8,723 words

President Donald J. Trump’s indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (as with impeachment, it was always obvious that if emoting Democrats didn’t charge Trump with this, they’d charge him with that) had one great redeeming feature for us here at VDARE.com: as with the concurrent Douglass Mackey / Ricky Vaughn lynching, it brings home, to at least the half of America that voted for Trump, that what Anglosphere independent media phenom Mark Steyn has judiciously described in a recent interview with Conrad Black as “America’s Dirty Stinking Rotten Corrupt ‘Justice’ System” is now hopelessly politicized, weaponized, and increasingly subordinated, exactly like Soviet law, to a totalitarian ideological faction

Which makes it easier for us to explain why VDARE.com’s advocacy of immigration patriotism is now facing the most serious threat in its 24-year existence.

And that’s saying a lot in this era, unparalleled in U.S. history, of intensifying shadow-banning, deplatforming, demonetization, doxing and ongoing Chinese Communist Social Credit–style stealth deprivation of professional and commercial services.

VDARE.com is the main project of our tax-exempt 501(c)(3) VDARE Foundation. And the VDARE Foundation has been mugged—targeted for lawfare by New York State Attorney General Letitia James , yet another of those childless female Black Supremacists who so much enrich our political life.

AG Letitia James to host Drag Story Hour for kids in NYC, sparking outrage https://t.co/PSzGn8LKVY pic.twitter.com/ejV8VSKcaO

— New York Post (@nypost) March 14, 2023

[New York AG Letitia James hosts ’Drag Story Hour’ for children: ’Celebration of love, joy and family fun,’ by Lindsay Kornick, Fox News, March 19, 2023]

It has become unmistakably clear that NYAG James aims to suppress our VDARE.com website, seize control of the VDARE Foundation and even expropriate our Berkeley Springs Castle, WV headquarters (which she probably intends to fill with Third World “asylum seekers”).

Of course, we share this badge of honor with more prominent targets of NYAG James—notably Trump, but also the National Rifle Association [New York AG sues to dissolve the NRA, alleging widespread fraud, Politico, August 6, 2020], Project Veritas [N.Y. attorney general warns Project Veritas its fundraising license is at risk, by Shawn Boburg, Washington Post, November 30, 2017] and other patriots unfortunate enough to be technically in reach of her lawless politically motivated rampage.

But President Trump and the NRA (five million members, total assets over $200 million) can, arguably, afford it.

VDARE.com, which is a tiny organization (revenues typically $600k-$800k range, no endowment), absolutely cannot.

Note also that NYAG Letitia James has not yet even accused us of any infraction—much less have we been convicted. We are merely being “investigated”—at deliberately destructive expense.

In other words, we are being battered to death by subpoena.

It really is true that as Mark Steyn has also said, “the process is the punishment.” This is the regulatory version of the prosecutorial abuse epidemic identified more than twenty years ago (to the great dismay of his allies in the naive law-and-order Reagan Era conservative movement) by my old friend Paul Craig Roberts.

It is only because of the extraordinary generosity of our donors that we have been able to finance our defense against NYAG Letitia James’ mugging thus far.

Most tiny organizations like ours would already have been forced to capitulate—which is probably what NYAG Letitia James was counting on.

I am sure she is astounded by our supporters’ loyalty.

But now this effort has brought us to financial crisis. Our general funds have been drained, and we are right at the point of being unable to pay our writers and our technical support staff, with no end in sight to this harassment.

Which is why I must beg you to help us—now.

Trump (Love Him Or Hate Him) Was Right About NYAG Letitia James

As single-issue immigration patriots, we at VDARE.com regarded presidential candidate Donald J. Trump’s historic August 15, 2015 immigration statement as a triumphant vindication of our long struggle to get the immigration issue into politics.

Since then, of course, we have occasionally voiced disappointment with President Trump’s achievements in office (although we did accurately anticipate that a Biden Regime would be infinitely worse).

Nevertheless, let the record show that, in an August 10, 2022 deposition in NYAG Letitia James ’s lawfare attack on Trump (quite separate from Manhattan DA Melvin Bragg’s lawfare attack—there are a lot of them), Trump opened with a statement that was a definitive takedown of her thuggery.

Trump described James as “a renegade and out-of-control prosecutor” engaged in “an unfounded, politically motivated witch hunt.”

