Why Scientology's fight over 'Snow White' files is coming up in Trump civil lawsuit

[Trump pal Dan Scavino is taking inspiration from Scientology's legal tactics]

Nonprofit news service NOTUS (News of the United States) yesterday noted an ironic legal situation involving President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino.

Although Scavino has been running Trump’s social media strategy for a decade, and presumably enjoys being a part of the second Trump presidential administration, in court Scavino is arguing that sealed records associating him with Trump should not be made public because of the likelihood that they will ruin his reputation.

“The current political climate and the observable news cycles over the last nine years have demonstrated that revealing inoffensive details about one’s involvement with President Trump’s administration, particularly in the matters discussed in the sealed exhibits, would likely lead to public degradation,” Scavino’s lawyer Mark P. Nobile told a DC court.

The sealed exhibits have to do with investigations of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, which is still the subject of civil lawsuits. And Scavino doesn’t want some of that evidence becoming public because, he argues, it doesn’t look good to be helping out Trump.

But then, the detail that really made it more interesting for us — and that Raw Story grabbed and put in its headline on its rewrite — was that for legal support Scavino’s attorneys are citing a 1980 case involving none other than the Church of Scientology.

As Jose Pagliery described it for NOTUS:

But the bulk of his argument for keeping it secret rests on the idea that whatever is in those exhibits would be embarrassing, with his lawyer relying on a legal precedent stemming from a 1980 case that frowned upon the way a lower court judge released records in a case involving the government seizure of some 50,000 documents from the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles.

Raw Story said essentially the same thing, but neither of them went into any detail about that 1980 Scientology case.

But, oh, do we know it well.

It makes up a substantial portion of our book about Paulette Cooper, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, and it relates, of course, to the “Snow White Program” — Scientology’s 1970s infiltration of the US government — and the subsequent 1977 FBI raid of church offices in Los Angeles and DC.

Here’s a very brief outline of what went down, and we hope you have a chance to take in the longer version that we put together in Unbreakable.

After a couple of years of spying, infiltration, break-ins and burglaries at numerous government agencies, a couple of Scientology operatives were stopped and questioned by one of the FBI’s first female agents, Christine Hansen, at the DC Law Library in June, 1976. One of those operatives, Michael Meisner, was put under heavy guard by Scientology after his arrest as the church tried to figure out how to keep its involvement a secret. After Meisner got sick of his confinement, he made a run for it in 1977, informed the FBI about what was going on, and that resulted in the July 8, 1977 raid.

Scientology reacted to the raid with heavy lawfare, arguing that it was an illegal search, and demanded that the seized evidence be returned.

How many documents were taken in the raid? The court records cited in yesterday’s stories say 50,000. But Scientology itself wrote a history of the Snow White prosecution and said it was 48,149 files with a total of 100,124 pages.

Scientology’s heavy attack produced results: While the court considered the church’s objections, it instructed the FBI and Justice Department to keep quiet about what was in the documents. It was a smart move by the church, as news of the raid quickly faded in the press.

But then, in April 1978 there was a bombshell: The Washington Post, in two stories on April 28 and 29, shocked readers by saying that the FBI’s evidence described something that called itself a church but operated more like a criminal intelligence agency, with elaborate spying operations spelled out in detail. In particular, wrote Post reporter Ron Shaffer, the church had targeted a woman named Paulette Cooper.

It was the first public acknowledgment of what Paulette had been saying for years, that she was the subject of a complex and sadistic operation to silence her, drive her insane, or get her imprisoned.

And Shaffer’s stories, about Paulette and also about the bizarre targeting of Clearwater, Florida mayor Gabe Cazares, reflected only a tiny portion of what the FBI was sitting on.

Later that year, in August 1978, nine top Scientology officials, including Mary Sue Hubbard — wife of founder L. Ron Hubbard — were indicted for conspiracy and various other charges. (Two more Scientologists would be extradited from England later for a total of 11 facing prosecution.)

The case went through a couple of judges before Judge Charles Richey was assigned to it in February 1979. That summer, he traveled to Los Angeles with two marshals for protection in an effort to make the preliminary moves in the criminal case more convenient for the defendants, who were in LA. And mainly, the fight that summer was over Scientology’s argument that the raid had been illegal and the evidence tainted. When Judge Richey ruled that wasn’t the case and the Justice Department could proceed, the nine defendants decided to plead guilty, foregoing a trial.

