On May 28, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department would begin restricting visas for those who abuse the law to censor Americans for their online speech. He lamented that “foreign officials have taken flagrant censorship actions against U.S. tech companies and U.S. citizens and residents.”
I have felt this tangentially. The Turkish government has peppered me with lawsuits since 2010 because I criticized its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2017, Turkey unsuccessfully sought to have Twitter close my account; in December 2024, under owner Elon Musk’s control and at Turkey’s request, X censored to its European audience an article I authored.
I have had it easy. Turkey’s reputation as the world’s greatest jailer of journalists means no one takes its criminal complaints seriously.
Other European countries, however, weaponize their reputations and their legal processes to harass Americans for truthful speech inside America. They use the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process to harass Americans to protect their reputations or to shield themselves or citizens from criticism. While the State Department denies it plays politics, partisan political appointees during the Biden administration cynically encouraged European partners to target their American critics.
Rubio means to counter such practices with new visa sanctions against foreign officials. But announcing a policy is not enough; he needs to implement it. Switzerland’s targeting of Alan White, the previous director of investigations for the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the lead investigator for the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, should be the test case.
The Swiss harassment of White should make Americans’ blood boil.
Alain Werner, executive director of the Swiss nongovernmental organization Civitas Maxima, was caught red-handed coaching supposed war crimes witnesses. As a result of the false testimony, U.S., U.K., and European courts imprisoned innocent men and women; some died in prison. At trial, however, witnesses recanted and the cases fell apart.
In one case involving Civitas Maxima, the accused had an alibi: He was under 24/7 U.N. protection as a confidential informant when the Civitas Maxima witness perjured himself by pretending to be an eyewitness to crimes.
As I testified at a congressional hearing in June 2024, there is a profit motive. Civitas Maxima issued press releases and raised millions of dollars through grants, enabling it to “expose” other war criminals, no matter that most were innocent and some were even confidential informants for the U.N.’s Sierra Leone court.
White blew the whistle on this scheme, which also involved American NGOs that had given him grants and then circled the wagons when multiple jurisdictions exposed the malfeasance.
After White helped expose these facts, Werner launched a criminal defamation case in a Swiss court, accusing White of criticizing him unfairly in an email to a third party. Werner’s case was without merit, but playing the victim allowed Werner to sidestep responsibility.
Biden administration officials Beth Van Schaack and David Mandel-Anthony, who had sponsored Werner and Civitas Maxima in both the NGO world and the State Department, reportedly helped coordinate the meritless complaint against White through the Department of Justice, effectively abusing U.S. law to silence a whistleblower who had been a decadeslong civil servant.
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The FBI visited White’s home unannounced to question him on behalf of the Swiss court; he directed them to his attorney. A catch-22 developed: The FBI refused to share the questions unless White agreed to answer them; White refused to commit to an interview until the Swiss court provided its questions. As a result of the impasse, the Swiss prosecutor convicted White in absentia without considering incontrovertible evidence that courts on three continents had accepted.
The case is chilling. A Swiss judge and an allegedly corrupt Swiss citizen sought to abuse a legal process to silence a whistleblower. The ball is now in Rubio’s court. Will he revoke or blacklist Werner and Swiss officials who colluded in a conspiracy of censorship? Or was the State Department’s new visa and free speech policy empty posturing?
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.