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June 12, 2026
His Excellency António Guterres
Secretary-General of the United Nations
United Nations Headquarters
405 East 42nd Street
New York, NY 10017
United States of America
Your Excellency:
Please consider this missive a retrospective on unfolding political developments in Liberia that are fraught with deleterious consequences for the country’s long-term peace, democratic viability and investment credibility. The missive describes a persistent pattern of political witch-hunt targeting key members of the Liberian opposition under the pretext of pursuing anti-corruption and accountability aims. It details how this political targeting has played out and is playing out against me personally as former Minister of Finance and Development Planning (Finance Minister), and subsequently veers into a broader depiction of extant degeneration of the rule of law in Liberia, the egregious pattern of executive dismemberment of judicial independence and an opprobrious and well-orchestrated design to silence political dissent. These despotic proclivities, if unchecked, would reverse the solid gains made over the last 20 years in the abolition of autocracy in Liberia and exacerbate political and economic fragility. In this communication, I will call on the international community to end its deafening silence as the smoldering embers of a looming national calamity glow ever brighter under Liberian president Joseph Nyuma Boakai.
I have also addressed this letter to the following Excellencies: H.E. Evariste Ndayishimiye, Chairperson of the African Union and President of the Republic of Burundi; H.E. Dr. Julius Maada Bio, Chairman Authority of Heads of State and Government of ECOWAS and President of the Republic of Sierra Leone; H.E. Antonia Costa, President of the European Council; the Honorable Brian Mast(R-FL), Chairman House Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Congress; the Honorable Jim Risch (R-ID), Chairman Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the United States. In addition to direct communications, I have copied all relevant members of the diplomatic community in Liberia, the two Co-Chairs of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the United States Congress, the Independent Human Rights Commission of Liberia, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, members of the opposition community in Liberia and the Ministers of Justice and State of the Republic of Liberia. Your Excellency, I write to officially document President Boakai’s and the governing Unity Party’s doomed and ill-fitted illegal attempts to manipulate and overturn a verdict of acquittal in my favor reached by 12 jurors in a bogus national security case brought against me as former Finance Minister for the period 2018-2023, as well as against four other colleagues who served as national security officials in the administration of former President George Manneh Weah. The Government, in a clear witch-hunt garbed under the rubric of “fighting corruption,” and without any iota of evidence, indicted us in July 2024 for crimes ranging from economic sabotage to criminal facilitation for legally approving and expending $6.2 million for national security purposes during the 2023 general and presidential elections. This political indictment was followed by a trial that began in the last quarter of 2024.
The trial was subsequently suspended late in 2024 due to a prohibition filed with the Supreme Court of Liberia by our Defense Counsel on grounds that the National Security and Reform Law of Liberia (NSRL) and other national security legislation prevented national security actors from disclosing legally protected confidential information at trial. The filing contended that the whole purpose of a trial organically redounds to the provision of evidence, and that the legally-mandated inability to avail such evidence disadvantages national security defendants in a trial, predisposing them negatively to jurors who may view their legal inability to disclose certain information, at the pain of imprisonment as mandated by law, as a form of admission of culpability or guilt. Our Defense Counsel thus petitioned the Court to dismiss the case on national security grounds.
The Supreme Court subsequently convened arguments after the filing. The two female Associate Justices on the Bench in persons of Her Honor Jamesetta Howard-Wolokolie and Her Honor Ceaineh D. Clinton-Johnson recused themselves from this hearing: Justice Howard-Wolokolie because of personal relations with me through her late brother Thomas Doe-Nah who served as Director General of the Liberia Revenue Authority under former President Weah; and Justice Clinton-Johnson because it was her who had forwarded the case to the full bench of the Supreme Court. This left the three male Justices in persons of His Honor Chief Justice Yamie Quiqui Gbeisay, His Honor Associate Justice Jussif D. Kaba and His Honor Associate Justice Boakai N. Kanneh to hear the case. Arguments from both Prosecution and Defense Counsels followed and the Court handed down its ruling in December 2025, essentially holding that national security strictures should not prevent national security actors from facing trial. Thus, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the lower Criminal Court C for continuation of trial.
