No. 15-3047 7 Upon receipt of the letter MasterCard forthwith stopped allowing its credit cards to be used to purchase ads anywhere on Backpage’s website. Visa followed suit. So the threats had worked. And so just two days after Dart’s letter was sent, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office was able to (and did) issue a triumphant press release captioned “Sheriff Dart’s Demand to Defund Sex Trafficking Compels Visa and MasterCard to Sever Ties with Backpage.com.” Notice “demand,” not request; notice “compels,” not persuades; notice “sever ties,” not “refuse to make payments for ads in the adult section of the Backpage website.” Imagine a letter that was similar to Sheriff Dart’s but more temperate (no “demand,” no “compels,” no “sever [all] ties”) and sent to a credit card company by a person who was not a law-enforcement officer. The letter would be more likely to be discarded or filed away than to be acted on. For there is evidence that the credit card companies had received such complaints from private citizens, yet it was Dart’s letter that spurred them to take immediate action to cut off Backpage. For that was a letter from a government official containing legal threats and demands for quick action and insisting that an employee of the recipient be designated to answer phone calls or respond to other communications from the sheriff. It was within days of receiving the letter that the credit card companies broke with Backpage. The causality is obvious. It’s true that Visa filed an affidavit stating that “at no point did Visa perceive Sheriff Dart to be threatening Visa.” But what would one expect an executive of Visa to say? “I am afraid of the guy?” “He is in effect calling me an accomplice of a criminal organization (Backpage), and I’m afraid