Fani Willis Ordered to Turn Over Anti-Trump Collusion Records to Court
Judicial Watch Sues California to Stop Counting of Ballots Received after Election Day – Lawsuit Filed on Behalf of Congressman Darrell Issa
Supreme Court Asked to Review California’s Retaliation against Judicial Watch over Election Integrity Video
Judicial Watch Sues New York for Records on Killing ‘Peanut the Squirrel’
USDA Spent $600k to Study Menstrual Cycles in Transgender Men
Fani Willis Ordered to Turn Over Anti-Trump Collusion Records to Court
Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis will face more accountability thanks to Judicial Watch’s persistence.
She was just ordered to turn over 212 pages of records to a state court judge. The court also ordered Willis to detail how the records were found and the reason for withholding them from the public.
The records were belatedly found in response to our request and lawsuit for communications with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6 Committee.
The court order was issued on March 7 in our lawsuit filed after Willis falsely denied having any records responsive to our earlier Georgia Open Records Act (ORA) request for communications with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office and/or the January 6 Committee (Judicial Watch Inc. v. Fani Willis et al. (No. 24-CV-002805)).
The order follows a February 28 hearing in which Willis’ lawyers admitted to finding the records after what is believed to be a fifth search of her office. The court order reads as follows:
ORDER RE: IN CAMERA REVIEW OF RECORDS
In August 2023, Plaintiff Judicial Watch Inc. submitted an open records request to Defendant District Attorney Fani Willis seeking “[a]ll documents and communications sent to, received from, or relating to Special Counsel Jack Smith” and “[a]ll documents and communication sent to or received from the United States House January 6th Committee.”1 Defendant claimed to have no responsive records. Doubting this, Plaintiff sued and has since secured a default judgment against Defendant, who, it turns out, does have responsive records. After several non-searches, one court order, and at least one actual search of unknown thoroughness, Defendant revised her answer to, in essence, “I do have records, but you can’t have them (except this one record you already had and gave me).”
Unsurprisingly unsatisfied with this post-adjudication response, Plaintiff on 17 December 2024 petitioned the Court for the appointment of a Special Master to (1) conduct her own search of Defendant’s files for responsive records and (2) review the documents Defendant has determined fall outside the ambit of the State’s Open Records Act (ORA), O.C.G.A. § 50-18-70 et seq. On 28 February 2025, the Court held a hearing on Plaintiff’s motion at which both sides presented argument and made various factual representations, to include an assertion that the universe of responsive records consists of 212 pages (some of which may be duplicative). From those presentations and representations — and a review of the parties’ pleadings — the Court rules as follows:
1) No Special Master will be appointed — for now.
2) Defendant shall, through counsel, deliver to the Court within five business days of the entry of this Order all records Defendant has identified as being responsive to Plaintiff’s ORA request but which are being withheld pursuant to one or more of the exemptions set forth in O.C.G.A. § 50-18-72(a). These records should be Bates stamped for ease of reference.
3) Along with the documents, Defendant shall provide a list indicating which documents arguably fall under which exemption(s).2 For any records for which an attorney-client privilege is being asserted, counsel shall also identify the attorney and the client.
4) Defendant shall additionally provide, along with the documents, an affidavit, sworn out by someone in Defendant’s employ with direct personal knowledge, that includes the following:
a. A detailed description of the search that was conducted that yielded the 212 pages. This description should identify what was searched and how (e.g., manually versus electronically) and by whom.
b. The search terms used to search e-mail accounts and, if not every e-mail account in the office was searched, the universe of accounts that were searched. (These accounts need not be identified by employee name, but should at least indicate employee role (e.g., Assistant DA #2, Administrative Assistant #3, etc.).)
c. An answer to the question of whether cell phones were searched. If the answer is “no”, that should be explained. If the answer is “yes”, it should include a list of whose phones (again identifying them, for now, simply by employee role) and how the search was performed.
The Court will review all these submitted materials and determine if any are, despite Defendant’s claimed exemptions, subject to disclosure under the ORA. Should any of the submitted records be deemed disclosable, the Court will notify counsel for Defendant so that Defendant may file an ex parte pleading justifying the exemption. Any such pleadings will be filed under seal in this case, as will all the submitted materials.
SO ORDERED this 7th day of March 2025.
1 Plaintiff’s request also extended to employees of Smith and the Committee. 2 Defendant has asserted as bases for non-disclosure open investigation (subsection (a)(4)), attorney-client privilege (subsection (a)(41)), and work product (subsection (a)(42)).
Fani Willis can’t be trusted. Every time we go back to court there are new excuses and new documents that she said never existed.