Trial resumed in March of 2026. Arguments and evidence were submitted before 15 empaneled jurors. The state essentially presented no evidence of the crimes for which we were charged. Its key witness, Baba Borkai, who had led the investigation by the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission, rehashed non-evidentiary recitations contained in the indictment and presented assumptions, conjectures and educated guesses as evidence for conviction. His and the Prosecution’s central argument was that as Minister of Finance, I did not have the authority to have approved the monies in question because the investigation did not see a letter of request from the Financial Intelligence Unit which received the funds, neither did the investigation see formal approving documents from the National Security Council. They represented to jurors that the absence of these documents meant that the monies were stolen or misappropriated and that the entire documentary process of the transfer was illegal.
I then took the stand as the principal witness for the Defense and torpedoed the Prosecution’s case. I demonstrated to the jurors that the Minister is authorized by the Public Financial Management Law of Liberia to make monies available to spending entities without a written request under national security or exigent circumstances. I argued that the passage of the national budget by the National Legislature is the signal that authorizes the Finance Minister to release monies, not letters of requests from spending entities seeking to access budget appropriations approved by the legislature, since even these requests may be denied or delayed by the Minister as he or she sees fit, consistent with the powers conferred to the Finance Minister under the Public Financial Management Law. I informed the jurors that once the National Joint Security budget was approved by the National Security Council, as confirmed by evidence submitted by the Prosecution, the finance minister has the authorizing signal to release monies under emergency situations to national security actors with the approval of the President even without any formal request. I argued that this triangle of approval – the passage of the national budget, the approval of the budget for the National Joint Security and the Public Financial Management Law—completed my legal authority to have transferred the funds. Our Defense presented evidence showing similar transfers approved under my signature: The direct transfer of more than $20 million to the National Elections Commission for the conduct of the 2023 elections; the direct transfer of $25 million to the World Food Program for Covid-19 household food distribution; and the direct transfer of $1 million to the United Nation Population Fund for the conduct of the 2022 National Census. With these pieces of evidence, jurors were convinced that the litigated transfer done in favor of the Financial Intelligence Agency was legal and lawful, contrary to the pleadings of the Prosecution. This essentially meant that the Prosecution’s theory had collapsed.
I related to jurors that no crime was committed in this case and that the Government was merely weaponizing its ability to indict political opponents to achieve political ends. I narrated that the Unity Party is after me, the financial architect of the Weah administration, to deliver “red meat” to its political base to fulfill its electoral promise of fighting corruption in the hope of thwarting the re-election of former President Weah in 2029, the year of the next presidential election. I related the lies told by the Government through the Ministry of Information that Interpol had ordered my arrest in August 2024 from La Cote D’Ivoire, where I resided when the indictment was handed down, when in fact no such warrant was ever issued by Interpol. I explained the facts and circumstances of the dismissal of the former Commissioner-General of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, former Lofa County Senator Steve Zargo for failing to arrest me at Robert’s International Airport upon my return from La Cote D’Ivoire to face trial and clear my name. I also narrated the suspension and reassignment of an ordinary police officer who failed to arrest me at the gate of the Court whose entrance the police had barricaded in the hope of placing me in handcuffs for political showmanship.
On May 8, 2026, during closing arguments, our lead Defense Counsel Cllr. Arthur Tamba-Johnson brilliantly argued and summarized our case for the jurors. In his compelling peroration, he impelled the jurors to go and make history by setting the defendants free against a powerful despotic Government wanting their destruction for political purposes. He famously intoned that when they shall have delivered the historic verdict of not guilty, jurors would experience the national celebrations and reverberations issuing from their rendering of justice. Jurors subsequently went in to deliberate and decide the case and came out with a split verdict. Former Finance Minister Samuel D. Tweah, Jr. and FIA Comptroller Moses D. Coooper acquitted; Former Acting Minister of Justice Cllr. Nyanti Tuan and former National Security Advisor Jefferson Kanmoh were guilty on two charges; with Former Director General of the Financial Intelligence Unit Stanley Ford receiving a hung verdict.
The nation erupted in rapturous elation after this historic verdict and the Government quaked under the pressures of political fear. Of course, the nation knew that this trial was not about the other defendants but about me, the former Finance Minister. For the Government, at first, confusion and disappointment reigned. At a press conference held a few days after the verdict at the Ministry of Justice, which was attended by the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Information and the Solicitor General of Republic, the Government presented the verdict to the public as a victory for Liberian justice and democracy, as well as for the fight against corruption, since two persons were acquitted and two were found guilty with one hung verdict. The Government told the public that it would build on lessons from the case and look to the future to win more convictions and advance the fight against corruption. However, as celebrations for my acquittal intensified, the Government panicked since its supporters who wanted my head at all and any costs mounted more and more pressure, pushing the Government toward the precipice of the unthinkable and undouble: aiming to manipulate the verdict or give the appearance that finality had not arrived in the case and that “ Samuel D. Tweah, Jr may still not be off the hook.”
