PARIS — A senior policy adviser from the U.S. State Department asked a French magistrate last year whether she could intervene over the election ban on far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

The previously unreported details of the encounter will refocus attention on U.S. efforts to support the European far right. U.S. Donald Trump has slammed the electoral ban against Le Pen as an example of using “Lawfare to silence Free Speech.”

French magistrate Magali Lafourcade told POLITICO that she and a colleague held a meeting in May with State Department adviser Samuel Samson, who made headlines last year for proposing the use of American taxpayer funds to support Le Pen.

Lafourcade said she was sufficiently concerned by the American approach to notify the foreign ministry in Paris. The foreign ministry declined to comment.

The meeting was organized by the U.S. embassy in Paris, and came two months after Le Pen was convicted of embezzlement, for which she was handed a five-year ban on running for public office that knocked her out of the 2027 presidential election. Le Pen’s appeal against her ban is ongoing and a verdict is expected later this year.

Samson, a political appointee who recently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, according to his LinkedIn profile, previously wrote an article for the State Department in which he described Europe as “a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”

Also attending the meeting with Lafourcade was Christopher Anderson, a diplomat from the same department where Samson serves as a senior policy adviser — the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

The embassy had arranged for the duo to meet with Lafourcade in her capacity as secretary general of France’s National Consultative Committee on Human Rights, a U.N.- accredited body that advises the French government on human rights but isn’t directly involved in ongoing legal cases.

Lafourcade said the conversation had begun with a discussion of freedom of speech, then “fairly quickly it came to Marine Le Pen’s legal situation,” a topic to which “they kept circling back.”

“They seemed to think it was a purely political trial, [happening] because she was an opponent,” she added.

Lafourcade responded by explaining the French judicial process, but “that wasn’t of interest to them.”

The diplomats asked whether her organization could intervene in such cases, to which she responded that it didn’t weigh in on individual cases.

The U.S. embassy in Paris and the State Department did not immediately respond for comment when asked by POLITICO about Lafourcade’s recounting of the meeting.

Beyond France, the Trump administration has sought to build strong alliances with nationalist, anti-immigration parties and leaders in countries including Germany, Poland and Hungary. Washington styles these alliances as part of a crusade to defend “free speech” and traditional Christian values.

The news of Samson’s meeting also comes against a backdrop of concerns that Trump and his administration are pursuing a wider offensive against foreign judges whose rulings they don’t agree with. Such worries have been exacerbated by hints from the Trump administration in its bombshell National Security Strategy that it could help ideologically allied European parties.

The U.S. in recent months has sanctioned 11 judges from the International Criminal Court, including Nicolas Guillou, a French magistrate who green-lighted an ICC arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes in Gaza — which Netanyahu slammed as “antisemitic.”

A report in German magazine Der Spiegel earlier this month said the State Department had considered imposing sanctions on the judges in Le Pen’s initial trial. The story prompted a furious response from a senior French judge, who said such a move would “constitute unacceptable and intolerable interference in our country’s internal affairs.”

A high-ranking U.S. diplomat subsequently denied the Spiegel report, calling it “stale and false.”