Noah Peters
After Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal, several commentators called for Rittenhouse to sue the many media figures who, for more than a year, falsely branded him a white supremacist and murderer…Our justice system, however, throws up several obstacles in the path of libel plaintiffs like Rittenhouse. Noah Peters in The Federalist
Noah Peters is an attorney who has been floated as a potential Labor Department appointee. In September 2019, Peters was announced by Trump appointee Colleen Duffy Kiko to be Solicitor for the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), a career appointment at an agency tasked with aiding labor-management relations for millions of federal employees. In that role, Peters aided and defended Trump appointees’ anti-union FLRA policies that went against decades of the agency’s own precedents, many of which have since been or are in the process of being undone, such as a rule that made it easier for some workers to be free riders on union-negotiated benefits by more easily revoking paying dues.
In December 2021, Peters argued that “it would seem fair that [teen-aged shooter Kyle] Rittenhouse, whose life was ravaged by biased media coverage, would be able to reap some measure of restitution now that he’s been acquitted.“ That was after Rittenhouse fatally shot two protesters and seriously injured another with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle he brought to a Black Lives Matter protest. Rittenhouse has parlayed his notoriety into getting platformed on the right-wing speaking circuit. In the 2021 article, Peters lamented that “libel victims” like Rittenhouse, in his view, face many legal obstacles (as noted at top).
As a lawyer, Peters has also aided the gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, in innumerable ways, such as challenging state divestment efforts in response to the mass shooting of students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. He also attacked the Biden administration’s response to a mass murderer’s use of a stabilizing brace on an AR-15 pistol to gun down 10 people at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, by suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to enjoin its efforts to reclassify brace-equipped pistols as short-barreled rifles. Peters also “helped represent” the NRA in a case where it and some of its top executives were found to have violated the law through the NRA’s corrupt use of donations; as state Attorney General Leticia James noted in the complaint: “As a New York charity, the NRA is legally required to serve the interests of its membership and advance its charitable mission.”
Peters also represented white nationalist Jared Taylor–self-proclaimed “advocate for white interests”—who sued Twitter in 2018 for removing his account. Peters claimed Twitter’s approach to banning and suspending accounts, including those known for promoting racist viewpoints, was “a prospect that should terrify everyone.” Before he joined the Trump administration he also represented a Google employee who claimed it allegedly discriminated against people with conservative views and asserted the company was a “liberal-dominated monopoly which uses its market power to promote its favored left-wing ideology.”
(This entry was updated by the editors on August 19. 2024.)
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