Bingo.

As Trump pointed out, James ran for New York State Attorney General in 2018 explicitly promising to sue him—before she could have known any of the actual facts. She did the same with the NRA. (Trump also noted that in her campaign she called him “an illegitimate president,” something which, if said about Joe Biden, is now apparently a hanging offense).

Trump then proceeded to refuse to answer any questions on Fifth Amendment grounds (at 12:12 below).

Quite right too.

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(Transcript here.)

Subsequently, Trump wrote on his Truth Social outlet:

I don’t expect that President Trump will Truth Social any time soon about how our tiny VDARE.com should also be supported.

But the fact is that we are, all of us, in the same fight—against a Totalitarian Woke weaponized justice system.

And so is America.

A Point Of Personal Privilege

And I must rise here on a point of personal privilege, as they say in the U.S. Senate.

I began writing about America’s post-1965 immigration disaster with my 1992 National Review cover story that has been credited with starting the modern debate. I did this despite the fact that my then-employer, Steve Forbes, was gearing up for a Presidential run featuring bone-headed Wall Street Journal Editorial Page–type immigration enthusiasm. I kept on writing about the immigration disaster despite the savage Regime Media backlash, my completely unexpected betrayal by National Review founder William F. Buckley and by Conservatism Inc. in general, the increasingly ominous threat to my ability to feed my family even in the obscure briar patch of financial journalism, abandonment by cowardly former friends, unbridled abuse and physical threats.

And now, at the age of 75, I am still working on the immigration issue in my office in the Berkeley Springs Castle every day.

I regret nothing—Non, je ne regrette rien, as the French Foreign Legionnaires famously sang as they were taken prisoner after their attempt to save French Algeria failed in 1961.

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Maybe that’s not the most hopeful analogy. But I like it.

Nevertheless, nothing has infuriated me as much as the lying insinuation by NYAG James that I, and my wife Lydia, bought the Castle to benefit ourselves personally.

Exactly the opposite is true. Because Lydia and I knew no commercial bank could be trusted not to cave to political pressure and pull a mortgage in the most inconvenient way—as happened to Rebel Media’s Ezra Levant in Canada [Canadian media outlet says bank denied it a commercial mortgage over conservative political leanings, by Yael Halon, Fox News, December 30, 2021]—we had to gamble on pouring all of an unprecedented and wonderfully generous 2019 gift to the VDARE Foundation into buying the Castle for cash. (The prudent and self-interested course would have been to invest it and live off the proceeds.) We sold our much-loved home in the beautiful Connecticut Berkshires. We uprooted our little daughters and moved to a small rental cottage on the Castle grounds here in Appalachia. We were forced to do this because, in the three years before COVID, our proposed conferences had been canceled because of political pressure more than a dozen times (see e.g., here, here, here, here). We concluded that, for a persecuted organization like ours to hold conferences, it ultimately must own its own venue.

The net effect: The Brimelow family no longer owns a home. But its shelter dollars now go to support the Berkeley Springs Castle complex. What NYAG Letitia James is insinuating here adds insult to injury—in fact, it adds injury (in the form of her deliberately ruinous subpoena harassment) to insult (see above) to the professional injury I have already, I may say unflinchingly, sustained.

Of course, this could never happen if the U.S. were still the Land of the Free. But the fact is that what we all now face is a communist coup. And America’s corrupted legal and regulatory institutions are complicit.

So I say: to hell with NYAG Letitia James!—and to hell with those e.g., the supposedly libertarian Reason commenters cheering her on.

And to hell with everyone else enabling this new Soviet America.

Why was the VDARE.com Foundation registered in New York State, and thus vulnerable to thugs like NYAG Letitia James, anyway?

The VDARE Foundation was set up in 1999 by a heroic volunteer lawyer who at that time did a great deal of pro bono work for the immigration patriot movement. He happened to be admitted to the bar in New York State, so he set it up there.

(However, contrary to NYAG Letitia James’ insinuations in her filings, the foundation was subsequently dormant for several years because we were working through another foundation registered in a different state. This is why we made no further filings: they were not necessary.)

It is perfectly normal for 501(3) charities to be registered in states other than those in which they have a physical presence.

