More than 420,000 leaked emails have reopened a controversy over illegal donations to Germany’s Alternative for Germany party, while newly examined correspondence reveals previously undisclosed disagreements within its leadership. The revelations could also influence the continuing debate over the party’s constitutional status.

Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) is facing renewed scrutiny after hackers published a substantial archive of internal correspondence, exposing details of party finances, political strategy and disputes among senior officials.

The material, released on 19 October 2026, comprises approximately 421,000 emails and nearly 50,000 accompanying documents, amounting to some 281 gigabytes of data. The files cover more than a decade of party activity, including correspondence involving co-leader Alice Weidel, former chairman Alexander Gauland and other senior figures.

The AfD confirmed that its hosting provider had suffered a cyberattack in September. According to the party, the attackers obtained information from a limited number of email accounts, many of which had not been actively used for several years.

The identity of those responsible remains unknown.

The documents are being examined by several investigative teams, including ZDF, Der Spiegel and Austria’s Der Standard, with technical assistance from the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

The Swiss donations controversy returns

The most consequential findings so far concern Weidel’s knowledge of illegal campaign donations received during Germany’s 2017 federal election.

At the time, approximately €132,000 was transferred through Swiss companies into accounts belonging to the AfD’s Bodensee district organisation. The payments were designated for Weidel’s election campaign, particularly its social media activities.

When the transactions became public in 2018, Weidel maintained that she had not known about the money until September 2017 and described the donations as unsolicited.

However, correspondence examined by German investigators and journalists raises questions about that account.

In an email dated 10 July 2017, attributed to Weidel, she told her district treasurer that campaign donations had been promised and requested that the party’s bank account be checked twice weekly.

She also asked to receive confirmation of incoming payments so that campaign expenditure could be planned.

Four days later, the first payment arrived from Switzerland.

Further correspondence indicates that Weidel arranged a separate campaign account and obtained authority to direct expenditure from donations earmarked for her election activities.

The latest investigation, published on 26 October, provides additional details about the account’s management and how the party handled the ensuing controversy.

The leaked correspondence also reportedly includes invoices relating to the purchase of approximately 25,000 Facebook followers for Weidel’s campaign. The extent to which those accounts were automated, and their influence on voters, has not been established.

The AfD was previously ordered to pay approximately €396,000 for accepting the unlawful donations. Criminal proceedings involving Weidel and other district officials were discontinued in September 2021 because prosecutors found insufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Weidel’s spokesman has rejected suggestions that she misrepresented events. He maintains that she had discussed possible contributions with several potential supporters but had neither anticipated specific amounts nor expected the payments from the Swiss companies concerned.

The new material does not establish that Weidel knew the identity of the ultimate donor or participated in concealing the source of the funds.

Emails reveal divisions over the party’s radical wing

Another development concerns Weidel’s earlier relationship with Björn Höcke, the influential leader of the AfD’s Thuringia organisation.

According to correspondence examined by WELT, Weidel expressed serious reservations between 2015 and 2017 about the influence of nationalist and extremist elements within the party.

She warned colleagues that associations with the anti-Islam Pegida movement and the far-right National Democratic Party risked alienating mainstream conservative voters, particularly in western Germany.

Her private concerns contrast with her subsequent accommodation of Höcke’s influence within the AfD.

The correspondence provides evidence of the internal disagreements that accompanied the party’s transformation from an initially Eurosceptic political movement into one centred increasingly on immigration, national identity and opposition to Germany’s established parties.

The revelations are particularly relevant because Weidel now promotes proposals for substantial changes to Germany’s relationship with the European Union.

As EU Today previously reported, she has advocated withdrawing Germany from the euro and the Schengen passport-free travel area.

Could the material influence an AfD ban?

The leak arrives amid continuing legal and political arguments over whether the AfD threatens Germany’s constitutional democratic order.

In May 2025, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the party as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation. However, a Cologne court issued an injunction in February 2026, preventing that classification from taking effect pending a final judicial decision.

The court acknowledged evidence of anti-constitutional tendencies within the AfD but found that the material presented was insufficient at that stage to establish that they characterised the party as a whole.

The leaked emails could potentially become relevant to future assessments.

Germany’s Interior Ministry has confirmed that domestic intelligence authorities can, in principle, consider available information when evaluating possible threats to the constitutional order.

Nevertheless, whether unlawfully obtained correspondence could be admitted as evidence, and what weight it would carry, would require separate legal examination.

A party ban can be imposed only by the Federal Constitutional Court. The present disclosures do not themselves establish the legal conditions necessary for such a decision.