Your Excellency, this is where the crux of my letter begins. On May 8, 2026, two days after my birthday on May 6, I was declared a free man by the Liberian people. Ten days after the jurors were disbanded back into their private lives, where they were no longer under surveillance and protection by the Government, as was the case during the trial, and about seven days after the Government’s acceptance of the verdict through a nationally broadcast press conference, the Government proceeded to influence the three jurors who found me guilty – 9 jurors voted not guilty and 3 voted guilty — to file an affidavit alleging juror misconduct or tempering. I accuse the Government because these jurors would have immediately filed their complaints if they felt strong and passionate about jury misconduct, independent of, and uninfluenced by, promptings from both the Prosecution and the Defense. Throughout the trial the jurors were quite expressive about health and other sequester issues and challenges they faced and presiding Judge Ousmane Feika was always open to addressing their issues in the presence of both Prosecution and Defense representatives. If no other juror could complain of jury misconduct immediately after the verdict, the jury forewoman should have complained. The forewoman voted guilty on all charges and was the only juror to have decided this way. Based on her voting pattern, this juror must have been seriously committed to finding all defendants guilty and at least she should have summoned the outrage to immediately file a complaint after the verdict was announced, right in front of the judge, especially after he mandated that I and Moses Cooper leave the defendants’ deck and “go home as a free men.” Even this highly motivated juror had to take ten days to file a complaint of jury misconduct, whose content remains shrouded in secrecy. But she and other jurors did not complain immediately because they knew there was no possibility of any defendant accessing jurors since they were always under strict Government and court surveillance and protection. They would only complain after they were politically prompted.
On May 20, 2026, our Defense Counsel filed a motion to prohibit the investigation on grounds that the investigation was proceeding in a fashion that was not deemed transparent and open. On that same day, the judge, who during the trial had exemplified the highest virtue of independence and impartiality, had declared that he alone would conduct the investigation and that no lawyers would be present during his questioning of jurors. It was this declaration that influenced our Defense Counsel’s filing before Justice in Chamber His Honor Yussif D. Kaba, who has agreed, in a stipulation signed by both Prosecution and Defense, that the investigation proceed consistent with due process rights conferred by article 20 (a) and (b) of the Liberian constitution. This means the judge alone would not be present during the investigation as jurors may have access to lawyers during this process and both the Prosecution and Defense teams would also be present, as would the three defendants and the two adjudged free by the verdict. Whether the investigation would proceed in open court is still in doubt but if the Government has nothing to hide, it should not be afraid of investigating open court where all Liberians may see or hear allegations that have been raised by jurors who voted guilty. The Prosecution remains averse to open court investigation.
Your Excellency, as we await the commencement of this process, I inform you honorable members of the international community that any attempt to use this process to subvert the verdict for political purposes would be fiercely politically resisted. I, Samuel D. Tweah, Jr, am a free man would not honor any politically manipulated process that aims to subvert justice. I stand ready to bear any consequence for this resistance. I would be more than glad to become a major political prisoner of conscience on the question and issue of fighting for my rights and against the Government’s maneuvers to dismantle the foundation of the rule of law in our society. No precedent exists in Liberia where either the Supreme Court or a lower court has overturned an acquitting verdict.
But Your Excellency, I cannot put it past the Government of President Joseph Nyuma Boakai to establish such precedent. This Government has shown wanton and reckless disregard for the rule of law and has aimed to weaponize the judiciary against political opponents. May I regale your patience with three noteworthy incidents exemplary of this callous abuse of executive political power.
In 2025, the Boaikai Government disregarded the opinion of the Supreme Court delegitimizing a “Majority Bloc” of lawmakers that purported to own legitimacy over the running of the affairs of the House of Representatives. The Majority Bloc had wanted to remove the Speaker, J. Fonati Koffa, but wanted to circumvent House rules governing the removal of a speaker. Speaker Koffa hence filed a prohibition with the Supreme Court. The Court’s ruling in the matter conferred legitimacy to the Speaker but the Boakai Government trashed this ruling, a treasonous legal and political opprobrium, and continued to do financial business with the Majority Bloc, contrary to law, and much to the impassioned dismay of most Liberians. The specter of this executive repudiation of a Supreme Court decision now looms very large for both Liberian justice, democracy and investment, since most international investors are wary of countries where political whims predominate rule-based order.
