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Some of Prince Harry’s visa documents will be made public after the Department of Homeland Security agreed to release them. Lawyers for DHS said that three items can be unsealed with redactions, giving the biggest insight yet into whether the Duke of Sussex lied on his immigration forms about his drug use.
However none of a fourth document can be made public without releasing information a judge has ruled should stay private. The latest twist in the case came days after Donald Trump called himself ‘King’ in portrait posted a Truth Social showing the president donning a royal crown.
Trump has previously said he wouldn’t deport Prince Harry , but that he was only giving the Duke a break because ‘he’s got enough problems with his wife.’ ‘She’s terrible’, Trump said.
The case was brought to a court in Washington by the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank. Heritage sued DHS last year after the agency, which oversees immigration, refused a Freedom of Information request for Harry’s files. Heritage claims that Harry may have lied on the forms under the section which asks if you have been a drug user.
In his memoir, ‘Spare’, and his Netflix TV series Harry talked about using cannabis, cocaine and magic mushrooms. In a filing, John Bardo, a lawyer for DHS, said it had ‘determined that redacted versions of items 1-3 can be made public’. ‘Specifically, Defendant would propose redacting all information in these items that would reveal information that the Court has determined Defendant can withhold’, the filing said.
Bardo said that the materials would be given to Judge Carl Nichols by March 6th. But with respect to a fourth item, DHS does not believe it is possible to remove any of the existing redactions ‘without releasing information that the Court has determined (DHS) can withhold’, the filing stated. No further details were given on what the four items are. The document was filed weeks after Judge Nichols said that he wanted to make the ‘maximum amount’ of material public about Harry’s visa forms.
In September the judge had refused the request from Heritage to release all the documents because the Duke had a right to privacy. But after a hearing he reconsidered and said he wanted to reveal as much as he could. ‘In my view that has to happen’, Judge Nichols said, adding that he wanted to take the release of files ‘in stages’.
Speaking after the hearing, Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at Heritage, appealed to Trump to make the files public. He said that the president had put ‘border security and the application of the rule of law a top priority’. The hearing was the first since Trump took office as President for a second time.
Trump and the Duchess of Sussex have publicly sparred since 2016 when she called him a ‘misogynist’ and ‘divisive’. The President responded by calling her ‘nasty’, though he later took it back and said she was ‘very nice’.
Speaking in February last year, Trump said he ‘wouldn’t protect’ Harry if he was re-elected, an ominous warning for the Duke who moved to the U.S. in 2020 after stepping back from being a working royal.
The President has said that Harry ‘betrayed’ his grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, in an apparent reference to how the Duke made private conversations. Harry’s representatives have declined to comment on the case.
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