Thanks to this lawsuit, Willis finally admitted to having records showing communications with the January 6 Committee but refused to release all but one document in response to the court order that found her in default. She cited a series of legal exemptions to justify the withholding of communications with the January 6 Committee. The only document she did release is one already-public letter to January 6 Committee Chairman Benny Thompson (D-MS). The court also awardedJudicial Watch $21,578 in “attorney’s fees and costs.” (Willis’ operation made the payment to Judicial Watch 10 days after the court-ordered deadline.)
We subsequently filed a motion, asking the court to conduct a private inspection of any records found.
We had argued:
Willis by her own admission conducted at least three searches before finding any responsive records not already supplied by [Judicial Watch]. She did not even bother to conduct a search until the Complaint was filed. Her records custodian says he does not know the Cellebrite [digital investigations] equipment he apparently had a hand in ordering can be used to search cell phone texts and other data…. Moreover, the custodian had no standard practice for conducting searches and keeps no records of the methods used in a given search.
Judicial Watch has several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits on the lawfare targeting Trump:
In February 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice asked a federal court to allow the agency to keep secret the names of top staffers working in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office that is targeting former President Donald Trump and other Americans.
(Before his appointment to investigate and prosecute Trump, Special Counsel Jack Smith previously was at the center of several controversial issues, the IRS scandal among them. In 2014, a Judicial Watch investigation revealed that top IRS officials had been in communication with Jack Smith’s then-Public Integrity Section about a plan to launch criminal investigations into conservative tax-exempt groups. Read more here.)
In January 2024, we filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, for records regarding the hiring of Nathan Wade as a special prosecutor by District Attorney Fani Willis. Wade was hired to pursue unprecedented criminal investigations and prosecutions against former President Trump and others over the 2020 election disputes.
In October 2023, we sued the DOJ for records and communications between the Office of U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney’s office regarding requests/receipt of federal funding/assistance in the investigation of former President Trump and his 18 codefendants in the Fulton County indictment of August 14, 2023. To date, the DOJ is refusing to confirm or deny the existence of records, claiming that to do so would interfere with enforcement proceedings. Judicial Watch’s litigation challenging this is continuing
Through the New York Freedom of Information Law, in July 2023, we received the engagement letter showing New York County District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg paid $900 per hour for partners and $500 per hour for associates to the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher law firm for the purpose of suing Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in an effort to shut down the House Judiciary Committee’s oversight investigation into Bragg’s unprecedented indictment of former President Donald Trump.
Judicial Watch Sues California to Stop Counting of Ballots Received after Election Day – Lawsuit Filed on Behalf of Congressman Darrell Issa
Judicial Watch filed an important federal lawsuit against California on behalf of U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa to prevent state election officials from extending Election Day for seven days beyond the date established by federal law (Darrell Issa v. Shirley N. Weber, in her official capacity (No. 25-cv-00598)).
Federal law requires an Election Day – not an “Election Week.” California’s counting of ballots that arrive a full seven days after Election Day is unlawful, encourages fraud, and undermines voter confidence in election outcomes.
We argue that California’s election law violates federal law, which defines Election Day as “the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of every even-numbered year.”
This lawsuit against California builds on an October 25, 2024, Judicial Watch landmark victory against Mississippi, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found counting ballots received after Election Day contrary to federal law.
The California lawsuit states:
Despite Congress’ unambiguous and longstanding statement regarding a single and uniform national Election Day, California modified and extended Election Day by allowing seven additional days after Election Day for receipt of vote-by-mail ballots.
The lawsuit alleges that ballots arriving after Election Day “change electoral outcomes in California:”
This change to electoral outcomes has been publicly acknowledged by the Office of Secretary of State. Defendant Weber’s predecessor issued a press release advising the public not to rely on initial results from Election night because late-arriving VBM [vote by mail] ballots and canvassing may mean the “outcomes of close contests may take days or weeks to settle.”
During the 2024 federal election, two of Plaintiff’s Republican colleagues in Congress lost their reelection campaigns due to late-arriving VBM [vote by mail] ballots. Congresswoman Steel (45th Congressional District) and Congressman Duarte (13th Congressional District) were both leading in their respective races immediately after Election Day on November 5, 2024, but ultimately lost reelection due to late-arriving VBM [vote by mail] ballots.
California Governor Gavin Newsom recently said it was “right” to criticize the extended post-Election Day counting in his state, which he called “ridiculous.”
“I am grateful to have Judicial Watch’s support in this important lawsuit,” Rep. Issa said. “California voters need all the help they can get to ensure fair elections.”
In an Illinois “Election Day” lawsuit Judicial Watch in November 2024 filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the United States Supreme Court challenging the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the case filed on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors from Illinois to prevent state election officials from extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law.
Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of our work, we assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other achievements.
