Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis will face more accountability
thanks to Judicial Watch’s persistence.
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Fani Willis Slammed by Court!

FANI WILLIS ORDERED TO TURN OVER ANTI-TRUMP COLLUSION RECORDS TO COURT

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Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis will face more accountability
thanks to Judicial Watch’s persistence.

She was just ordered
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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
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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._
[[link removed]]
(No. 24-CV-002805)).

The order follows a February 28 hearing
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in
which Willis’ lawyers admitted to finding the records after what is
believed to be a fifth search of her office. The court order
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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,
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Willis
finally admitted to having records
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showing
communications with the January 6 Committee but refused to release all
but one document in response to the court order
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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
[[link removed]
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
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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
>
[[link removed]]]
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
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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
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among them. In 2014, a Judicial Watch investigation
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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_
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(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
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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
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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
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a petition
for a _writ of certiorari_
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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
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In May 2024, we sued
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California under the National Voter Registration Act
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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
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the removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since last
year, under the terms of a settlement agreement
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in a federal lawsuit
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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_
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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_
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(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
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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!”
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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
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voter list maintenance requirements. For instance, in June 2019
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we were informed that Los Angeles County had sent notices to 1.6
million inactive voters on its voter rolls after a settlement
agreement
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had been reached.

We uncovered
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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
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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
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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
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DHS for
all records of communications tied to the Election Integrity
Partnership. Based on representations from the EIP (see here
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and here
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the federal
government, social media companies, the EIP, the Center for Internet
Security
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(a non-profit
organization funded partly by DHS and the Defense Department
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and numerous other leftist groups communicated privately via the Jira
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software platform developed by Atlassian.

In February 2023, we sued
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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
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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
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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
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public outrage, being an example of the overreach of government.

We filed a lawsuit
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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_
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(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
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> 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
>
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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
>
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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
>
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> 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
>
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> 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
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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,



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RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS IN PERIL

_"When it comes to fighting for the American people’s ‘right to
know,’ no one holds a candle to Tom Fitton and his team at Judicial
Watch"_ - SEAN HANNITY

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