Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

The Washington Post published a blistering editorial criticizing Biddle’s decision: “In this case the public could have been sure that Mr. Maloney would have pulled no punches, whether the evidence incriminated a conspirator or embarrassed one of his friends in Congress. Maybe that was why Congressional friends of the defendants hated and feared this prosecutor and publicly harassed Mr. Biddle with windy threats of investigation, with boasts of what they would do to the Department of Justice unless they got Mr. Maloney’s scalp. Now they have it.” — THINGS GOT WORSE for Maloney in the coming weeks. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5–2 decision, overturned the conviction he had won in the Viereck case. The majority found that the main fault was in the murkiness of language in the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Viereck, they decided, had possibly complied with the letter of the law by registering himself as an “author and a journalist” in the pay of Germans, even though he didn’t mention his voluminous German-funded work in Congress on a propaganda scheme dreamed up and directed by the Nazi high command. The court’s majority opinion basically missed the entire point of Viereck’s endeavors and his paymasters, but it didn’t stop at the nearest exit, where it could have; the opinion also made a frontal attack on William Power Maloney and his personal exuberance. “In his closing remarks to the jury, [Maloney] indulged in an appeal wholly irrelevant to any facts or issues in the cas...