For the past year, the Heritage Foundation, an American right-wing think tank, has been engaged in a targeted harassment campaign against Prince Harry. Heritage has marched into court multiple times to try to force the Department of Homeland Security to “release” Harry’s visa application. DHS has refused, saying that every visa applicant has the right to privacy. Heritage’s deranged argument is that Harry wrote about using drugs in his memoir, and then something something, what if he lied on his visa application? That’s it. That’s their whole legal strategy, it’s based on “what if” and endless and baseless supposition. Well, Heritage was back in court on Friday and DHS’s lawyers tried a new strategy. Anti-Sussex Derangers are always calling Harry and Meghan liars, so DHS was like “Harry could have been lying in his book, who even knows, a memoir is not a court of law.”
The Duke of Sussex’s admission in his memoir that he took drugs is not “proof” and could have been embellished to “sell books”, a lawyer for the US government has argued in court. The Biden administration is resisting demands for Prince Harry’s US visa application to be made public to see if he lied about his drug use when he moved to America in 2020.
As a federal court in Washington began hearing the case, John Bardo for the Department of Homeland Security claimed the revelations in the prince’s memoir, Spare, were not “sworn testimony or proof” that he took drugs.
“Just saying something in a book doesn’t make it true,” Bardo said. The prince’s book was written “for a commercial audience” and does “not necessarily tell the full story,” he added.
Judge Carl Nichols, overseeing the case, said early in the hearing that he was uncomfortable referring to the duke as Prince Harry, deciding that it was too informal. “You wouldn’t call me Judge Carl,” he told the court.
Under US law, applicants who are “determined to be a drug abuser” are generally denied a visa, although the government is permitted to make exceptions. Past drug use has caused problems for other celebrities seeking a US visa.
“The duke explicitly admitted at length to drug use” in his book, said Samuel Dewey, a lawyer for the Heritage Foundation, holding a copy of Spare in court. Dewey added that Harry had admitted to taking drugs after entering the US and had not denied the revelations in his memoir under cross-examination in other court cases in the UK. “Spare is a valid admission” of drug use, Dewey said.
The government has refused to reveal any of Harry’s immigration documents, even refusing to say what type of visa he was granted. “There are multiple lawful ways that the duke might have entered the US and do not show government impropriety,” Bardo said.
The judge suggested that the questions surrounding the prince’s visa raised a “suite of red flags”. He confirmed that he had not looked at any of the prince’s visa documents to avoid prejudicing his questioning at the hearing, but said he will now decide “pretty soon” on whether to order the government to submit Harry’s visa declarations for him to view in confidence. A ruling is expected in the coming weeks.
Apparently, the judge ordered the lawyers to refer to Harry as “the Duke of Sussex” throughout the arguments because the judge was so uncomfortable with the informality of calling him “Prince Harry.” As for the DHS stuff… yeah, you can argue that the book is an admission, but Harry wasn’t “under oath” when he wrote the book. There’s also a difference between “drug abusers” and “drug users.” The foreign nationals who have visa issues because of drugs have usually been convicted or charged with drug crimes internationally. Harry has never been charged with anything, nor has anyone credibly claimed that he is a habitual drug abuser (or even habitual drug user). Saying “I did coke once when I was a teenager” in a book or interview is not the same thing as saying it under oath in court, nor does it follow that Harry lied about anything in his visa application.
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