Trump Assassination
Every Judicial Watch supporter and every patriotic American is praying for
President Trump, his family, the family of the Trump
supporter who was murdered, and those injured on
Saturday.
The radical Left has attempted to mass murder Republican congressmen, as
well as Justice Kavanaugh and his family. Recently, Democratic Party
leaders, through unhinged rhetoric, false allegations of misconduct,
proposed legislation, and sham prosecutions, have increased the risk of
assassination of President Trump, as well as violence against his
supporters.
Americans can be assured that Judicial Watch has already initiated an
independent investigation into the catastrophic Secret Service failures
that day.
Judicial Watch Applauds Judge Cannon’s Decision to End Rogue Special
Counsel Prosecution of Trump
Judicial Watch applauds Judge Cannon’s principled decision to end Jack
Smith’s unconstitutional criminal proceeding that has so abused former
President Trump and the rule of law.
I am an eyewitness to these abuses, as I was harassed personally by Jack
Smith’s rogue operation.
Cannon’s decision, “based on the unlawful appointment and funding” of
Special Counsel Smith, is a victory for the U.S. Constitution and
accountable government. This case never should have seen the light of day.
We have long called out the unconstitutional “special counsels” and
their attendant abuses of former President Donald Trump and other innocent
political targets. As Judge Cannon noted in her opinion:
The bottom line is this: The Appointments Clause is a critical
constitutional restriction stemming from the separation of powers, and it
gives Congress a considered role in determining the propriety of vesting
appointment power for inferior officers. The Special Counsel’s position
effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to
a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty
inherent in the separation of powers. If the political branches wish to
grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to
investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United
States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so. He can be
appointed and confirmed through the default method prescribed in the
Appointments Clause, as Congress has directed for United States Attorneys
throughout American history … or Congress can authorize his appointment
through enactment of positive statutory law consistent with the
Appointments Clause.
We have several Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) lawsuits related to the prosecutorial abuses 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 Jack
Smith’s office targeting Trump and other Americans.
(Before his appointment to investigate and prosecute Trump, Jack Smith 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 Smith’s then-Public
Integrity Section about a plan to launch criminal investigations into
conservative tax-exempt groups. Read more here.)
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.
This decision was a big victory for Trump and the rule of the law but the
corrupted Biden Justice Department won’t stop trying to abuse him – so
there will be much more work to be done!
Judicial Watch Sues over Scuffle Involving VP Harris’ Secret Service
Detail
The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump is not the
first black mark on the Biden Secret Service.
We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for records relating to an incident
at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland in which a Secret Service agent assigned
to protect Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly got into a scuffle with
colleagues (Judicial Watch v.
Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:24-cv-01705)).
According to an April 24 report in the
Washington Examiner, a Secret Service agent was removed from her
duties after physically attacking the commanding agent in charge and other
agents who tried to subdue her.
A later report states: “The
agents involved in restraining [Michelle] Herczeg were especially concerned
because she still had her gun in the holster. They wrestled her to the
ground, took the gun from her, cuffed her, and then removed her from the
terminal.” The report also states that, following the incident at Joint
Base Andrews, which is the home base for Air Force One and Air Force Two:
Secret Service agents and officers are privately questioning the hiring
process and whether the agency had adequately screened Herczeg’s
background. Some also wonder whether her hire was part of a diversity,
equity, and inclusion push in response to years of staff shortages that may
have required the agency to lower its once-strict employment standards and
physical performance to reach quotas for female agents and officers.
We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after DHS
failed to respond to an April 25, 2024, FOIA request for:
All records related to a reported incident at Joint Base Andrews in
which a Secret Service agent was involved in an altercation with colleagues
on or about April 23, 2024, including but not limited to incident reports,
Vice Presidential protective detail agents’ emails and text messages, and
emails and text messages of the following USSS officials: Director Kimberly
Cheatle, Deputy Dir. Ronald Rowe, Chief Operating Officer Cynthia Radway,
Asst. Dir. Michael Plati, Asst. Dir. Brian Lambert, Chief Human, Capital
Officer Denise Walker Hall, Asst. Dir. David Smith, Asst. Dir. Miltom
Wilson, Uniformed Division Chief Michael Buck, Chief Counsel Thomas Huse,
and Chief of Communications Anthony Guglielmi.
All SF-50s, SF-52s, training completion
forms, and disciplinary records of Secret Service Agent Michelle
Herczeg.
All USSS and DHS policy documents related to
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the hiring, employment, training and
discipline of Secret Service agents.