A second incident pertains to the tension between constitutionally granted executive presidential authority to dismiss at will and the limits burdening such at-will dismissals where statutes have prescribed that a president would have to commission a formal investigation to establish cause before dismissing a certain category of presidential appointees. In cases involving the Governance Commission, the Liberia Telecommunications Commission and the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission and other autonomous agencies, the Supreme Court held in April of 2024 that where a statute grants a fixed tenure and specifies the grounds for removal, the Liberian President cannot remove those officials at will simply because they serve in the Executive Branch. The Court rejected the argument that Article 56 of the Constitution gives the President unrestricted authority to dismiss all executive appointees. Instead, the Court ruled that the tenure laws enacted by the Legislature limit the president’s pleasure removal power for these offices. As Chief Justice Sie-A-Nyene Yuoh stated in the opinion, the laws creating those tenure positions “absolve” the President of the power to appoint and dismiss these officials at pleasure. The Boakai Government was outraged by this ruling and went on to remove the officials, ignoring and dismantling the Supreme Court’s ruling.
A third incident involves the Government’s disbanding of jurors in a Capitol Building fire incident case. On December 18, 2024, the nation awoke to billows of smoke issuing from the Capitol Building, the seat of the Liberian National Legislature. The Government, again without any shred of evidence, indicted several members of the “Minority Bloc,” including former Speaking Koffa, accusing them of culpability in the burning of the Capitol Building and arraigning them to trial. During the trial, the Government proceeded to disband the jury on grounds that some “jurors may have been compromised”. The Prosecution reached this determination only because jurors were asking technical questions that seem to betray, in the eyes of the Prosecution, the direction of their decision. Here again we see the egregious, nefarious display of executive dominance of the judiciary to achieve a desired political outcome. Jurors are expected to ask questions during trial. Why should they be penalized for the questions they ask? Is this the same dominance we are about to witness in the pending post-verdict investigation into allegations of jury misconduct/tempering? Why is it the that the Government, which protects and controls the jury system, scampers to allegations of “jury misconduct” whenever it loses or appears to be losing? Does the Government accuse jurors of misconduct only when they acquit or are perceived to be acquitting targeted political opponents but hail jurors as patriots when the Government’s prosecutorial interests are achieved? Is this the image of the Liberian justice system the Boakai Government is presenting to the world?
How long would the international community remain silent amid the abuses described above? How fierce should the embers of these rule-of-law degradations glow for the international community to see the flicker of gloom lurking on the horizon, or to sense the smoke of the apparent danger to Liberia? There should be no doubt in the mind of international actors that Liberia is currently navigating the faultlines of political crisis. Crisis evolves from perceptions of wrongdoing on the part of powerful governments bending the reins of governance to their caprices. And this villainous tendency is magnified when the international community distills silence amid aggression, repudiation of national laws and the persecution of political opponents.
The international community has paid heavy price to procure Liberia its current democratic dividend, where Liberians themselves have paid the heaviest price in lives and opportunity cost. When this dividend is being squashed by Liberian leaders who have shown no appreciation of the complex fragility of the Liberian political situation; who cannot make the link between democratic and rule-of-law resilience of countries and their surging capacities to sustain investment and economic growth; and when leaders, who see power as a means toward the next election cycle and not as an end toward empowering a generation, wreck the foundation of the state, the clarion warning signs are all too visible for members of the international community to see. Prevention is cheaper than resolution.
Your Excellency, I use this missive both as a rallying call into Liberia’s current degenerating circumstances and as a retrospective into the tremendous gains that are now being eroded. You members of the International Community–the ECOWAS, the UN, the AU, the EU, the U.S. Government and several multilateral partners such as the World Bank, the IMF and the AFDB — have helped nourished Liberian democracy up as a shining beacon on the African continent. You have assisted in our ending autocracy, that murderous rule of presidential will that has been our national nemesis. No president can ever seek more than two terms in Liberia and in this regard, we consider ourselves equal to any Western democracy. No Liberian President or Government can ever silence political dissent. Liberians may be poor or may have challenges getting out of poverty, but they are wealthy in their freedom to criticize and challenge any Government or any power, and it is this freedom that avails the foundation to resolve our economic perplexities. Yet these are the hard-won foundations the Boakai Government is aiming to destroy, while you bend your respective energies and attentions to other pressing national, regional or international matters.