And at the time, of course, with the West’s concurrent victory in the Cold War, no one had any idea of the communist Reign of Terror that was subsequently to sweep through American institutions, above all after the apparently unauthorized election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.

Thus our heroic volunteer lawyer was later forced by his white-shoe law firm, to its great discredit, to abandon his pro bono work for immigration patriots. This an example of the stealth “Chinese Communist Social Credit–style deprivation of professional and commercial services” (see above) that is a key part of America’s ongoing communist coup.

Why didn’t VDARE leave New York State?

New York State has to give its consent for a 501©(3) to leave.

Because our unusually good fundraising year pushed us over a N.Y. regulatory threshold, we initiated an exhaustive financial audit (i.e., a qualified third party had to look over our accounts). Our aim was to be fully compliant before we even considered raising our heads above the parapet with a request to exit.

This audit was very much hampered by the fact that our Connecticut accountants suddenly abandoned us and refused to suggest referrals (see “Chinese Communist Social Credit–style stealth deprivation of professional services” above).

The trivial, very common, easily corrected, and anyway generally obviated by the statute of limitations regulatory missteps that NYAG Letitia James is now hyperventilating about (see below) arose in the resulting chaos because we had so much trouble finding a replacement. In fact, at one point we had to turn to VDARE.com accountant reader, who had kindly offered his services.

The audit was completed—triumphantly. But of course NYAG Letitia James has ignored it anyway.

However, once the VDARE Foundation was forced into the real estate business in order to own its conference venue, we had to reorganize legally, at considerable expense, in a way that is more typical of commercial operations, to protect ourselves against predatory lawsuits (whether politically motivated or not), e.g., slip-and-fall. Thus the VDARE Foundation now owns a for-profit LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) that holds the property surrounding the Castle and leases it back to VDARE. And the Berkeley Springs Castle itself is now owned by the Berkeley Springs Castle Foundation, a 501(c)(3) supporting organization of the VDARE Foundation that is registered in West Virginia. NYAG Letitia James has made numerous lying references to this reorganization (see below).

What has NYAG Letitia James done?

Last summer, we learned from Facebook that NYAG Letitia James had hit it with two overlapping subpoenas regarding its transactions with us:

• Meta May 13 2022—PDF


• June 14 to Facebook Payments Inc PDF

This was a flagrant violation of procedure. The Stored Communications Act, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 2703(b)(1)(b), permits a government agency to obtain third-party information from Facebook or other internet services—provided that there is ”prior notice from the governmental entity to the subscriber or customer” [viz., the third party, here VDARE].

But NYAG Letitia James never provided VDARE.com with that notice. An email from Facebook was the first we heard about it.

She simply disregarded the law.

This has turned out to be a pattern.

Significantly, in both cases, the Facebook subpoenas were issued on NYAG Letitia James’ behalf by someone called Rick Sawyer, who is described as “Special Counsel for Hate Crimes.” (In his email signature, Sawyer advertises his pronouns as “he/him”—for now.)

Needless to say, VDARE.com has not committed, or has even (yet) been accused of, a crime of any kind—let alone a “Hate Crime” (which we have anyway consistently argued is an unconstitutional concept).

But Commissar Sawyer’s role betrays what is really motivating NYAG Letitia James: not some technical issue arising from her role of overseer of charities, but the suppression of political opinion she dislikes (aka “Hate”). She apparently thinks she can do this by claiming that such political opinion results in “Hate Crimes” (unlike, of course, Black Lives Matter rhetoric).

Needless to say, this is a direct assault on our First Amendment rights.

NYAG’s James’ move against Facebook was especially bizarre because Facebook had, without warning to us, deleted VDARE.com’s page some two years earlier, all too obviously as part of its Woke campaign to defeat President Trump in that fall’s Presidential election [The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg, by William Doyle, The Federalist, October 12, 2021].

(With characteristic leftist vindictiveness, Facebook also deleted our own personal pages, which in Lydia’s case was entirely non-political—she had used it, as all student Millennials were encouraged to do, as a diary, family resource and baby book, showing our children’s first steps, etc.—and has refused to return her data, although we understand it is legally her property.)

And we never raised much money through Facebook anyway, or spent much money on promotion there, partly because I had quickly concluded it was shadow-banning us.

So why was NYAG Letitia James targeting Facebook at all? One theory: She or her minions might actually have been crazy enough to think our Social Media Manager really was a Russian agent. (He is an American, albeit a Southerner, i.e., nearly as bad.)

