Magali Lafourcade, Secretary General of France’s independent human rights institution the Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme (CDCDH), told AFP she was approached a few months ago by State Department adviser Samuel Samson and Christopher Anderson, a diplomat from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
She says that the pair asked her about the criminal case involving French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who was convicted of embezzlement in a French court last year, and is currently appealing against her conviction and sentence, which includes a five-year ban on running for office.
Samson had previously called for American taxpayer money to support Le Pen, who leads the Rassemblement National party.
According to Lafourcade, the pair were looking for, “evidence to support a theory that could perhaps have been used to spread disinformation or manipulate public debate”.
Le Pen’s political future remains legally uncertain. She has been in court in the past week, appealing against her conviction in March 2025 for embezzlement relating to a ‘fake jobs’ scheme in the European Parliament.
The court found that the party employed parliamentary assistants, paid with EU funding, who in fact did no work for the Parliament and in some cases had never even been to Brussels or Strasbourg.
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The court is set to rule on her appeal against that conviction later this year.
Analysts who followed the original case closely say that it is unlikely that Le Pen will be able to overturn the embezzlement conviction — the court saw extensive documentation about the fake jobs scheme, including emails from Le Pen herself indicating that she knew that the assistants in question were not working at the European Parliament.
She may, however, be able to convince judges to impose a lighter sentence than at the original trial, including overturning the politics ban which, as things stand, prevents her from being a candidate in the 2027 presidential election.
Lafourcade said the American representatives were convinced that the trial was political “aimed at preventing [Le Pen] from running for president or ostracising her for purely political reasons”.
They argued that she had been “unfairly treated” and was the victim of “a political conviction”.
At the time, US President Donald Trump said Le Pen was the target of “a witch hunt”.
Lafourcade said she took the unusual decision to report the discussion to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that same day — which she would usually not do, she said, “because, as an independent institution, we don’t report on our exchanges with diplomats”.
A spokesperson for the US State Department confirmed the Paris visit by the duo but dismissed the interference allegations as “false rumours”, according to Politico.
It is not the first time Donald Trump’s administration has been suspected of interference in the Le Pen trial. In early January, the president of the Paris court pointed out that magistrates involved in the initial trial had received threats of US sanctions.
In December, the French former EU commissioner Thierry Breton was banned from entering America, due to his work on the EU's Digital Services Act, which imposes tighter controls on tech companies.
The US has also imposed sanctions on two judges at the International Criminal Court who rejected an appeal from Israel on war crimes charges - being sanctioned does not just mean a ban on travel, it means that the person, and their family, is also barred from a range of US based companies and services including internet platforms and financial services.
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