Summary: A Texas lawyer with a questionable past lost his job offer with a district attorney’s office when someone made an issue with him being hired there, so he is suing that person.
A Texas lawyer is suing a man that alerted a district attorney’s office, where the lawyer had received a job offer from, about the lawyer’s true behavior. In a complicated legal fight between the two, as reported by The Daily Beast, attorney Jason Lee Van Dyke wants $100 million from Thomas Retzlaff, believing Retzlaff is the reason he lost the job with the Victoria County district attorney’s office. Van Dyke, the lawyer for a well-known “Western” nationalist group, is facing off against Retzlaff, who may have his own messy past with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
Retzlaff complained to the D.A. office when he learned that Van Dyke had been offered a felony prosecutor position. He told The Daily Beast, “I live in San Antonio, and Victoria County is right next to where I live. When I found out Van Dyke had got the job thee, I had some communications with the district attorney and said ‘this guy is a crazy person, why would you hire him? Didn’t you use Google?’” He noted that a simple Google search would have produced information about who Van Dyke really was.
Van Dyke currently represents the Proud Boys, a self-described “Western chauvinist” group. He was expelled in 2000 from Michigan State University after he was arrested for domestic violence, firearm safety violation, and possession of banned weapons, as reported in 2007 by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The charges were later dropped but a search of his dorm room found “extremist literature, including the race war fantasy novel The Turner Diaries and the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Online, Van Dyke is not always a man of high character, resulting in threats of violence against those who oppose him. On Twitter in 2014, he posted a picture of a noose, directed at one of his enemies, where he tweeted, “Look good and hard at this picture you f***ing n****r. It’s where I am going to put your neck.”
Legal blog Popehat explained their belief that Van Dyke posts as WNLaw (white nationalist law) on the site Stormfront, a white supremacist forum. WNLaw claims to be a Texas lawyer named Jason who is interested in firearms, very similar to Van Dyke. The poster has also linked to articles by Van Dyke and an anti-Dianne Feinstein petition created by someone with the same initials as Van Dyke. He claims he has never posted on the “despicable” hate forum. He believes the posts are an issue of stolen identity from 2014, even though the posts were from 2011. His response to The Daily Beast when confronted with this fact, “I have no idea. I haven’t read these things. I know nothing about Stormfront, but suffice to say, I’ve made a lot of enemies with a lot of people over the years.”
When Popehat posted about Van Dyke’s history, he demanded a retraction or threatened consequences. In an email, he wrote to the author Ken White, which White then posted on Twitter, “I have a picture of you. I am going to put it on my mirror at home, near my desk, and in my truck. My pure and absolute hatred for you will be unprecedented … I will make you so miserable and treat you with such extreme and unprecedented cruelty that you’ll either kill yourself or move yourself and your family to the most remote part of the world you can afford to escape my wrath.”
When his job offer with the district attorney’s office was rescinded, he sued them to find out who had blown the whistle against him. He then went on to pester Retzlaff, who filed several more complaints against Van Dyke. In December Retzlaff filed a grievance with the Texas State Bar, stating that Van Dyke was “posting online that he is going to murder me because I am the one who cost him his job with Victoria County … You all need to disbar this retard ASAP.”
Despite his questionable past, Van Dyke points the finger at Retzlaff, noting a lawsuit against Retzlaff in 2014 where he was accused by the plaintiff as posing as a KKK member online. Van Dyke filed his lawsuit against Retzlaff for $100 million in damages last month. In it, he claims Retzlaff has written libelous blog posts about Van Dyke being a Nazi and white supremacist.
Do you think Van Dyke has any claim over his lost job? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
To learn more about other attorneys caught up in controversial actions, read these articles:
- Attorney Ousted When His Side-Gig as a Neo-Nazi Record Producer was Exposed
- Houston Lawyer Donates Money to Minority Bar Group after Racist Remarks
- Self-Professed Lawyer Shouts N-Word on New York Subway
Photo: law.com