Facebook, not a friend, informed us that it would comply with these subpoenas—no easy task—unless we contested them.

And we did indeed consider contesting James’ subsequent subpoena against the VDARE Foundation, because it was plainly harassment aimed at suppressing our First Amendment rights (see below).

But eventually, very reluctantly, we took the hard decision to comply, without prejudice, with NYAG Letitia James’ demands as much as possible—to demonstrate good faith to the court.

Facebook thereupon apparently met her demands.

At least, we think it did. Typical of the relentlessly hostile environment in which patriots now operate, Facebook will not tell us what data it supplied. And neither will NYAG Letitia James.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Because our relationship with Facebook was so minimal, we believe and hope that none of our readers, or even the commenters on our late lamented Facebook page—and certainly not our donors—are significantly at risk here.

But THEY COULD HAVE BEEN. This whole episode is disgraceful in a supposedly free society.

Significantly, NYAG Letitia James’ targeting of VDARE.com followed her creation of a ”Hate Crimes Unit,” which she claimed would “strengthen oversight, because we see how much hate is being fueled by content on the internet” [’Hate Has Been Unleashed’ | New York’s AG Lays Out Her Plan to Solve the State’s anti-Semitism Crisis, by Amir Tibon and Danielle Ziri, Haaretz, January 8, 2020].

“Hate” is, of course, an offense unknown to the U.S. Constitution. “Hate speech” is in effect simply something with which NYAG Letitia James disagrees.

For example, in August, during the run-up to the 2020 Presidential Election, NYAG Letitia James joined in a letter to Facebook demanding that it increase censorship against ”hate speech and hate organizations,” aka suppress pro-Trump Facebook pages. [PDF] [AG Racine Leads 20-State Coalition Urging Facebook to Aggressively Combat the Spread of Hate and Disinformation Online, Office of Attorney General for the District of Columbia, August 20, 2020].

Similarly, in August 2022 James took the extraordinary step of trying to intimidate the tiny Cornerstone Church in Batavia, NY out of hosting an event featuring President Trump’s son Eric and former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn [ReAwaken Tour host feels harassed by NY attorney general , oleantimesherald.com, August 11, 2022].

The Cornerstone Church has (good for them!) now filed an action under the Civil Rights Act against NYAG Letitia James. It points out that the original venue had cancelled the event after pressure from Democrat elected officials, notably Monroe County Legislature President Sabrina LaMar, and also that the Church’s hosting of the ReAwaken Tour was a legitimate exercise of their First Amendment Rights.

Especially significant from VDARE.com’s point of view: The Cornerstone Church has argued that NYAG James’ behavior violated provisions of the New York State Bar Association’s Rules Of Professional Conduct—because she abused her office for political purposes and lied about the nature of their meeting:

Specifically, plaintiff alleges that the Defendants negligently, wantonly, recklessly, intentionally, and knowingly sought to and did deprive them of their constitutional and civil rights, pursuant to the above-named statutes and causes of action by committing acts to deprive Plaintiffs of rights secured by the Constitution of the United States and the State of New York,” the suit states. “Further, Defendant James negligently, wantonly, recklessly, intentionally, and knowingly published multiple false statements to multiple media outlets to mar the reputations of Pastor Doyle and Clay Clark, to provoke objectionable opinions in the minds of members of the community to expose plaintiffs to hatred, contempt, and aversion.”

[ReAwaken organizers, host fight back on what they call ’intimidation,’ ’libel,’ from AG, by Joanne Beck, The Batavian, January 23, 2023]

More on this interesting idea, as it relates to VDARE.com, below.

Then we learned that NYAG Letitia James had issued a subpoena to the VDARE Foundation itself.

See the Subpoena, PDF

NYAG Letitia James’ subpoena made a staggering 44 separate demands for documents. Most of them were of no possible relevance to any oversight function that the New York Attorney General’s office could conceivably claim to exercise over charities registered in New York State.

