Libertarian Party Prospects for 2025: It Starts With Discovery
Angela McArdle has resigned, but her replacement doesn't seem to have a plan to get the Libertarian Party back on a track for growth. What must be done?
Dear Friends,
Since the Mises Caucus takeover of the Libertarian National Committee in 2022, the Libertarian Party has been on a constant downward spiral of fewer members, fewer donors, and fewer candidates. Angela McArdle worked tirelessly to raise funds for anything other than the Libertarian Party. She raised funds for mysterious nonprofits she controls and she used party funds to pay her household members, all at the same time that incoming revenue was dropping fast.
This self-dealing and corruption was enough to justify, not just one, but two derivative lawsuits seeking to make Angela McArdle comply with the legal requirements for a Chair of a D.C. nonprofit organization. With the assistance of the Veritas Law Firm, Beth Vest and Caryn Ann Harlos applied the legal heat to McArdle, beating back motions to dismiss and forcing the cases to proceed to discovery.
Discovery, for the non-lawyers who may be reading this, is the part of a lawsuit where each party has to answer questions and produce documents about the case. The courts have a discovery process, which compels parties to share basic facts about the case with each other, avoids trial by surprise and can often help a case settle, as each side learns more about what the evidence would show to a jury.
Discovery is the last thing that a defendant wants to go through if she had communications with her domestic partner Austin Padgett about setting up a shell company to avoid LNC policies against the party employing household members of officers, since those would have to be produced in discovery. Discovery is the last thing a defendant’s co-conspirators would want to go through, knowing that their communications about violating the conflict of interest policy in order to get a major payout to a nonprofit controlled by another LNC board member would have to be produced in discovery. Documents and records will have to be produced about Angela McArdle’s personal financial benefits from her control of the Libertarian Party.
So when discovery started, Angela McArdle resigned. My January column goes into much greater detail.
She resigned hoping that a resignation would let her avoid discovery, even though her resignation strongly implies that discovery was going to produce evidence that would help the Libertarian National Committee move past this whole sordid affair, knowing who participated and who didn’t, knowing how many board members violated their own fiduciary duties to the party under D.C. nonprofit code and the party bylaws.
If you are a current or former member of the Libertarian Party, you deserve to know what that discovery will show about the extent of Angela McArdle’s malfeasance. Only a court can force McArdle to cooperate, no investigation conducted by LNC members or an accounting firm can compel her to produce the evidence of what happened, that will help the LNC make the changes necessary to prevent something like this from ever happening again.
And that’s why the LNC should direct its counsel in the derivative suits to continue moving the case forward through the discovery process, rather than letting her sweep it under the rug. Counsel for the LNC have a duty to defend suits alleging errors and omissions by board members, but when the officer appears to have engaged in corrupt behavior, the best interest of the organization is to make the officer who engaged in the corruption provide the evidence necessary for restitution and a full accounting of the wrongdoing; that accounting will help the Libertarian Party move forward with the confidence of libertarians around the country who stopped donating due to the unethical and illegal behavior of Angela McArdle and a confederacy of Mises Caucus cronies like Michael Heise.
Moreover, the LNC should pay the plaintiffs costs of bringing this litigation. Beth Vest and Caryn Ann Harlos stood up to blow the whistle when nobody else would. Their relentless pursuit of justice, in the face of vicious personal attacks and frivolous attempts to remove them from the LNC for standing up for the legal rights of nonprofit supporters to have their leadership put the organization first and not engage in corrupt and conflicted financial transactions that she concealed from the board. The actions McArdle took are criminal, even if the current MAGA US Attorney for the District of Columbia wouldn’t prosecute it.
Unfortunately, due to Angela McArdle’s disastrous tenure as Chair of the LNC, revenues have dropped to half of what they were immediately before she took office and the party has giant credit card balances. None of that is going to change until Stephen Nekhaila and the other new leadership of the LNC present the membership with a full accounting of how much Angela McArdle siphoned from the Libertarian Party and who she worked with to do it.
My modest proposal is that the LNC allow targeted donations to the Legal Fund specifically to cover the plaintiffs costs in bringing the cases and getting through the discovery process. That way, people who want to see the discovery process through to its conclusion can provide support for that crucial first step before the Libertarian Party can start raising money in 2025.
The Libertarian National Committee is meeting tonight, Sunday March 2nd at 7:00 pm Eastern time. You can find details to watch the meeting live in this Third Party Watch article. If you are able to, contact your LNC members by emailing entire.lnc@lp.org with your message about this idea to move forward in a positive direction from Angela McArdle’s abuse of her power and regain the confidence of the over 50% of donors who have walked away from the Libertarian Party because of it.
Truth and reconciliation are the first steps to building the kind of Libertarian Party we need in 2025.
Yours truly,
Nick
P.S. If you want to directly support the derivative lawsuits ahead of any LNC action, you can contribute directly on the Veritas Law Firm website, just put “LNC Derivative Suit” in the Reference field. Grassroots financial support is what helped us get this far, please help us finish strong.