I present to you that these other varied tensions are not more pressing than the looming predicament of governance and law that now pervades the Liberian body politic. Several national actors have spoken against these afflictions of law, justice and governance. The Student Unification Party (SUP), a student political grouping on the main campus of the University of Liberia, that usually holds poignant viewpoints on a range of national questions, has condemned the witch-hunt against me personally and has vociferously and variously lampooned Liberia’s current descent into the abyss of lawlessness. Solidarity and Trust for a New Day (STAND), a national rights-based political advocacy group, has staged several protests vilifying the collapse of rule-based order, the sacrilege against our constitution and the selective fight against corruption while the current Unity Party Government plunders national resources without any accountability. STAND is planning a major protest on July 17, 2026, to bring national and global attention to this worsening national degeneration. Mr. Alexander Cummimgs, the political leader of the Alternative National Congress (ANC), has publicly argued against any attempt to overturn my verdict of acquittal as setting a dangerous precedent for the rule of law. Mr. Cummings has similarly assailed the Government’s selective fight against corruption by calling on the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission to investigate the construction of an alleged $10 million complex in Foya Lofa County that has been the subject of political controversy for more than a year, with Government officials rendering conflicting information regarding the sources of funding, since no public information is available on the financing, as required by public law for transparency and accountability purposes. Cllr. Tehwon Gongloe, the Standard Bearer of the Liberia’s People Party and a highly regarded human rights lawyer, has equally condemned the Government for undermining justice and judicial independence, for discrediting the opinions of Supreme Court, and for engaging in rampant corruption, among a wide array of criticism that runs the gamut from governance and leadership style to inclusion and fairness in Government. These and several other national actors have seen the fierce urgency of acting now to prevent an escalation of the current degeneracy.
Even as tension is mounting, Liberians remain peaceful amid the systemic onslaught on our laws, and this is out of profound respect and deference to the tragic experiences from our civil conflict. But the Unity Party Government apparently interprets this deference as a sign of weakness on the part of the political opposition and as a license to expand the reach of its degradation. This misperception is dangerous and challenges the international community to end its deafening silence!
Perhaps this missive and retrospective may inspire the desired change for action since the Government appears not to be letting up. After my verdict of acquittal was announced, the Government immediately drummed up a second bogus case involving my legal approval and transfer of resources from 2021 under a program for subsidies for rice importers to assuage the impact of very high freight costs exacted by Covid-19 and Russia’s war against Ukraine. These were legally approved Government transactions, done in consultation with the IMF during Liberia’s IMF-supported External Facility. I have recently been asked to appear for questioning by the Government’s Asset Recovery and Property Retrieval Task Force (AREPT) and have provided answers on the legal role I played as Minister to avail monies to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry for onward transmission to rice importers. As Finance Minister, I had no role in the expenditure of public monies given to spending entities, since they are under obligation by the Public Financial Management Law to account for those resources and to submit financial reports back to the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning. As Finance Minister, I oversaw financial transactions totaling over $ 3 billion for six years. Maybe the Government intends to invite me for questioning on all these approvals. There is no clearer and better evidence of witch-hunt anywhere the world over.
Your Excellency, I invoke this second case to demonstrate the ruthless, diabolical and unrelenting tenacity of the Unity Party Government to weaponize the judiciary toward electoral outcome in 2029. This goal predicates upon a certain desperation. The Government faces a precarious political situation where lies told to win the 2023 elections are now widely known by the Liberian electorate. Complicating this picture is the fact that the Government is struggling to meet campaign promises and resolve vexed economic questions such as persistent joblessness and the lack of investment expansion. The country faces extreme economic hardship. The Government of course cannot solve the jobs question, nor has it begun to wriggle out of investment and business climate challenges. Time marches on fast and furiously and reeling from this fear of unmet expectations, the regime’s only strategy is to intensify the targeting of key opposition members of the former CDC administration to show some signs of “winning,” even if the win can only be seen as illegally fomenting their arrests and politically motivated imprisonment. And if this win must come at the expense of bastardizing the judiciary, so be it. This is the mantra of desperation that motivates the malicious actions of the Government, whose staving requires concerted international effort and engagement.
It is my hope that this letter inspires some reflection and needed action.
Yours Sincerely,
_______________________
Samuel D. Tweah, Jr.
Former Minister of Finance and Development Planning
Republic of Liberia
