Lafourcade said she was sufficiently concerned by the American approach to notify the foreign ministry in Paris. The foreign ministry declined to comment.
The meeting was organized by the U.S. embassy in Paris, and came two months after Le Pen was convicted of embezzlement, for which she was handed a five-year ban on running for public office that knocked her out of the 2027 presidential election. Le Pen’s appeal against her ban is ongoing and a verdict is expected later this year.
Samson, a political appointee who recently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, according to his LinkedIn profile, previously wrote an article for the State Department in which he described Europe as “a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”
Also attending the meeting with Lafourcade was Christopher Anderson, a diplomat from the same department where Samson serves as a senior policy adviser — the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
The embassy had arranged for the duo to meet with Lafourcade in her capacity as secretary general of France’s National Consultative Committee on Human Rights, a U.N.- accredited body that advises the French government on human rights but isn’t directly involved in ongoing legal cases.
Lafourcade said the conversation had begun with a discussion of freedom of speech, then “fairly quickly it came to Marine Le Pen’s legal situation,” a topic to which “they kept circling back.”