LaRouche Criminal Trials - Reactions From LaRouche and Supporters

Reactions From LaRouche and Supporters

"My imprisonment is the American Dreyfus case", LaRouche said in a January 1989 interview from prison. The prosecutor denied claims of a conspiracy, describing the theory as an "Orwellian fantasy ... that we are hiding some supersecret spy plot which, if exposed, would exonerate them". LaRouche supporters insisted that LaRouche was jailed, not for any violation of the law, but for his beliefs.

LaRouche also alleged systematic government misconduct:

The record shows, that for nearly thirty years, elements of the U.S. Department of Justice have been engaged in world-wide political targeting of me and my associates. This includes early 1970s operations run in conjunction with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's U.S. State Department. During the last ten years or so of that period, some U.S. officials, and others, have challenged the relevant agencies with some of the evidence which shows, that those prosecutions and correlated harassment of me and my associates, had been clearly fraudulent, politically motivated targeting.

LaRouche and his lawyers asserted that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sought to destroy his organization, and that the prosecution was the result of a conspiracy between the ADL, the government and the media. This claim stemmed from a series of meetings that LaRouche publications refer to as the John Train "Salon".

In testimony submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 13, 1998, the LaRouche-affiliated Schiller Institute claimed that "he inability to repay lenders and other crediters was the consequence of an unprecedented involuntary bankruptcy proceeding initiated by the Justice Department against those companies in 1987, initiated in an ex parte, in camera proceeding".

Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, a professor of constitutional and international law at the University of Mainz in Germany, compared the LaRouche trial to the Dreyfus affair, which he called "a classical example of a political trial". He wrote, "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."

On November 8, 1991, Angelo Vidal d'Almeida Ribeiro, the Special Rapporteur for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, filed a request to the U.S. Government based on a complaint that had been filed concerning the LaRouche case. The U.S. government responded by saying that LaRouche had been given due process under the laws of the United States. The U.N. Commission took no further action.