The original draft of this email was sent Washington Post byline reporter Shane Harris and two Post colleagues, Julie Tate and Matt Zapotosky, who contributed to the story from Washington. It was also copied to Thomas Brennan, a contributing independent journalist in Greenville, N.C., where the story is centered, several Post editors, and public information officers at the Greenville Police Department, the Pitt County district attorney’s office and the Saudi Embassy here in Washington.
Dear Shane, Julie and Matt,
One needn’t defend foreigners who actually commit crimes here to concede that Saudi Arabia and every other country in the world would be crazy not to protect their citizens, by any means necessary, from the politically motivated, race-fevered prosecutions that have now become all the rage in America [“Saudi Embassy helps citizens flee U.S. justice,” A1, June 16].
Like so many who’d never known a loving father’s discipline or learned lessons about gentlemanly comportment, Raekwon Moore’s first inclination back in Oct. 2018 was to throw down when two Saudi students protested the vulgar, inconsiderate noise pollution blasting from the SUV he was riding in. And like that of so many other black man-children in recent years — from Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown to Atlanta’s taser thief Rayshard Brooks and George Floyd himself — Raekwon’s unfathered urge toward physicality over rationality led directly, if sadly, to his death.
The Greenville Police presumably concluded as much when they looked at the surveillance video that showed Raekwon charging out of the SUV and escalating a verbal beef into a physical assault. Police and an unnamed assistant district attorney reasonably decided at that point to release the Saudis for having done little more than protect themselves, albeit with a knife, and so the Saudis and their embassy-provided defense counsel believed they were in the clear.
But when the courthouse grapevine began whispering about the Pitt County D.A. initiating grand jury proceedings and seeking murder indictments, the Saudi students and embassy attorneys were right to suspect political motivations and fear a media-pleasing show trial that was sure to come. Like other prosecutors with a yen for the spotlight these days, the D.A. apparently felt the need to blame somebody other than a dead young black man for the outcome of his risky behavior. And since charges of criminally negligent homicide or manslaughter weren’t likely to bring CNN and MSNBC cameras to sleepy Pitt County, the D.A. went for broke and succeeded in ginning up first-degree murder charges, even though, as you report, it’s “not clear what evidence persuaded [the D.A.] that the [Saudis] had not acted in self-defense” since “the case files are sealed.” How convenient.
In any case, this Kafkaesque over-charging left Saudi officials with little choice but to whisk their citizens out of the U.S. and home to safety. Remember Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning film “Argo” based on the CIA’s dramatic rescue of U.S. embassy staff from the clutches of Iranian revolutionaries? Same thing.
Saudi and other foreign diplomats can see that America’s woke media, including the Post, New York Times, NPR, CNN and others, tell incessant lies about police and otherwise try to paint every fatherless black ne’er-do-well as a saintly martyr. They know grandstanding prosecutors are shamelessly driven by such media coverage and are willing to weight the scales of justice against police, small business owners or anyone else with the temerity to defend himself against such ne’er-do-wells. So, as the 2019 Justice Department memo you cite predicts, we’ll likely see more embassy-orchestrated flights out of the country as our so-called justice system is perverted and, for the time being, cannot be trusted to render fair and impartial verdicts because media, many politicians and activists-poised-to-riot are demanding that certain defendants be found “Guilty!”
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.