For example:

We sued the New York Times because it described me, the Editor of VDARE.com, as an “open white nationalist.” Needless to say, this allegation is lethal in the current political climate. However, it is not an opinion, but a matter of fact—I have repeatedly said I’m a Civic Nationalist, i.e., I’m not “open” about being a white nationalist. The Southern District of New York Court recognized this when it acknowledged the issue was “actionable,” although absurdly claiming I had been made whole by the New York Times’ subsequent guilty stealth-edit of its website, even though correction was unacknowledged in the print edition despite its publicly stated ethics code.

At the time, a prominent First Amendment lawyer told us, “The Supreme Court is going to revisit SULLIVAN”—its disastrous 1964 decision that effectively deprived public figures of Common Law libel protection—”but not for you.”

So much for Equality Before The Law.

To SCOTUS’ great discredit, he turned out to be right.

But what does our New York Times litigation have to do with New York State’s charitable oversight role?

And why not subpoena our Colorado Springs litigation?

Significantly, NYAG Letitia James did not attempt to subpoena any documents regarding our litigation against the city of Colorado Springs for its refusal to protect our proposed 2017 conference there.

We believe this is because our suppression by Colorado Springs was so flagrantly unconstitutional, as even one Reason commenter acknowledged. To quote Judge Harris L. Hartz’ magisterial dissent from the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals decision:

A government effort to punish or deter disfavored speech is what VDARE adequately alleges. And the City accomplished its purpose. The complaint plausibly alleges that the Mayor’s statement caused the Resort to cancel the VDARE conference.

This atrocity is simply not something to which our new communist overlords want to draw attention.

Our initial response—WHAT ABOUT THE FIRST AMENDMENT?

Looking over all three (3!) subpoenas, to Facebook and to the VDARE Foundation, it appeared to us that, of 68 separate demands, fully 53 were improper, with most violations landing squarely on First Amendment grounds.

For example, Item 4 of NYAG Letitia James’ subpoena to the VDARE Foundation:

Quite apart from the extraordinary, and utterly unnecessary, compliance burden that this demand imposes on the VDARE Foundation, it also aims to expose everyone who has ever been involved with us to doxing and harassment by Antifa thugs.

Above all, it aims to expose our writers, who have careers and families to support, and who therefore now operate under pseudonyms because of the Reign Of Terror.

There is simply no need for NYAG Letitia James to know who they are.

Moreover, 40 gigabytes of email could amount to a million individual items or more. Redacting them is an enormous and obviously very tricky task (because of the risk of accidentally exposing donors and supporters).

And we absolutely do not want to tell NYAG Letitia James who our writers are—because we know that she cannot be trusted with confidential information.

Just look at this MSM story about a leak from NYAG Letitia James’ office last year:

Like other nonprofits, Stand For America files an annual tax return with the IRS. While the agency and the nonprofit must make those filings available to the public, including the amounts of contributions to the group, such nonprofits do not have to disclose the identities of their donors.

However, the organization Documented, which describes itself as a nonpartisan government watchdog that investigates money in politics, obtained an unredacted copy of Stand For America’s 2019 filings, which it then shared with POLITICO. The group did not share the original source of the filing, but it bears a stamp from the charity office of the New York state attorney general. [Emphasis added]

[Document reveals identity of donors who secretly funded Nikki Haley’s political nonprofit, by Alex Isenstadt, Politico, August 26, 2022]

Needless to say, giving money to GOP Establishment catspaw Nikki Haley is not really a hanging offense (except possibly in James’ crazed New York Democrat bubble).

But giving money to, or writing for, VDARE.com most certainly is a hanging offense right now—given the current Reign Of Terror. (Consider the fate of blogger Razib Khan, fired after less than 24 hours as a New York Times contributor just because he had some years earlier written a letter to VDARE.com opposing something we had published.)

So James’ incentive to leak the identities of our writers and donors is exponentially greater.

Six House Republicans from New York State wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding that he launch an investigation into the leak [NY GOPers ask DOJ to probe AG James over leaked Nikki Haley donors list, by Mark Moore, New York Post, October 13, 2022].

But significantly, Gulag Garland appears to have not responded to the GOP demand at all—further evidence that the Regime is now completely lawless.

(I might also note that Nikki Haley’s Stand For America appears effortlessly to have raised some $7 million in 2019. Obviously, this far outmatches any VDARE Foundation fundraising, even though donations to us are tax-deductible, whereas donations to Stand For America are not. It’s simply amazing how much money professional politicians can raise, as opposed to political truth-tellers like us. With that much money, we could cause a Cultural Revolution.)