It’s pretty clear to us that they did this in part to keep those 100,000 pages of evidence from being used in court and therefore available to the public. The nine initial defendants fell on their swords, and it seems obvious it was to protect Scientology from even more scrutiny.

But then Judge Richey did something kind of remarkable. Even if only a tiny percentage of those 100,000 pages had been used so far in the case, the judge and the FBI knew the picture those documents revealed of this nefarious organization.

And so, after Judge Richey sentenced the nine in December 1979, he announced that he was releasing a large percentage of the evidence to the public.

Scientology blew a gasket.

But after an initial appeal failed, Judge Richey was good as his word and in January 1980 he released 23,000 pages of the Snow White evidence.

Paulette Cooper and Nan McLean were in line that initial day to be among the first people to get their hands on those documents. So were numerous journalists, who wrote about the astonishing things described in them. Here it was, all spelled out in black and white: The Church of Scientology targeting people with elaborate schemes of retaliation, extortion, intimidation, and blackmail.

On February 21, 1980, a DC appeals court held a hearing on Scientology’s objections to Judge Richey’s decision to unseal the files. That’s the case that Dan Scavino is now citing, 45 years later.

After that hearing, there would be a delay of several months as the appeals court considered the various arguments about what Judge Richey had done.

But while that was going on, Scientology was targeting Judge Richey in a very different way. Here’s how we described it in Unbreakable:

[Private investigator Richard Bast] nosed around until he made contact with a federal marshal named Jim Perry who had been one of Judge Richey’s bodyguards during the Los Angeles trial in the summer of 1979. Bast discovered that he had a mutual friend with Perry, who told Bast that Perry had been grousing about missing out on some disability pay. Bast engineered a meeting with the unhappy marshal, and used his inside information to get the man talking. Eventually, after he’d loosened up, Perry said that he’d seen quite a lot of things in his nine years as a marshal, enough to make a good book. Bast encouraged him, and said he’d pay Perry an advance of $2,000 to produce a manuscript.

Perry got to work, not realizing that he was actually writing notes for a Scientology operation. And his notes included the allegation that during the summer trial, when Richey was with Perry and another marshal staying at the Brentwood Holiday Inn, the judge had paid for prostitutes.

Bast told Perry that his book needed confirmation before they could print such an allegation, and that’s the excuse he used for flying Perry out to Los Angeles to track down one of the women who had supposedly been paid by Richey. Bast then paid the woman $300 a day for her time as he interviewed her and had her sign a sworn statement that Richey had paid her for sex. In July 1980, Judge Richey formally pulled out of the trial against the two remaining Snow White defendants, citing health reasons.

For his work for the Church of Scientology, Bast was paid $321,000 plus $84,000 in expenses.

Before Judge Richey pulled out of the case, the DC appeals court made its decision, written by Judge Patricia McGowan Wald: The court decided that Scientology had a point that only a tiny portion of the evidence had actually been used in the prosecution before the defendants had pleaded guilty, so why was Judge Richey giving the public much more of the evidence when the trial had been averted?

Meanwhile, Judge George MacKinnon wrote a scathing dissent to Wald’s opinion, pointing out how naive the appeals court was being.

“My dissent from this disposition is based on my conclusion that the disclosure was not only warranted, but required,” he wrote. And MacKinnon clearly seemed to understand what the case was about:

“There is nothing to the point that the Church has a different interest from the defendants. The individual defendants were not acting for themselves. They were acting for the Church. As charged in the indictment the Church of Scientology was organized with ‘a department known as the Guardian's Office [which] had responsibility to promote the interests of Scientology by covertly identifying, locating, and obtaining all Scientology-related information in the possession of various individuals, government agencies and private organizations. Each of the Guardian Offices was composed of five bureaus including the Information Bureau which was assigned the responsibility for the conduct of covert operations including the collection of data and documents of interest to Scientology.’”