Prior to the altercation, Herczeg reportedly arrived at
Joint Base Andrews “and began acting erratically, grabbing another senior
agent’s personal phone and deleting applications on it, according to two
sources familiar with the matter. The other agent, a shift leader, was able
to recover his phone and then acted as if nothing had happened.”
The catastrophic security failure behind the attempted assassination of
Trump shows how the management and quality of Secret Service personnel are
urgent issues. The Secret Service’s illicit cover-up of these documents
about the Kamala Harris protective detail incident is not reassuring.
Judicial Watch Asks Court to Retain Lawsuit to Clean Up Voter Rolls in
Illinois
Illinois is fighting a federal law requiring it to clean up its voter
rolls.
We asked a federal court to
reject the state’s motion to dismiss and end our National Voter
Registration Act (NVRA) lawsuit to clean up the
state’s voting rolls (Judicial Watch, Inc. et al
v. The Illinois State Board of Elections et al. (No.
1:24-cv-01867)).
We sued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois,
Eastern Division, on behalf of the nonprofit organizations Illinois Family Action,
Breakthrough
Ideas, and Carol J. Davis, who is a lawfully registered voter in
Illinois.
In our original complaint, we
point out that 23 Illinois counties, with a combined registration list of
980,089 voters, reported removing a combined total of only 100
registrations in the last two-year reporting period under a crucial
provision of the NVRA. This is an “absurdly small” number, and there
“is no possible way these counties can be conducting a general program
that makes reasonable effort to cancel registrations of voters who have
become ineligible because of a change of residence while removing so few
registrations.”
We point out:
Aside from the outright failure of 23 Illinois counties to remove
registrants who fail to respond to Confirmation Notices [as required by
NVRA], the complaint also listed counties who lack data that is crucial to
list maintenance efforts under the NVRA. Again relying on Defendants’ own
admissions to the EAC [Election Assistance Commission], the complaint notes
that 34 counties could only report “Data not available” regarding
Confirmation Notice removals, and 19 of these reported the same thing for
death removals. In addition, 29 counties reported “Data not available”
regarding the number of Confirmation Notices sent, and 22 counties said the
same thing about the number of inactive registrations. In all,
“[f]ifty-two of 108 Illinois jurisdictions failed to report any data to
the EAC in one or more of the crucial data categories identified above.”
For her part, Defendant Matthews confirmed that she “does not have access
to local election authorities’ list maintenance records.” Apparently,
no one in Illinois has access to this data.
Our attorneys argue:
- Defendants have failed to implement
the NVRA’s required “general program that makes a reasonable effort”
to remove voters who have moved or died;
- Defendant Matthews, who is Illinois’
chief State election official…has failed in her duty to coordinate state
responsibilities under the Act; and
- Defendants have failed to retain and
provide to Plaintiffs NVRA-related records they are required to provide.
The support for these allegations derives primarily from Defendants’ own
admissions, in response to a survey conducted every two years by the
federal Election Assistance Commission as it prepares a mandatory report to
Congress, and in their correspondence with Plaintiffs.
Dirty voter rolls can mean dirty elections, and Illinois’ voting rolls
are a mess. Rather than trying to shut down our lawsuit, Illinois should
take immediate steps to clean its rolls to both prevent fraud and increase
voter confidence in the elections.
As you know, we are a national leader in voting integrity and voting
rights. 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.
Robert Popper, a Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads our election law
program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights
Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights
investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of
states.
In May 2024, we sued California to force
the clean-up of 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 December 2023, we sent notice letters to
election officials in the District of Columbia, California, and Illinois,
notifying them of evident violations of the National Voter Registration
Act (NVRA) of 1993, based on their failure to remove
inactive voters from their registration rolls. The letters point out that
these jurisdictions publicly reported removing few or no ineligible voter
registrations under a key provision of the NVRA. The letters threatened
federal lawsuits unless the violations were corrected in a timely fashion.
In response to Judicial Watch’s inquiries, Washington, DC, officials
admitted that they had not complied with the NVRA, promptly removed 65,544
outdated names from the voting rolls, promised to remove 37,962 more, and
designated another 73,522 registrations as “inactive.” NVRA lawsuits
subsequently were commenced against California and Illinois.
In July 2023 we filed an amicus
curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the decision of the
U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, which struck down Maine’s
policy restricting the use and distribution of the state’s voter
registration list (Public Interest Legal
Foundation v. Shenna Bellows (No. 23-1361). According to a national study conducted
by Judicial Watch in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate was 101%
of eligible voters.
In July 2023 we also settled a federal
election integrity lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union
against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Elections, and
its director, which now grants access to the current centralized statewide
list of registered voters for the state for the past 15 elections.
In April 2023, Pennsylvania settled with us and
admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations
in response to communications from Judicial Watch. The settlement commits
Pennsylvania and five of its counties to extensive public reporting of
statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next
five years.
In March 2023, Colorado agreed to settle our NVRA
lawsuit alleging that Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its
rolls. The settlement agreement requires Colorado to provide Judicial Watch
with the most recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for
six years.
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 Judicial Watch
filed in 2017.
We settled a federal
election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed
441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take
reasonable steps going forward to clean its voter registration lists.
Kentucky also removed
hundreds of thousands of old registrations after it entered into a consent
decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.
In February 2022, we settled a voter roll
clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North
Carolina removed over 430,000 inactive registrations from its voter
rolls.
In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of our
challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme”
congressional-districts gerrymander.
We’ll keep you updated on this and our other election law cases as events
warrant!
TSA Has No Idea How Air Marshal Reassignments Affected Security
Trying to cope with its disastrous border policies, the Biden
administration misused skilled air marshals to “babysit” the people
coming across. And it has no idea what that meant for our air security, as
our Corruption Chronicles blog reports.
The federal agency created after 9/11 to protect the nation’s
transportation system has no idea how aviation security was impacted when
it plucked Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) agents from their critical
duties to help with the Mexican border crisis. FAMS operates under the
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and in the last few years the
agency has forced the highly trained aviation security specialists to
assist Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with the onslaught of illegal
immigrants entering the country under Biden’s disastrous open border
policies. The deployments outraged air marshals around the country and led
to accusations of fraud, waste, and abuse of authority by TSA and FAMS
leadership for unlawfully sending assets to the southern border to perform
duties unrelated to transportation. FAMS is charged with protecting
commercial passenger flights by deterring and countering the risk of
terrorist activity, a mission impossible to fulfill from the southwest
border.
When the highly trained law enforcement
agents were reassigned to babysit the influx of illegal immigrants the Air
Marshal National Council, which represents thousands of officers
nationwide, filed a complaint
with the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) Inspector General and requested that the watchdog
investigate the questionable deployment of TSA assets to El Paso, Laredo
and McAllen Texas, San Diego California and Tucson and Yuma Arizona. The
council pointed out that the air marshals were assigned to perform hospital
watch, transportation duties, law enforcement searches, welfare checks and
entry control, which have no relation to TSA’s core mission of
transportation security. The first recent wave of air marshals—45
officers and two supervisors—was dispatched to El Paso and Yuma on
October 30, 2022, for 21-day rotations. More were assigned later to other
busy locations overrun with migrants.
The TSA admits it does not know the
operational impacts that the air marshal border deployments had on
transportation security. “TSA cannot assure deployments did not impact
FAMS’ mission to mitigate potential risks and threats to our Nation’s
transportation system,” according to a DHS report
issued days ago thanks to the Air
Marshal National Council’s request to probe the matter. The agency did
not bother to establish baseline quantifiable and measurable goals from
which it could measure the effectiveness of its primary operations while
air marshals were assigned to assist CBP at the southwest border, the
17-page report says. TSA incurred approximately $45 million in travel and
payroll costs, but the agency was eventually reimbursed by CBP, which also
operates under DHS.
Under the agreement with CBP, air marshals
played the role of “immigration officers,” to perform the following
duties: Escorting migrants from the point of apprehension to processing,
between various Border Patrol Sector facilities, or to another entity with
jurisdiction over post-processing custody; escorting migrants to and from
local health providers and hospitals; conducting searches, including pat
downs, and placing or removing handcuffs or restraint devices on migrants
in custody before they are transported; securing CBP facilities, including
detention cells, and authorizing access to various entry controlled points;
escorting migrants between processing checkpoints within the facility;
assisting with staffing the unaccompanied female housing facility;
observing migrants in holding areas to assess their safety and well-being
while awaiting processing or transportation.
Perhaps to discourage more Mexican border
deployments, the DHS IG report, which has large redactions to protect
sensitive information, stresses that FAMS is a risk and intelligence-based
federal law enforcement organization. “TSA employs approximately
[redacted] air marshals to assess, address, and mitigate potential risks
and threats to our Nation’s transportation system,” the DHS watchdog
writes, stating the obvious. “In addition to providing in-flight
security, air marshals carry out a variety of other law
enforcement–related functions.” Babysitting illegal immigrants is most
certainly not one of them. FAMS was created in 1961 as a small force of
only 18 “sky marshals” to counter airplane hijackers. After the 2001
terrorist attacks the force grew tremendously and plays a major role in
protecting the nation’s civil aviation system.
Until next week...
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