Two policemen violated the rights of a protester when they arrested him last year “at the behest of” the wealthy activist who led a conservative overhaul of the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday.
The federal false-arrest lawsuit is bolstered by a 52-minute dashcam video that captures audio of police talking with Leonard Leo, who accused Eli Durand-McDonnell of cursing at him and his family on a street in Northeast Harbor. Leo’s claim led police to go outside and arrest Durand-McDonnell as he demonstrated by the home while the camera rolled.
The suit and the audio are a revealing look behind closed doors as one of the country’s most powerful brokers at the center of a vast conservative network talks with local police over how to handle a protester furious with Leo’s pivotal role in overhauling the U.S. Supreme Court.
The suit says the officers “made this illegal and retaliatory arrest to silence Durand-McDonnell’s free speech and at the direct behest of Leo, a powerful and wealthy conservative political activist who has used millions of dollars as political speech to influence American politics and courts.”
Durand-McDonnell, 24, is the plaintiff in the federal lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Bangor against the two officers who arrested him — Lt. Kevin Edgecomb of the Mount Desert Police Department and Officer Nathan Formby of the Bar Harbor Police Department.
It seeks an unspecified amount of damages, and Leo is not named in the...
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