Our long national nightmare is not over in this particularly unhinged situation. Last year, Heritage Foundation sued the Biden administration – specifically, the Department of Homeland Security – to get access to Prince Harry’s visa records. Heritage argued (poorly) that because Harry wrote about trying cocaine in his memoir, he never should have been given residence or a visa in America. Heritage waged this war for Harry’s visa records for seventeen, maybe eighteen months. Last month, the judge terminated Heritage’s lawsuit and basically said Harry has his right to privacy and that he wouldn’t allow Heritage to go on a fishing expedition through any foreign national’s private immigration records. We hoped it was over. It is not over. Heritage is once again creating content for the British press by arguing that their terminated lawsuit needs to be reviewed. Giant sigh…
A “unique” court case concerning the Duke of Sussex’s immigration records should be reopened because certain submissions by the US government were made in secret, it has been claimed. A judge ruled in September that Prince Harry’s US visa application should remain private, following an almost two-year legal battle surrounding his admission of drug taking.
The Heritage Foundation, a Washington DC-based think tank, failed in its bid to access the documents on the grounds that the Duke waived his right to privacy when he divulged personal details in his memoir. However, the foundation is now seeking to reopen the case on the basis that it was not granted access to private submissions made by the Biden administration to the judge. In a new court filing, it states that the way the case was conducted breached “iron-clad guardrails” on conducting ex-parte proceedings – those involving only one party.
The foundation claims in a 13-page motion, lodged with the court on Tuesday, that certain documents should have been reviewed in court before declarations were sought and that ex-parte proceedings were held without being recorded on the court file.
“Collectively, these errors were not harmless,” the think tank argues. The secrecy surrounding certain elements of the case left both the think tank and the public in the dark about the reasons behind the judge’s ruling, it claims. The “most obvious consequence”, it argues, is that its ability to prepare arguments on appeal is “severely compromised”. The motion acknowledges that the “unique” case was fraught with complexities but warns there is “ample evidence of agency bad faith”.
I’ve been covering this bullsh-t since it started, so I think I know what’s crawled up Heritage’s Christofascist ass. The judge in the case basically asked for DHS to hand over Harry’s records to the court so that the judge could do a simple, one-man review of the records to ensure that there was nothing to Heritage’s increasingly wild claims that Harry must have LIED in his visa application. The judge reviewed the records and made his ruling, terminating the case and saying Harry has every right to his privacy, meaning that the judge saw nothing that would indicate Harry lied or misrepresented anything in his application. Now Heritage is saying that THEY need to see the records too, because they were already submitted to the judge for review. That’s the whole thing, that’s what they’ve been trying to get their hands on this whole time. I’ve said this before, but this is such a bizarre side-quest for Heritage, considering that 99% of their time is spent writing Project 2025 and trying to implement Project 2025. Aren’t they also trying to start a war in Iran?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.