In May 2024, we sued California under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) to force it to clean up its voter rolls. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Judicial Watch and the Libertarian Party of California, asks the court to compel California to make “a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls” as required by federal law.
In February 2023, Los Angeles County confirmed the removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since last year, under the terms of a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit we filed in 2017.
Supreme Court Asked to Review California’s Retaliation against Judicial Watch over Election Integrity Video
We can never forget the massive and unprecedented schemes of abuse, propaganda and censorship over the last several years. Judicial Watch won’t forget, because we were directly affected.
You can find details on this in a petition for a writ of certiorari in the United States Supreme Court concerning our lawsuit asserting that the California Secretary of State retaliated against Judicial Watch because of an accurate election integrity video posted to YouTube just before the 2020 Election (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Shirley Weber, in her official capacity as Secretary of State of the State of California (No. 2:22-cv-06894)). The California Secretary of State used its well-established working relationship with Big Tech to have YouTube remove and censor Judicial Watch’s video.
We filed the lawsuit in September 2022.
On September 22, 2020, we posted on our YouTube channel a video titled “**ELECTION INTEGRITY CRISIS** Dirty Voter Rolls, Ballot Harvesting & Mail-in-Voting Risks!” The 26-minute video featured me discussing the vote-by-mail processes, changes to states’ election procedures, ballot collection (sometimes referred to as “ballot harvesting”), and states’ failures to clean up their voter rolls, among other topics.
My comments were informed by successful lawsuits we brought against Los Angeles County and Weber in 2017 to compel the county and State to comply with the National Voter Registration Act’s (NVRA) voter list maintenance requirements. For instance, in June 2019, we were informed that Los Angeles County had sent notices to 1.6 million inactive voters on its voter rolls after a settlement agreement had been reached.
We uncovered that the California Secretary of State monitored our videos for months leading up to the 2020 election with the help of a public relations firm closely connected to the Biden presidential campaign.
Contrary to 11 other appellate circuit courts in the country, the Ninth Circuit has made it more difficult for citizens and groups trying to hold government agencies responsible for retaliating against those citizens or groups for First Amendment-protected speech:
Until this case, every regional circuit had held that an adverse action in the First Amendment retaliation context is one that would chill a person of ordinary firmness from continuing to engage in protected activity. The Ninth Circuit strayed from its sister circuits, excising the “chilling effect” inquiry from the universally accepted standard. It ruled that the Secretary’s course of action was not adverse, and therefore not actionable, without defining “adverse action” or analyzing whether her course of action would chill a person of ordinary firmness.
The Supreme Court should not give a green light to California or any other government to retaliate against Americans for exercising their free speech rights. California’s retaliation against us led to YouTube removing and censoring our accurate election integrity video just before a presidential election.
Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other direct litigation, we continue to investigate and litigate the broad range of censorship that had been imposed upon tens millions of Americans.
In November 2024, we uncovered records from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealing an extensive effort by government and non-government entities to monitor and censor social media posts on fraud during the 2020 election.
In August 2023, 23 filed two FOIA lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for communications between the agencies and Facebook and Twitter regarding the government’s involvement in content moderation and censorship on the social media platforms.
In June 2023, we sued DHS for all records of communications tied to the Election Integrity Partnership. Based on representations from the EIP (see here and here), the federal government, social media companies, the EIP, the Center for Internet Security (a non-profit organization funded partly by DHS and the Defense Department) and numerous other leftist groups communicated privately via the Jira software platform developed by Atlassian.
In February 2023, we sued the U.S. Department Homeland Security (DHS) for records showing cooperation between the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and social media platforms to censor and suppress free speech.
In January 2023 we sued the DOJ for records of communications between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and social media sites regarding foreign influence in elections, as well as the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Judicial Watch Sues New York for Records on Killing ‘Peanut the Squirrel’
In late October 2024, 10 government agents from the state departments of Environmental Conservation and Healthreportedly showed up at Mark Longo’s home in Pine City, New York, where he operates an animal sanctuary, and took his pet squirrel Peanut and raccoon Fred, later euthanizing them.
“They treated me like I was a terrorist. They treated this raid as if I was a drug dealer. They ransacked my house for five hours,” Longo told the New York Post. Peanut, also known as P’Nut, was popular on social media.
The event sparked public outrage, being an example of the overreach of government.
We filed a lawsuit against the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for records about the seizure, testing and euthanizing of a squirrel named “Peanut” and a raccoon named “Fred” (Judicial Watch Inc. v Sean Mahar, Interim Commissioner, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (No. 902596-25)).
