‘Contrarians to the rescue of Comey, Kimmel, and Karen,’ Eisen writes in Substack post
She’s putting together a team.
Left-wing columnist Karen Attiah is challenging her firing from the Washington Post over Bluesky posts sent in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination that blamed “white America” for gun violence. Attiah posted her response to that firing in a Wednesday Substack post, which revealed that she “retained the Democracy Defenders Fund” to “challenge the termination.”
Attiah described the fund as a “bipartisan legal team” before naming its top two members: former Obama White House ethics czar Norm Eisen, who founded Democracy Defenders, and former MSNBC host Katie Phang, who joined it in April after the liberal network canceled her show. The pair sent a Sept. 24 letter to Post chief human resources officer Wayne Connell on Attiah’s “wrongful termination,” offering to “discuss how to set these wrongs right.” If the Post refuses to negotiate with Attiah, Eisen and Phang say they will “pursue all appropriate remedies for her sake, that of media freedom, and of our democracy itself.”
Wrongful termination suits are nothing new for Eisen and Democracy Defenders, though they are usually aimed at a different target: the Trump administration, which Eisen’s group has repeatedly sued in an attempt to reinstate fired federal employees. Attiah’s case is against a private entity—but that doesn’t mean Eisen is ruling out White House involvement.
“The Post‘s unlawful action against Ms. Attiah must, moreover, be viewed in the context of the intimidation campaign President Trump and his Administration have waged to silence those who criticize him and the actions and policies of his Administration,” Eisen and Phang’s letter to the Post reads. “We intend to determine whether there was direct or indirect pressure to wrongfully terminate Ms. Attiah.”
Eisen, for his part, touted Attiah’s case in a piece for the Contrarian—the Substack site he founded alongside fellow online liberal and former Post columnist Jennifer Rubin—headlined, “Contrarians to the rescue of Comey, Kimmel, and Karen.”
“As we made clear in our demand, if the Post doesn’t course correct, adequate legal remedies will be pursued,” Eisen wrote. “Not just for Attiah’s sake, but also to defend the principle that journalists in this country should be able to call out violence and hypocrisy without fear of political vengeance.”
Beyond the Attiah case, Eisen made headlines in January when Democracy Defenders sued the Trump administration in an attempt to compel the Department of Government Efficiency to disclose its taxpayer-funded meetings. The suit, Eisen said, was “about billionaires gutting important programs that American citizens across the country rely on every single day without adequate transparency or accountability.” Democracy Defenders, however, has its own ties to billionaires—and it’s not so transparent about them.
The group is registered as a tax-exempt charity. But IRS filings show that it shares office space—and a number of employees—with its political advocacy arm, State Democracy Defenders Action. Liberal billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations has given $5 million to that arm since 2023, according to the foundation’s “awarded grants” database, while the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a left-wing dark money network, reported giving it $565,000 in 2023. The rest of State Democracy Defenders Action’s donors are unknown, as it does not disclose them.
Democracy Defenders did not respond to a request for comment.
Attiah’s firing came in the wake of a mass exodus of Post opinion staffers after the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, announced plans to reshape the section “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Staffers who were not aligned with that vision were offered buyouts, which the likes of fact checker Glenn Kessler and columnist Philip Bump opted to accept.
Attiah did not follow suit, having rejected the buyout following a “tense” meeting with Post opinion editor Adam O’Neal, in August. The newspaper fired her a month later, citing her “unacceptable” posts about Kirk’s assassination. Attiah announced her unemployment in a Substack post that suggested her dismissal was “part of a purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media.” It was accompanied by a professional photograph of Attiah posing in front of Post headquarters with a burning newspaper in her hand and a rose in her mouth.
“Democracy Dies in Darkness, but some of us will carry the light,” the caption read.
Attiah’s final piece at the Post was a nearly 2,000-word column about the political significance of female strength training.
