The Libertarian Party is featuring a convicted child sex offender at an anti-war rally taking place in Washington, D.C., according to a website for the protest.
On Feb. 19, the party and other aligned organizations are hosting a “Rage Against the War Machine” rally at the Lincoln Memorial and will march to the White House to demand peace negotiations, the disbanding of NATO, and a slashing of the Pentagon’s budget. One speaker for the event is slated to be Scott Ritter, however, who is a convicted sex offender.
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Between 1991 and 1998, Ritter was a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, overseeing efforts to disarm weapons of mass destruction. While Ritter’s former U.N. job is listed in his bio on the protest’s website, key details in connection to his arrests are not disclosed.
A 2009 police sting led to the arrest of Ritter, who sent sexual messages to a detective posing as an underage girl, the Guardian reported. Ritter, who was found guilty on six charges, including unlawful contact with a minor, masturbated in front of the detective.
The ex-U.N. employee ended up serving roughly two years in prison, even though all six charges carried up to seven years in prison. Ritter was paroled in 2014 after being sentenced in October 2011.
“The Libertarian Party is the home of creeps, weirdos, and folks who like to lose elections,” a senior Republican official told the Washington Examiner.
The 2009 skirmish wasn’t the first time Ritter got into trouble. In December 2010, a Pennsylvania judge ruled to unseal case files related to his 2001 misdemeanor charge for soliciting a minor, which was ultimately dismissed, the Times Union reported.
Ritter twice showed up to meet with who he thought were teenagers and was questioned by police, who posed as a 14-year-old, and let him go, the outlet reported. Then, two months later, Ritter appeared at a fast food restaurant and met with police, who had posed as a 15-year-old girl on the internet.
“Born into a military family in Florida in 1960, Ritter grew up at postings around the world,” Ritter’s bio on the protest’s website says. “After earning a bachelor’s degree in Soviet history, he joined the armed forces, working in military intelligence in the USSR, where he met his wife. During the 1991 Gulf War, he served at Marine Central Command headquarters in Saudi Arabia under General Norman Schwarzkopf.”
Another speaker at the rally is Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute, a libertarian think tank named after ex-Libertarian and Republican Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the father of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). The institute hosted Ritter at a June 2022 conference, “The Biden Doctrine: New World Order or Nuclear Armageddon?”
Roughly two months before the conference, in April, Ritter was a guest on the institute’s podcast and discussed foreign policy. Ritter also wrote a March 29, 2022, op-ed in the Russian government-backed media outlet Russia Today that the Ron Paul Institute reprinted.
The European Union sanctioned Russia Today in March 2022 because it published propaganda about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Whether spoken or unspoken, it is clear to all that the official policy of the United States is, and has been since 2009, regime change in Moscow, using the forces of so-called ‘democratic reform’ (i.e., mass unrest) to oust President Putin,” Ritter wrote in the op-ed. “Unfortunately for Biden, Blinken, Graham and their fellow regime-change travelers, an opinion poll from Levada (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia) showed that the Russian leader’s approval rating was over 71 percent.”
Not all Libertarian-aligned groups have remained on good terms with Ritter. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an isolationist think tank bankrolled by billionaires Charles Koch and George Soros, removed an article on its website in January 2021 that was written by Ritter.
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The institute has raked in roughly $1.5 million from Soros’s Open Society Foundations network between 2019 and 2021, records show. It launched in 2019 with the help of a $500,000 donation from Koch.
The Libertarian Party did not reply to a request for comment.
