Lawyers accuse Trump administration of rewriting extradition request against jailed activist

Lawyers for James 'Fergie' Chambers, the wealthy leftwing donor jailed in Spain pending a US extradition request, have accused the Trump administration of making 'malicious' and 'bad faith' changes to the Spanish translations of its own extradition documents. The translations added words like 'violent', 'detonate' and 'fires' that do not appear in the original English text, the defense says.

The Guardian has seen the 21-page filing, lodged on Tuesday with Spain's National Court, which includes detailed examples of a translation that has 'fictitiously added incriminating acts, in presumed bad faith' — aimed, the attorneys argue, at leading Spanish authorities into errors when evaluating the case. The original English text describes how 'throughout October and November 2023, multiple direct action events occurred at Elbit facilities, causing significant damage'; the Spanish rendering turned 'direct action events' into 'actos de violencia directo', acts of direct violence. Another passage about three activists arrested at a protest became 'tres incendios' — three fires. There is no mention of fires in the original, and according to defense lawyer Aitor Martínez the protesters set nothing on fire.

Both Spanish law and the US-Spain extradition treaty require the requesting country to supply the translation. Chambers' case is the first known instance of the US seeking to extradite a citizen over alleged support for Hamas, tied to a money laundering charge and donations to Palestinian causes including the Sameer Project in Gaza. Two of the three charges — riot and conspiracy to riot — rest on his alleged funding of legal fees for activists arrested at late-2023 protests against Elbit Systems, the Israeli weapons manufacturer.

The translation dispute joins a growing list of irregularities. The FBI took Chambers' phone in apparent violation of Spanish law and the extradition treaty, and it recently emerged that no grand jury has evaluated the evidence: the entire request rests on the sealed complaint and the affidavit of a single FBI agent. Martínez, who has practiced for twenty years, called the translation scandalous and shameful.

Chambers' extradition hearing is scheduled for 13 November, by which point Spain's courts will decide whether an accusation laundered through its own language still counts as an accusation.