We sued in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Albany County, after the Department of Environmental Conservation failed to comply with two Freedom of Information Law requests for written and video records related to Peanut and Fred. The first, filed on November 6, 2024, seeks:
All New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (“NYSDEC”) records related to the seizure, testing, and euthanasia of animals, including a squirrel named “Peanut” and a raccoon named “Fred,” belonging to a Pine City, New York resident named Mark Longo on or about Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 2024. Such records shall include, but not be limited to, complaints filed with NYSDEC, internal NYSDEC communications, including emails and text messages, communications between NYSDEC and the Chemung County Department of Health, investigative reports, incident reports and laboratory reports.
The second, filed on November 6, 2024, seeks:
All body-worn camera audio and video footage, and dashcam audio-video footage, captured by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) and its partner agencies related to the seizure, testing and euthanasia of animals, including a squirrel named “Peanut” and a raccoon named “Fred,” belonging to a Pine City, NY resident named Mark Longo on or about Oct.30-Nov. 1, 2024.
Since November, the New York state agency has granted itself two 30-day extensions and then a 60-day extension to respond to our request.
The heartless killing of “Peanut the Squirrel” by New York State bureaucrats shocked America. And now these same bureaucrats don’t want to turn over one document about Peanut’s death and their abusive raid on Peanut’s home. Our lawsuit aims to get to the bottom of this abuse of government power.
USDA Spent $600k to Study Menstrual Cycles in Transgender Men
Far-left gender ideologies are an obsession of the Left and they were at the heart of the Biden-Harris administration. Our Corruption Chronicles blog has one unbelievable example.
In a flagrant example that demonstrates the urgency to crack down on reckless government spending, the federal agency that runs the nation’s scandal-plagued food stamp program gave a public historically black university over half a million dollars to study menstrual cycles in transgender men and people with masculine gender identities. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), long rocked by fraud and corruption in its $112.8 billion food stamp program, awarded the $600,000 grant to Southern University A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana last spring and the money is scheduled to flow through the spring of 2027. After explaining that a woman will have a monthly menstrual cycle for about 40 years of her life, the USDA grant document states that “it is also important to recognize that transgender men and people with masculine gender identities, intersex and non-binary persons may also menstruate.”
The outrageous trans menstrual cycle study was uncovered by a conservative nonprofit that recently published adatabase of government-funded programs to promote gender ideology. The Virginia-based group, American Principles Project (APP), documents $174 million in federal spending on programs advancing far-left gender ideology under the Biden-Harris administration. The money was used to fund projects that promote radical ideas on gender both domestically and abroad, the group reveals, adding that agencies involved in the spending spree also include the departments of Defense, State and Health and Human Services (HHS) as well as the famously corrupt U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which the Trump administration is working swiftly to clean up after determining that “waste and abuse runs deep.” With a massive budget of around $40 billion, USAID has for years come under fire for the egregious programs it funds with public money and fortunately for American taxpayers, President Trump froze USAID disbursements on day one while his administration identifies problems.
If there was any doubt about the need for the commander-in-chief’s new Department of Government Efficiency(DOGE) to clamp down his predecessor’s carefree spending spree, the APP database eliminates any uncertainty. Among the highlights are three State Department grants totaling $5.8 million to universities in Arab nations—Lebanese American University, American University of Beirut, and American University in Cairo—to “increase participation in gender studies.” USAID awarded the American Bar Association nearly $2 million to “shield the LGBTQI population in the Western Balkans,” and north of a million dollars to the Bangladesh-based Bandhu Social Welfare Society to “support gender diverse people” in the South-Asian Islamic country well known as a recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The Department of Education, which Trump is working to dismantle, awarded nearly half a million dollars last year to a Catholic university in Massachusetts so it could build an “empowerment program” for LGBTQ+ students in school gay-straight alliances. HHS gave a public university in San Diego, California around a million dollars to create a “trans-safe patient safety learning lab” that aims to improve “patient safety for transgender individuals.” The Department of Defense (DOD) doled out $850,000 in contracts to explore “racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in the military justice system.” The Department of the Interior (DOI) gave the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation a million dollars to convert men’s and women’s bathrooms into gender neutral bathrooms at Letchworth State Park.
The list of scandalous awards goes on and on, illustrating the need for an entity like DOGE. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) allotted a private research university in Massachusetts $700,000 to study “social media and substance abuse risk and resilience among gender minority emerging adults.” The DOD disbursed nearly $350,000 in contracts to research reports on undermining authoritarian regimes using gender. The USDA also doled out around $230,000 to a “Brazil forest and gender consultant” and the State Department spent nearly $25,000 to premier a play in which women speak about their vaginas in the Gujarati language in India as well as nearly $22,000 to train 50 LGBTQI refugees in Kenya on “barbering, hairdressing, beauty therapy and cosmetology, food production, and computer programming.” The agency also spent $2,315 to teach English to “professional transgender women makeup entrepreneurs” in Nepal.
Until next week,
Source: Judicial Watch