Another History-Making Year in 2024

Your Judicial Watch is fighting to ensure clean elections, secure borders, and transparency in government – and battling to thwart the Left’s attack on our constitutional republic through their censorship of free speech and abuse of power.

We had another history-making year in 2024, including the following selection of lawsuits and victories that I have no doubt helped preserve our constitutional republic.

We filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Mississippi, challenging a Mississippi election law permitting absentee ballots to be received as long as five business days after Election Day. In an election law victory, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued an opinion reversing the lower court ruling on Mississippi’s election law that permitted the practice.

We filed federal lawsuits against Illinois, Oregon and California to force clean-up of voting rolls.

We filed a $30 million a wrongful death lawsuit against the U.S. Government on behalf of the family of Ashli Babbitt, the U.S. Air Force veteran who was shot and killed inside the U.S. Capitol by then-Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd on January 6, 2021.

We received records from the U.S. Department of Justice in a FOIA lawsuit, that showed that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) opened a criminal investigation of Ashli Babbitt after her killing and listed four “potential violations of federal law,” including felony rioting and civil disorder.

We uncovered Secret Service records from the Department of Homeland Security in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that showed Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas personally declined then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s request for Secret Service protection.

One of our investigations revealed FBI records that included an April 2020 email exchange with several officials in the bureau’s Newark Field Office referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China as including “gain-of-function research” which “would leave no signature of purposeful human manipulation.”

We filed a class action lawsuit against Evanston, Illinois, on behalf of six individuals over the city’s use of race as an eligibility requirement for a reparations program which makes $25,000 payments to black residents and descendants of black residents who lived in Evanston between the years 1919 and 1969. The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

We forced the admission from the White House in federal court that the transcript of Biden’s testimony to Special Counsel Robert Hur was not accurate and was missing “filler words (such as ‘um’ or ‘uh’)” and words that “may have been repeated when spoken (such as ‘I, I’ or ‘and, and’)” which were sometimes “only listed a single time in the transcripts.” In its subsequent filing the Biden Justice Department made the extraordinary assertions of executive privilege and privacy to hide the Biden audio. The agency made the unprecedented assertion that because “AI” could be used to alter Biden’s words the material should be kept secret. Later, we requested that the court reject the Biden Justice Department’s request to rewrite the Freedom of Information Act and that it order the release of the audio recordings of Biden’s interviews with Hur.

One of our lawsuits forced records from the Department of Justice which showed that the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs provided a Democrat staffer with information on FBI whistleblowers who detailed the bureau’s targeting of political opponents and retaliation for their testifying at a May 18, 2023, hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

Heavily redacted records from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in one of our lawsuits showed state election officials in the days before and after the 2020 election flagging online content deemed “misinformation” and sending it to the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a DHS-funded nonprofit, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), and others.

We uncovered Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) records that showed Mike Morell, former acting CIA director under President Obama, requesting CIA permission to publish a letter by former intelligence community leaders stating that they believed the laptop emails exposing Hunter Biden’s connections to Ukraine were Russian disinformation. Morrell’s request for prepublication review was approved in just six hours by the CIA.

We discovered that 113 noncitizens had voted in the June 2024 DC presidential primary.

Records from the Department of Homeland Security, thanks to a FOIA lawsuit, showed, contrary to what it told media, at least one U.S. Secret Service agent broke in to a hair salon and taped over the salon’s security camera in Pittsfield, MA, during a July 27, 2024, campaign fundraising visit by Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Superior Court in Fulton County, GA, entered an order granting a motion for default judgment against District Attorney Fani Willis in our lawsuit for communications Willis had with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6 Committee. In doing so, the court granted our request for attorneys’ fees and ordered Willis to search for and provide releasable records to Judicial Watch.

2024 also marked the release of my fourth Judicial Watch book, Rights and Freedoms in Peril: An Investigative Report on the Left’s Attack on America. In it, I detail a long chain of abuses officials and political groups have made against the American people. The new book is available at JudicialWatchBook.com and I encourage you to get a copy if you haven’t already.

On behalf of our board and all the hard-working staff of Judicial Watch, we appreciated your support in 2024 as we pursued these and so many more investigations and lawsuits on the important issues facing our nation. We pledge to continue fighting aggressively on your behalf in 2025.

As we begin the year, I encourage you to renew (or begin!) your support of Judicial Watch!

Until next week,