Of course, in this sort of regulatory situation, courts do typically operate on the assumption that the government is acting in good faith.

But NYAG Letitia James subpoenas’ fail rate—53 out of 68 demands turn out to be First Amendment violations—simply is not the record of a government acting in good faith. Whatever statutory presumption NYAG Letitia James might be accorded, it is rebutted by this pattern.

Initially, we replied to NYAG Letitia James making these points.

See our letter, PDF.

Our subsequent response—an exhaustive (and exhausting) effort to demonstrate good faith.

I must stipulate here that the VDARE Foundation really is a tiny organization— “lean,” in our auditor’s words. And apart from editorial and tech support contractors, VDARE.com generally has only two full-time employees—Lydia and myself, home-schooling parents of three small children. And, importantly, we have no in-house lawyers.

Nevertheless, unlike many of the trusting January 6 martyrs, we knew better than to deal with the government without legal counsel [Why some alleged Capitol rioters are acting as their own attorneys, NPR, October 27, 2021].

But it simply took us time to organize our legal response to James’ massive onslaught.

This was particularly true because we have increasingly serious difficulty procuring any legal services at all—all this stuff about John Adams representing the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre although himself a Patriot, once the pride of the American legal profession, has gone down the toilet in this new Soviet America. (See “Chinese Communist Social Credit–style stealth deprivation of professional and commercial services” above.)

As discussed above, we elected not to fight NYAG Letitia James’ subpoena on First Amendment grounds, despite its flagrant political motivation, but instead to begin more cautiously, by demonstrating good faith and complying with the subpoena as far as was compatible with our contractors’ and donors’ security.

But the cost of this good-faith effort has been enormous—see “the process is the punishment” above. This is how what Paul Gottfried calls “the Managerial State” enforces obedience.

Our legal fees already amount to over $300,000—and, remember, we have not yet even been accused of any wrongdoing at all.

Even worse are the opportunity costs. Lydia and I just don’t have that much bandwidth. We have already been forced to suspend the hard-copy VDARE QUARTERLY. And when did you last see a National Data column?

Moreover, VDARE.com event-planning and fundraising has been completely crippled since the summer of 2022. (We will have our second invitation-only Annual Conference in June—contact Lydia for more details.)

If you’re a donor and you haven’t heard Lydia’s delicious alto on your voicemail thanking you for your donation, this is the reason: She was physically digging through the Foundation’s records, which reside in a cargo container on the Castle grounds.

She’s a tall, strong girl (6’ 1”). But this is still a huge pain.

By December 2022, the VDARE Foundation had produced over 7,000 pages of documents to AG NYAG Letitia James. We had engaged a third-party custodian to sort through our 40 gigabytes of emails, the equivalent of perhaps millions of pages, because we needed to protect the identities of our vendors, writers, volunteers and donors. And our lawyers’ review of those emails was well under way.

(Significantly, in the course of this production, our lawyers protested NYAG Letitia James’ demand that we produce the names of vendors, e.g., our webmaster, and were told the NRA had been forced to do so. This turned out to be a lie, and another ethical violation. Specifically, it is a violation of Rules 4.1 (”Truthfulness in Statements to Others”) and Rules 8.4 (“Misconduct“) of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct.

Despite all this, in early December, we received a peremptory email from NYAG Letitia James’ office demanding that the VDARE Foundation, within ten days, disclose its constitutionally protected information, reveal previously redacted (because we want to protect donors, writers and correspondents) information in the first 7,000 pages of production; complete review of the 40 gigabytes of emails (ditto); and produce a complete redaction log for the entirety of its production.

Again, the VDARE Foundation is a tiny entity in the world of New York State charities, not at all worthy of this massive regulatory overkill. And in the normal course of events, NYAG Letitia James’ underlings would have simply discussed any concerns about the status of the production with a phone call or a meeting.

But of course her persecution of us is not normal. It is purely political.

So, at this point, with NYAG Letitia James’ bad faith irrefutably evident, we filed a complaint in federal court for declaratory and injunctive relief. In other words, we want an official declaration that James has violated the First Amendment, and we want the Court to halt her attempt to enforce the subpoenas.

Complaint as filed, Northern District of New York

NYAG James’ shocking reaction: Ignore protocol, file in state court.