BATON ROUGE – A Harvard Law School lecturer is suing the Louisiana State Police to release a purported list of members of antifa that originated on white supremacist and Neo-Nazi websites.
The roster itself appears to be a hoax that originated a year ago on Neo-Nazi websites like Stormfront and the far-right conspiracy theory website 8Chan, according to the lawsuit filed by Harvard Law School Lecturer Thomas Frampton in Baton Rouge state court on behalf of New Orleans civil rights attorney William Most.
Most filed a public records request in May seeking all Louisiana State Police emails containing hate speech and racist catchphrases, such as “white genocide.”
After months of delay, the LSP initially refused to hand over “thousands of internal emails” containing such phrases, according to Most.
Eventually, a batch of 64 emails were handed over, and Most noticed that a document entitled “full list of antifa.docx” had been making the rounds among high-ranking LSP officials and local law enforcement officials.
When most requested a copy of the “antifa” document, the LSP said “releasing the document could ‘compromise’ an ongoing criminal investigation in which LSP anticipates arrests, and reveal the identity of its ‘Confidential Informant,’” according to Most.
The actual document originated on 8Chan, was popularized by Neo-Nazi websites like Stormfront, and contains the names of thousands of ordinary, law-abiding citizens who signed an online petition against President Trump, according to the lawsuit.