A few days ago, New York Attorney General Letitia James awkwardly admitted: “before this trial [of Trump] even began, the judge ruled in our favor.” This is not surprising, given that she ran for office on the promise to get Trump. She also helped to make New York the epicenter of COVID-19 in the US and played an important role in Internet censorship and sabotage, as exposed in Missouri v. Biden.
The Speech Restriction
Letitia James has been the New York Attorney General since January 2019. On March 19-20, 2020, her office sent letters to the largest domain registrars. Domain names (like ‘americanthinker.com’) are an essential component of the internet infrastructure and are necessary to create websites. Anybody can purchase any unowned domain name and use it for as long as they pay annual fees.
Carrying the AG Office’s Division of Economic Justice’s letterhead, each letter said that the AG office was “investigating the registration and use of coronavirus-related domains for the purposes of deceptive advertising, phishing schemes, and malware dissemination.” Then it suggested that the domain registrars revise their terms of service to ensure aggressive enforcement against “illegal use of coronavirus domains,” that they conduct a “human review of complaints… about fraudulent or illegal use of coronavirus domains” (suggesting yanking domains of alleged violators), and that the registrars take unspecified actions “that prevent rapid registration of coronavirus-related domains.” The letter also requested the registrar contact the AG office for further discussions.
The requests made by Letitia James were unprecedented. Registering a domain and hosting a website on it are First Amendment activities. The determination that there is fraud or other “illegal activities” is made by a court. Courts sometimes order the seizing of domains when it is demonstrated that a serious crime was committed or attempted by using them, like when domains are used to steal credentials.
The AG letter attempted but failed to justify those demands. It referred to a report that found 3% of the domains mentioning coronavirus were malicious, and another 5% were suspicious. The remaining 92% were neither malicious nor suspicious. Thus, the AG office exploited the disaster similarly to ordinary scammers but with more damage.
Letitia James was the only state AG openly requesting internet services providers to censor their customers then. One registrar admitted collaborating with “authorities” to prevent registration and even to remove “abusive domains or websites related to COVID-19 or the Coronavirus,” not clarifying what abusive means. Some registrars sounded less enthusiastic, but New York state is too powerful to resist, especially during pandemics.
Four months later, America’s Frontline Doctors’ website americasfrontlinedoctors.com was taken down by its host. There is no reason to think that Letitia James was involved directly, but her letters helped to legitimize the suppression of pandemic-related speech not only by domain registrars, but by search and social media platforms. Ms. James’ actions complemented CISA et al.’s efforts to suppress the speech of Trump supporters on social media. In 2021, Letitia James’ office sent cease and desist letters to doctors, requesting they stop prescribing Ivermectin to COVID-19 patients.
The Nursing Homes Massacre
On March 25, 2020, the New York state administration directed nursing homes in the state to accept new and returning residents with COVID-19. The order, now deleted from the NY government website, said: “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.” (The emphasis is in the original.) The majority of recovering COVID-19 patients are not contagious, but some are. Sending them to nursing homes was like setting fire to gasoline storage. Also, “medically stable” patients might have had COVID-19 at an earlier stage, and thus more infectious. Simultaneously, the New York government sent supposedly recovering COVID-19 patients from hospitals to nursing homes. Most of the 9,000+ COVID-19 patients admitted to nursing homes under these orders had never lived there. Despite medical organizations’ immediate protests, the order remained in effect until May 10. In spring 2020, the number of COVID-19 deaths from the New York nursing homes was 15,000 people (from all sources of infection).
These orders are inexplicable because there was plenty of room in New York hospitals, and the hospital ship USNS Comfort was on its way to New York. Furthermore, they went against the Trump administration’s guidance, stating that even visitors should not be permitted in nursing homes due to their residents’ susceptibility to COVID-19. Apparently, the New York government was driven by the desire to spite President Trump at all costs. This was not just a bad policy. It was not a policy at all but a physical act, a pre-mediated murder. It was like Imperial Japan’s use of biological weapons against the Chinese population during WWII.
NY AG office includes a Solicitor General and serves as an independent legal advisor to the New York government. Letitia James would be liable together with the signers of these orders even if she had just allowed their drafting and implementation. But her role was much more significant. She had personal knowledge of what was happening but assured the victims and their relatives that everything was fine and that her office would intervene otherwise. She even issued two press releases about it (1, 2).
Even worse, she fought the Trump administration’s efforts to protect citizens of states with rogue governments. On April 27, then-US Attorney General Bill Barr issued a memo warning states against violating human rights in their COVID-19 policies. “Many policies that would be unthinkable in regular times have become commonplace in recent weeks, and we do not want to unduly interfere with the important efforts of state and local officials to protect the public. But the Constitution is not suspended in times of crisis,” the memo said, without explicitly mentioning any State. Letitia James replied immediately: “Make no mistake: U.S. Attorney General Barr is not the only one prepared to take legal action… My office will fight every day…”
She did fight and treated President Trump as illegitimate, as promised when she ran for the office: “I’m running for attorney general, because I will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate president…”
In regular times, Letitia James would have been in prison now, awaiting the outcome of the automatic appeal.