Questions over authenticity and data protection

The scale of the archive introduces further complications.

The material reportedly contains bank statements, membership records, personal correspondence and other confidential information involving thousands of individuals.

Journalists have verified portions of the correspondence by comparing messages with independently retained originals. Handelsblatt’s examination, for example, identified previously exchanged emails whose contents matched records held by its own reporters.

However, verification of individual communications does not establish the authenticity of every document in the archive. Fabricated messages have also circulated online.

In an official statement on 21 October, the AfD described the breach as criminal data theft and said it would not authenticate individual documents for journalists.

The party has also reported the incident to the authorities.

For Germany’s political institutions, the affair now presents several distinct questions: whether historical campaign finance arrangements were accurately disclosed, what the correspondence reveals about the party’s internal decision-making, and whether any of the documents provide evidence relevant to ongoing constitutional scrutiny.

Those questions remain open as investigators and journalists continue examining the archive.

One of the more interesting developments at the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years has been the rise of a kind of sporadic alliance in defense of civil liberties between Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch.

In 2018, for example, Gorsuch, joined by Sotomayor, blasted the Supreme Court for refusing to even hear arguments in Stuart v. Alabama, an important case about forensic evidence, criminal trials, and the Sixth Amendment right to cross-examine one's accusers.

Similarly, in United States v. Davis (2019), Sotomayor joined Gorsuch's majority opinion striking down a federal law that called for enhanced sentencing when a gun was used in connection with certain federal crimes because the law at issue was too imprecisely written to pass constitutional muster. "When Congress passes a vague law," Gorsuch wrote, "the role of courts under our Constitution is not to fashion a new, clearer law to take its place, but to treat the law as a nullity and invite Congress to try again."

Gorsuch and Sotomayor have also been on the same page in a number of Fourth Amendment cases, though Sotomayor's overall Fourth Amendment record is arguably stronger than Gorsuch's. In Torres v. Madrid (2021), for instance, the Supreme Court held that when the police shoot a fleeing suspect, it still counts as a "seizure" for Fourth Amendment purposes even if the suspect kept on the move after being shot. "The application of physical force to the body with the intent to restrain is a seizure," the Court held, "even if the person does not submit and is not subdued." Sotomayor joined that pro-civil liberties decision; Gorsuch, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, sided with the officers and voted in dissent.

Fortunately, the Gorsuch-Sotomayor band was back together last week to make some noise in support of the Bill of Rights in a dispute that pitted property rights against police powers. As Reason's Billy Binion reported, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case challenging a lower court's "categorical rule" that "property destroyed in the exercise of [a state's] 'police power' is immune to claims under the Takings Clause, the U.S. Constitution's pledge that government cannot usurp private property without fairly compensating the owner."

Sotomayor, joined by Gorsuch, strongly implied that she thought the lower court's rule was unconstitutional, though she accepted that "further percolation" on the issue was needed before the Court should step in. "Where, as here, a person alleges a 'classic taking in which the government directly appropriates private property for its own use' or to pay an outstanding debt, like a tax lien," Sotomayor wrote, "the talismanic invocation of the State's 'law enforcement authority,' may be insufficient to avoid the requirement of just compensation." (Citations omitted.) Sotomayor then urged the lower courts that are "considering this issue to take care that due deference to state police powers does not eclipse constitutional rights."

Just as Gorsuch's Fourth Amendment record has its blemishes, Sotomayor's record on property rights has also been less than impressive at times. So it is doubly welcome to see these two justices back in the trenches together on this particular civil liberties front.

Elsewhere in the Law

Writing at SCOTUSblog, Anastasia Boden, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, has an interesting article about the Supreme Court's landmark 1926 decision in Euclid v. Ambler, in which, as Boden put it, the Court ruled in favor of a town's "power to pass comprehensive zoning, and against a local developer who had argued the town's plan exceeded the city's police power and destroyed the property's value." In effect, the Court's ruling was "the birth of modern zoning."

One of the things that has long fascinated me about Euclid v. Ambler is the fact that the opinion was authored by Justice George Sutherland, who is probably best remembered today for his role as a leading judicial foe of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In Euclid v. Ambler, however, Sutherland endorsed a view of regulatory authority that has been celebrated by liberal academics as "a model of pragmatic and well-balanced Progressive jurisprudence."

I suppose we might call it an irony of legal history: The intellectual leader of the Supreme Court's anti–New Deal bloc actually left a greater mark on the law by shoring up the immense power of city planners.

The post Gorsuch and Sotomayor Unite in Another Civil Liberties Case appeared first on Reason Magazine.