A lawsuit against the Louisiana State Police, filed by Harvard Law professor Thomas Frampton on behalf of New Orleans civil rights attorney William Most, has stumbled across evidence that the law enforcement agency is conducting an investigation based on a list of individuals named in a fabricated list of anti-fascist activists that originated on 8Chan and spread through white-supremacist online media outlets.

While seeking internal Louisiana State Police records that might contain evidence of far-right and racist sentiment among LSP employees, Most — who has previously represented individuals arrested while protesting the police shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge — discovered that a document labeled “full list of antifa.docx” had been passed around the LSP email server. The agency disclosed the existence of the document to Most when it turned up in a search for LSP records for “far-right catchphrases,” including “white genocide.”

The filing notes that while “none of these phrases appear in the body of the emails turned over to Mr. Most [...] the term ‘white genocide’ appear[s] as a comment” on a post titled “Full list of antifa members” which appeared on 8Chan three days before a similarly named file made its way through the LSP email system. The 8Chan post, which was picked up by the Neo-Nazi website Stormfront that same day, purports to be a database containing information on members of a national Antifa organization. In reality, however, no such formal organization exists, and the list primarily consisted of the personal information of people who had protested Donald Trump at some point.

When Most and Frampton requested to view the “full list of antifa.docx” file to confirm their suspicion that Louisiana State Police had been passing around a fabricated piece of Neo-Nazi propaganda, however, an LSP record-keeper refused to comply, writing in an email to Frampton claiming that:

The document at issue is part of an ongoing criminal investigation. It was provided by a Confidential Informant and release of the document would have the potential to undermine the investigation. [...] It was sent among LSP investigators for law enforcement purposes.

A portion of Frampton’s response is screencapped below: