Tag: Americas

From Breitbart:

Judicial Watch on Thursday sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for records about former Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz’s relationship with China, claiming there is a cover-up by the deep state.

The watchdog organization sued after DHS failed to respond to an election-era Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for: 

All documents and communications in the DHS Microsoft Teams group chat “NST NFT Bi-Weekly Sync” from July 1, 2024, to present, including all accompanying, uploaded, or imbedded attachments and documents, referring or relating to Minnesota Governor Timothy J. Walz (or the office and/or staff of Governor Walz).

All Intelligence Information Reports and Regional Intelligence Notes (including these documents that have been titled or categorized differently) from November 1, 2023, to present related to Minnesota Governor Timothy J. Walz (or the office and/or staff of Governor Walz).

All requests for assistance or referrals to other federal agencies regarding Minnesota Governor Timothy J. Walz

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) revealed that a Homeland Security whistleblower told the committee Walz was a “target” of the Chinese Communist Party as “someone they can get to DC.”

The whistleblower continued, “officials from DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) have been involved in the Department’s investigative and/or intelligence work connected with the CCP, the state of Minnesota, and Governor Walz.”

Read more here…

Source: Judicial Watch

From The Federalist:

The Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department is charging the conservative legal watchdog, Judicial Watch, more than $1.5 million to access bodycam footage of the Jan. 6 Capitol protests.

On Tuesday, the non-profit published a press release outlining the department’s demands following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed last summer. Judicial Watch filed the suit after local law enforcement refused to release the footage in August 2021. 

“The DC Metro Police initially rejected Judicial Watch’s request because, it claimed, the videos were, at the time, ‘part of an ongoing investigation and criminal proceeding,’” Judicial Watch said Tuesday. “But since President Trumps [sic] pardons of January 6 defendants, the DC government will make public the videos (supposedly containing over one thousand hours of footage) if Judicial Watch agrees to pay over $1.5 million.”

President Donald Trump pardoned nearly every defendant charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot immediately upon his second inauguration in January. The executive order granted “full, complete and unconditional pardons” to an estimated 1,500 people and commuted the sentences of another 14. 

“We hope they come out tonight,” Trump said on the evening of his first night back in office. Many of those charged with misconduct just walked into the open Capitol building, and Jacob Chansley, infamously known as the “Q-Anon Shaman,” was even escorted around the building by law enforcement officials. Chansley was sentenced to 41 months in prison in the fall of 2021. 

Read more here…

Source: Judicial Watch

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 a database 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.

Source: Judicial Watch

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis was 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 a Judicial Watch 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 a Judicial Watch lawsuit filed after Willis falsely denied having any records responsive to Judicial Watch’s 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,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. 

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 awarded Judicial Watch $21,578 “attorney’s fees and costs.” (Willis’ operation made the payment to Judicial Watch 10 days after the court-ordered deadline.) 

Judicial Watch subsequently filed a motion, asking the court to conduct a private inspection of any records found.

Judicial Watch 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 is assisted in the case by John Monroe of John Monroe Law in Georgia.

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, Specia 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, Judicial Watch filed 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, Judicial Watch 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, Judicial Watch 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.

In his book Rights and Freedoms in Peril Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton details a long chain of abuses officials and politicians have made against the American people and calls readers to battle for “the soul and survival of America.”

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Source: Judicial Watch

From The Washington Examiner by Tom Fitton:

Many are asking if federal judges can be impeached as a consequence of judicial activism,  deciding a case based on their personal preferences rather than what is stated in the Constitution, statutes, and applicable precedent and in usurpation of legislative and executive power. The answer is yes.

A series of extreme and activist decisions against President Donald Trump’s constitutional authority exercised through the Department of Government Efficiency and his appointees such as Elon Musk have brought the question to the fore.

But Article II, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution unambiguously states, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” In explaining what’s also known as the “vesting clause,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said, “A president is elected by the whole American people. He’s the only official in the entire government elected by the entire nation. Judges are appointed. Members of Congress are elected at the district or state level.”

Read more here…

Source: Judicial Watch