I am publishing this because I have now spent the better part of a decade dealing with Lithuania on Holocaust memory, historical accountability, and the ongoing prosecution of those who challenge state-sanctioned myth. After that decade, I have complete confidence that private communication with Lithuanian officials is pointless. They are skilled at the appearance of engagement. What they will not do is answer a direct question that threatens the narrative. So the record belongs in public, where it can be read for what it is.
On March 17, 2026, I sent a formal letter to Consul General Sandra Brikaitė of the Consulate General of Lithuania in Los Angeles. The letter asked twelve specific questions about the criminal prosecution of Artur Fridman — a Jewish Lithuanian citizen charged for a Facebook post discussing Holocaust-era history — and about the institutional architecture that made that prosecution possible. The letter is available here. My earlier article explaining why I sent it, and why the case matters beyond Fridman himself, is here.
On April 13, 2026, Consul General Brikaitė replied. Her letter is available here.
She answered three questions in substance. They were the process questions: the statutory charges, the applicable penalties, and the procedural posture of the case. Competent, lawyerly, appropriate to a consular response designed to appear responsive. I expected that much.
She gave five more questions a different treatment. Asked who Fridman’s defense counsel is, what level of defense he is receiving, whether he has been afforded full access to counsel at every stage, whether his assigned counsel is qualified in the relevant areas of law, and whether he has been given full access to the evidence against him, she responded with general statements about Lithuanian law and EU legal standards. She did not name his counsel. She did not describe the defense being mounted. She did not confirm full evidentiary access. She described the legal framework that surrounds the case rather than the conduct of the case itself. That is not a non-answer. It is something subtler: the form of an answer arranged around the absence of one.
The remaining four questions she did not answer at all. These are the ones that matter most.
Question one: Is criticism of Jonas Noreika protected historical discourse in Lithuania?
Noreika is a figure the Lithuanian state has officially honored. He is also a figure whose documented record includes roles connected to the destruction of Jewish life during the Nazi occupation. Fridman’s prosecution arose, in part, from public commentary on that record. I asked whether Lithuania considers such commentary — criticism of a state-honored figure’s Holocaust-era conduct — to be protected historical speech.
Brikaitė did not say.
Question two: Does Lithuania distinguish Holocaust denial from criticism of Holocaust collaborators it chooses to honor?
This is not a subtle question. Holocaust denial — fabricating or minimizing the murder of Jews — is treated as a serious offense across European legal systems, including Lithuania’s. Criticism of specific individuals whose documented conduct contributed to that murder is categorically different. It is historical inquiry. I asked whether Lithuania’s legal framework makes that distinction, or whether the state’s protection of honored figures effectively collapses it.
Brikaitė did not say.
Question three: Has the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania supplied expert opinion in the Fridman prosecution?
The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre — known by its Lithuanian acronym LGGRTC — is the state institution responsible for Lithuania’s official historical record of the Nazi and Soviet occupations. In December 2019, LGGRTC issued an official certificate declaring Jonas Noreika a rescuer of Jews. Lithuania’s own Presidential International Commission on the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes publicly rejected that certificate as utterly unacceptable. LGGRTC has never withdrawn it. I asked whether LGGRTC, or any other state institution, has supplied or been consulted for expert historical opinion in the prosecution of Artur Fridman.
Brikaitė answered that “any expert input, where applicable, is considered in accordance with procedural rules governing admissibility and relevance.” That is a description of how Lithuanian courts handle evidence. It is not an answer to whether LGGRTC has supplied evidence in this case.
The question matters because LGGRTC’s authority on the Lithuanian Holocaust record is precisely what is contested. If the institution whose Noreika certificate Lithuania’s own presidential commission rejected is now supplying the historical foundation for a criminal prosecution of a Jewish citizen for Holocaust-related speech, the prosecution does not stand on neutral state machinery. It stands on the same institutional record that has been challenged by international scholars, by Lithuania’s presidential commission, and by Jewish communities for years.
A simple yes or no would have sufficed. The Consul General provided neither.
Question four: Does Lithuania dispute the factual record underlying Fridman’s statements?
The prosecution’s own indictment, according to published accounts, cites archival material that partially corroborates the historical question Fridman raised. I asked whether the Consul General’s office disputes the underlying factual record — not the legal characterization, not the procedural framework, but the facts.
Brikaitė did not say.
Question five: What is Lithuania’s current position on its honors for Jonas Noreika and Juozas Brazaitis?
Both men are honored by the Lithuanian state. Both have documented records that international scholars and archival researchers have directly challenged. I asked for Lithuania’s current official position — not a historical recitation of past decisions, but a statement of where Lithuania stands today on continuing to honor these figures.
Brikaitė did not say.
———
Grant Gochin, the South African-Lithuanian Jewish genealogist who has spent years litigating and documenting Lithuania’s Holocaust record — and whose own subsequent open letter to Consul General Brikaitė addresses her non-answers in meticulous detail — opened that letter with a quotation from John Adams at the Boston Massacre trial: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
That is exactly right.
The questions Brikaitė declined to answer are not trick questions. They are not politically loaded traps. They are the questions any state committed to the rule of law and responsible historical discourse — the precise terms Brikaitė used in her own letter — should be able to answer without difficulty. A state confident in the integrity of its prosecution, its honors, and its historical framework would answer them. A state protecting something it cannot defend in plain language would not.
Lithuania did not answer them.
This matters beyond the particulars of the Fridman case, and it matters beyond Lithuania’s borders. Lithuania is a NATO ally. It presents itself to the United States and to European partners as a democracy committed to Western values, the rule of law, and the lessons of the twentieth century. It asks for — and receives — American military commitment on its eastern flank. Those commitments rest on a foundation of shared values that is supposed to mean something.
What Brikaitė’s letter demonstrates is that Lithuania’s commitment to “responsible historical discourse” operates selectively. Process questions are answerable. Substantive ones — the ones that would require Lithuania to either defend the indefensible or acknowledge what the record actually shows — are not.
I have spent nearly a decade watching this pattern repeat. Private engagement produces nothing. Diplomatic courtesy produces nothing. Even the formal letter-and-response format — which is designed precisely to create a clear, documented record — produces careful evasion dressed as cooperation.
That is why this is public.
Lithuania asks the United States for soldiers, weapons, and the patience of an alliance. It asks Congress for the benefit of the doubt. It asks American Jewish institutions for the credibility their names confer. The price of those requests is candor. Candor was the one thing Brikaitė’s letter would not provide.
Lithuania answered the questions that cost it nothing. It deflected the questions about the case. It refused the questions about the state. The record now reads exactly as Lithuania chose to leave it.
I will not be writing another private letter to the Consulate. The next round of questions, when there is one, will be public from the moment it is sent. That, too, is a choice — and unlike the choices Lithuania has made on this file, it is one I am willing to defend in plain language.
Dillon Hosier is the Chief Executive Officer at the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, an organization dedicated to empowering Israelis and Americans through advocacy education and civic action to combat antisemitism, fight BDS, and strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance. Previously, he served for a decade as the Political Officer at the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles.