sell weapons to Hamas.

Arson, vandalism, and other acts of rioting have accompanied many of the anti-police-brutality protests around the country. But since this violence is often adjacent to protected First Amendment activities, law enforcement's response needs to be careful, targeted, and proportionate. We should try to stop the violence and vandalism, but peaceful protesters shouldn't be unjustly punished or otherwise dissuaded from exercising their rights to free speech and assembly.

By encouraging prosecutors to be as punitive as possible, Barr appears to be taking the exact opposite approach. His suggestion that they dust off sedition laws should alarm all civil liberties advocates.