United States v. LaRouche
United States v. LaRouche refers to the prosecution and conviction of controversial American political activist Lyndon LaRouche and several of his associates on charges of mail fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion. LaRouche was sentenced to a prison term of fifteen years which began in 1989. He was paroled in 1994 after serving five years.
By the 1980s LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche had built a extensive political network, including the Schiller Institute in Germany, headed by Zepp-LaRouche, and branches in several other countries. The International Caucus of Labor Committees claimed to have affiliates in France, Italy, Sweden, Canada and several South American countries. In Australia LaRouche operatives took over an older extreme-right group, the Citizens Electoral Councils (CEC), and regularly contest elections. The LaRouche organisation published a weekly newspaper, The New Federalist, and a weekly newsmagazine, Executive Intelligence Review. At one time there was a LaRouche publishing house, Benjamin Franklin Books, which issued a steady stream of works by LaRouche and his followers. The real membership of LaRouche's organisation is not known.
The size of the LaRouche empire led to investigations of the source of its apparently extensive financial resources. The LaRouche organisation devotes much of its energy to the sale of literature and the soliciting of small donations at airports and on university campuses. It also solicits donations by phone. More seriously, however, LaRouche was accused of fraudently soliciting "loans" from vulnerable elderly people.
The First Trial
In October 1986, over 400 armed officers of the FBI, IRS, other federal agencies, and Virginia state authorities raided the LaRouche headquarters in Leesburg in search of evidence to support the persistent accusations of fraud and extortion made against LaRouche. This led first to the indictment of LaRouche and others on June 30, 1987 in Boston, on one count of conspiracy. The trial commenced on December 17 of that year, before Boston Federal Judge Robert E. Keeton. There were numerous revelations, including a search, authorized by Judge Keeton, of the personal files of Oliver North. This search produced a May 1986 telex from Iran-Contra defendant General Richard Secord to North, discussing the gathering of information to be used against LaRouche. After this memo surfaced, Judge Robert Keeton ordered a search of Vice President George Bush's office, for documents relating to LaRouche. Shortly after this order, the government took measures to shut down the trial. The trial ended in mistrial on May 4, 1988.
Before disbanding, the jurors polled themselves and found all defendants, including LaRouche, "not guilty." According to the Boston Herald of May 5, 1988, one of the jurors described the poll: "It seemed some of the government's people caused the problem, adding that the evidence showed that people working on behalf of the government 'may have been involved in some of this fraud to discredit the campaign.'" The National Law Journal called the Boston mistrial a "stinging defeat" for the government; LaRouche commented, "I was cheated out of an acquital."
The Second Trial
On October 14, 1988, LaRouche and six associates were re-indicted in the so-called "Rocket Docket" of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia located in Alexandria, Virginia, and charged with conspiracy and mail fraud; LaRouche was also charged with conspiring to hide his personal income since 1979, the last year he had filed a federal tax return. On December 16, 1988 a federal jury convicted LaRouche and his associates, and LaRouche was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, of which he served five.
Unlike Judge Keeton, who devoted three weeks to jury selection, Alexandria Judge Albert V. Bryan spent two hours. This contributed to the result that most jurors in the Alexandria trial were present or former government employees. Jury Foreman Buster Horton was the U.S. Department of Agriculture liason to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Judge Bryan also granted a motion in limine, which barred the defense from presenting the material they had presented in the Boston trial.
The prosecution alleged that LaRouche and his staff solicited loans with false assurances to potential lenders and showed "reckless disregard" of the facts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Robinson presented evidence that LaRouche's organisation had solicited US$34 million in loans since 1983 (however, the amount that was not repaid was $294,000). The most important evidence was the testimony of lenders, many of them elderly retirees, who had lost thousands of dollars in loans to LaRouche that were never repaid. Several witnesses were LaRouche followers who testified under immunity from prosecution.
Judge Albert V. Bryan ruled that the defense would not be permitted to discuss, or even allude to, the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice filed, on April 20, 1987, an unprecedented involuntary bankruptcy petition against two LaRouche-controlled publications companies on whose behalf the loans had been solicited. Federal trustees were placed in charge of the companies, and they immediately suspended repayment of loans to creditors (who were, for the most part, political supporters of the LaRouche movement). On October 25, 1989, Judge Martin V.B. Bostetter ruled that the government's bankruptcy action was illegal. Bostetter said the government acted in "objective bad faith" and the bankruptcy was obtained by a "constructive fraud on the court." Thus the argument of the defense, that the decision to not repay the loans was made by government trustees and not by the defendants, was never presented to the jury. It was also never heard by an appellate court.
In addition to LaRouche, his chief fund-raiser, William Wertz, was convicted on ten mail fraud counts. LaRouche's legal adviser, 1993.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark supported LaRouche's claims that his prosecution was politically motivated. In 1995 he wrote to Attorney-General Janet Reno: "I bring this matter to you directly, because I believe it involves a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge."
(Clark, who was Attorney-General under Lyndon Johnson, has since become a regular radical critic of U.S. government actions. He has supported, among others, Slobodan Milosevic, alleged war criminal Radovan Karadzic, an alleged leader of the Rwandan Genocide, as well as Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier and antiwar activist Father Phillip Berrigan. A 1999 in Salon.com described him as "the war criminal's best friend," and "the tool of left-wing cultists.")
Dr. Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, Professor of Constitutional and International law at the University of Mainz in Germany, wrote the following on the case:
- On closer examination of the behavior of the U.S. authorities toward LaRouche, there emerge strong parallels to the infamous Dreyfus Affair in France, which has gone down in history as a classical example of a political trial.
- Just as LaRouche was, the French Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was deprived by the structure of the trial procedures, of any opportunity to prove his innocence, and facts critical for his defense were excluded from the trial.
LaRouche and his associates maintained their innocence. After the release of LaRouche from prison, full page advertisements calling for him to be exonerated (paid for by the LaRouche movement) appeared in papers such as the New York Times and Washington Post (see .) Among the signators were Arturo Frondizi, former President of Argentina; figures from the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement Amelia Boynton Robinson, Dick Gregory, Al Sharpton, James Bevel, and Rosa Parks; former Minnesota Senator and Democratic Presidential Candidate Eugene McCarthy; 31 former U.S. Congresspersons, including Mervyn Dymally, who chaired the Congressional Black Caucus; and artists such as classical vocalist William Warfield, and violinist Norbert Brainin, former 1st Violin of the Amadeus Quartet.
