Lawfare Against Free Speech October 18, 2023
Two issues of Quadrant ago I wrote about the dire legal straits of former President Donald Trump under the assault of Democrat federal and state prosecutors who seemed to be weaponising US law to ensure the conviction of Tom Wolfe’s ultimate Great White Defendant by any technicalities necessary….
In recent months Trump’s legal perils have metastasised further as prosecutors have employed more and more recondite legal arguments to convict him. That said, as I ended my Quadrant column: “Donald Trump is big enough to look after himself. What about the rest of us?”
For Democrats in law and political office have recently been selectively applying laws across a wide field and harming both their rivals and the general public — releasing dangerous criminals onto the streets without bail, refusing to enforce border laws, not charging some rioters while throwing the book at others, and using regulatory and prosecutorial powers to censor opinions they dislike and bankrupt those who express them.
Very few ordinary Americans, whether individuals or small businesses, can afford Trump’s kind of first-class legal defence to keep at bay a state or federal prosecutor armed with limitless taxpayer funding and free to range through a forest of laws and regulations so dense that he can indict almost anyone he likes (or dislikes) for crimes they have no memory of committing. And by what is anything but a strange coincidence, a small mom-and-pop business, the website Vdare.com, and its owners, Peter and Lydia Brimelow, have recently been suffering under such assaults from a recidivist prosecutor, none other than the New York Attorney-General Letitia James, who is one of Trump’s earliest and main tormentors. (Full disclosure: I am an old family friend of Peter Brimelow, a former colleague on National Review, and sympathetic to proposals for restrictive immigration reform, though we differ on other issues.) Ms James claims to be conducting a regulatory oversight of the website to check it abides by the state’s business regulations, and to ensure in particular that as a 501©(3) foundation, it has not become a vehicle for self-dealing by the Brimelows.
The specific suspicion directed towards them is that they are living either rent-free or on favourable terms in a West Virginia castle that was bought by Vdare with donors’ money for the purpose of holding conferences. The castle was indeed bought with donations, and necessarily so: Vdare needs a conference venue that cannot be cancelled at will, after more than a dozen hotels had been pressured by left-wing groups to cancel its conferences in the previous four years. And it has since held successful conferences at the castle.
Yes, the Brimelows were initially living on the property as they restored it (they live now in a nearby cottage), but they pay rent for doing so and that rent is estimated by an independent assessor. All these arrangements were drawn up and approved by lawyers to ensure probity and avert suspicions.
Nonetheless, in pursuit of her suspicions, Ms James demanded that Vdare provide her office with an extraordinary array of forty-four different kinds of documents, some dating from 1999, covering not only the website’s everyday business, but also all its internal emails, any documents relating to its lawsuit against the New York Times, any property transactions it has had, the names of its anonymous contributors, and much, much more. [Read the whole thing]