Yes, exactly. But the appeals court agreed with Scientology’s position that the seizing of its records was a privacy matter. MacKinnon understood the truth: These documents described a criminal enterprise that the public deserved to know about. “The Church of Scientology wants secrecy, not privacy,” he said.

Wald’s ruling remanded the case back to Richey, asking him to give more specific reasons for releasing the evidence, so the appeals court could then decide if those reasons were valid. Richey initially responded that he was standing behind his decision to release the records, but then he left the case and the judge who replaced him decided not to review the documents. The appeals court had them sealed again.

Sadly, today courts tend to treat Scientology more in the manner of Judge Wald than Judge MacKinnon, and continue to give Scientology the benefit of the doubt, still seduced by the idea that it’s a “church” and not a ruthless, mafia-like outfit run like an intelligence agency that literally took down a sitting US district judge with a private investigator operation while an appeals court was considering his heroic act of releasing Scientology’s damning documents.

Thanks to Paulette Cooper and journalists like Ron Shaffer, we can still see many of the documents that Judge Richey made public before they were sealed again, including, of course, “Operation Freakout,” the one that was designed to destroy Paulette.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see this case brought up again 45 years later because Dan Scavino doesn’t want people to see what he was doing for Donald Trump. We don’t really care too much whether he wins that argument or not. We’d rather keep politics confined to our “Lowdown” side blog. But as we’ve been telling you for several weeks now, it’s been alarming to see so many connections between the new White House administration and Scientology.

President Trump appointed Scientology’s wealthiest donor Trish Duggan to the board of trustees at the Kennedy Center. He named OT Scientologist and attorney John P. Coale to be his deputy envoy to Ukraine while key negotiations are going on. Another major Scientology donor, Grant Cardone, spoke at the Madison Square Garden rally a week before the election. And Pam Bondi, the new US Attorney General, has a long relationship with Scientology and has praised its “civil rights” agenda.

We also pointed out the connections between Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to OT Scientologist attorneys who are leading a years-long litigation war against the manufacturers of the devices used in ECT.

With top donors and OT Scientologists like Duggan, Cardone, and Coale so tight with the administration, and with Bondi at Justice, we agree with the late Mike Rinder, who said after the election that he did not expect anything to be done by the federal government in the next four years about Scientology’s controversies or abuses.

When will this country see another figure like Snow White prosecutor Ray Banoun or a Judge Charles Richey who will truly investigate the menace that is Scientology?

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Patricia 'Trish' Nichol, 1959-2025

We are very sad to learn of the passing of one of our most treasured members of the Underground Bunker, Trish Nichol, who died of cancer on March 7.

You knew her as Daisy.

She was a frequent commenter at our main site but then switched over to the Lowdown almost exclusively three years ago. We loved her sense of humor.

M.C. Mayo let us know she’d heard from Daisy several weeks ago, who had said she was ill. And then she alerted us to an obituary that was posted by the family. Here’s a portion of it…

Nichol, Patricia “Trish” Louise (March 24, 1959 – March 7, 2025), a resident of Tillsonburg, at the Tillsonburg District Memorial Hospital, on March 7th, 2025, at the age of 65. Trish was born in Tillsonburg, to her parents Tom Nichol Sr. and Ishbel (Hamilton) Nichol. In her working years, Trish was a dedicated nurse in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and later a caregiver for 18 years for her mother Ishbel. She is lovingly remembered by her brother Terry (wife Linda) Nicol, of London. Special aunt to Joseph (Hadas) and to their children Jordan and Tom; Sarah (Nadov). Also survived by her close friend Celeste. Predeceased by her brother Tom Nichol Jr.

Just to give a sense of what Daisy’s posts were like, this is something she posted on Christmas night four years ago.

On days like Christmas when we all fill our bellies with yummy food, fun, family, and access to anti-depressants, it is so sad to be resigned to one's horrible fate. I am so grateful that I made a wrong turn at the AA meeting and landed in this community instead. I wish all of the intriguing daily information about Scientology were in the past tense, and the tragic characters were fiction. Not profound or helpful, just my endorphin-fueled musings after a long content day. Night to all my bunk mates and you too, Tony. You all made my Xmas merry.

Thank you for being a part of our lives, Trish.

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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea

Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology

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