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USAID BRIBERY!

FBI STILL HIDING BIDEN TWITTER CENSORSHIP RECORDS

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We were in court this week for a hearing ordered
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by U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan in our FOIA lawsuit
against the U.S. Department of Justice for “Twitter Files
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records
concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop
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and other censorship. The only issue remaining in the lawsuit is the
FBI’s continued hiding of records
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documenting two meetings between Twitter and the Biden FBI.

We filed the April 2023 lawsuit
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against the
Justice Department, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence after the FBI failed
to respond to a December 2022 FOIA request for the records of any FBI
official and key Twitter employees between June 2020 and December 2022
(_Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice_
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(No. 1:23-cv-01163)).

The lawsuit references Yoel Roth, Vijaya Gadde, and Jim Baker, who
were prominent in internal discussions at Twitter about censoring the
_New York Post’s_ Hunter Biden laptop story, as journalist Matt
Taibbi revealed in the December 2022 release of the “Twitter Files
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It is frustrating beyond belief for us to have to go to federal court
for basic information on Biden’s abuse of the FBI, using Twitter to
censor and monitor Americans.

Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel committed the FBI
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to a “new
era” of transparency:

> The FBI is entering a new era—one that will be defined by
> integrity, accountability, and the unwavering pursuit of justice.
> There will be no cover-ups, no missing documents, and no stone left
> unturned — and anyone from the prior or current Bureau who
> undermines this will be swiftly pursued. If there are gaps, we will
> find them. If records have been hidden, we will uncover them. And we
> will bring everything we find to the DOJ to be fully assessed and
> transparently disseminated to the American people as it should be.
> The oath we take is to the Constitution, and under my leadership,
> that promise will be upheld without compromise.

Through FOIA and other direct litigation, we continue to investigate
and litigate the broad range of censorship that had been imposed upon
tens of 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 June 2024, heavily redacted Homeland Security records
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from
a Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit 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), which is a division of DHS, the
Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which was created to flag online
election content for censorship and suppression, and others.

In December 2023, Homeland Security records
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from the
same lawsuit showed a close collaboration between its Cybersecurity
and Information Security Agency (CISA) and the leftist Election
Integrity Partnership (EIP) to engage in “real-time narrative
tracking” on all major social media platforms in the days leading up
to the 2020 election.

In November 2023, we uncovered Homeland Security records
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that
showed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
communicating during the 2020 election campaign with the Election
Integrity Partnership (EIP). The CISA records showed government
involvement in the EIP pressure on Google, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok,
Pinterest, Reddit and other platforms to censor “disinformation.”

In September 2022, we sued
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the
Secretary of State of the State of California for having YouTube
censor a Judicial Watch election integrity video. In March 2025,
Judicial Watch asked the Supreme Court of the United States to review
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the
case.

In July 2021, we uncovered
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records
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which
revealed that Facebook coordinated closely with the CDC to control the
Covid narrative and “misinformation” and that over $3.5 million in
free advertising was given to the CDC by social media companies.

In May 2021, we revealed
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documents
showing that Iowa state officials pressured social media companies
Twitter and Facebook to censor posts about the 2020 election.

In April 2021, records
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from the
Office of the Secretary of State of California revealed how state
officials pressured social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google
(YouTube)) to censor posts about the 2020 election. Included in these
records were “misinformation briefings” emails that were compiled
by communications firm SKDK, which lists
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Biden for President as their top
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of
2020. The records show how the state agency successfully pressured
YouTube to censor a Judicial Watch video concerning mail-in voting and
a Judicial Watch lawsuit settlement about California voter roll clean
up.

CHARGES: BRIBED USAID OFFICIAL HELPS MINORITY BUSINESSES GET $550
MILLION IN CONTRACTS

The United States Agency for International Development has been in the
news lately as President Trump’s administration exposes its use as a
cash cow for the Left. Now there’s news of outright bribery at the
agency, as our _Corruption Chronicles_ blog reveals
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> In yet another case that demonstrates the deep-rooted corruption at
> the dismantled United States Agency for International Development
> (USAID) , a contracting officer at the scandal-plagued State
> Department offshoot has pleaded guilty to bribery of a public
> official
>
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> for running a decade-long scheme involving over half a billion
> dollars in contracts. The criminal operation was facilitated by a
> government program that helps socially and economically
> disadvantaged businesses by giving them lucrative federal
> contracting opportunities through “set-asides and solo-source”
> contracts exclusively available to minorities and women without a
> competitive bidding process. All the parties involved in this
> criminal enterprise, including the veteran USAID employee, are
> minorities.
>
> It is important to note that the mainstream media, which
> collectively expressed outrage when President Trump dismantled
> USAID, has failed to report on the pervasive fraud that has long
> gripped the foreign aid agency and still ignores cases like this
> that support the administration’s move. Only a few local Maryland
> news outlets covered this huge bribery operation because the
> perpetrators were from the Baltimore area. The corrupt USAID
> contracting officer, Roderick Watson, is from Woodstock, which is
> just west of Baltimore. Federal prosecutors say he received over a
> million dollars in bribes in exchange for using his position as a
> trusted overseer of taxpayer money to direct 14 prime federal
> contracts to his three buddies, Walter Barnes, a certified Small
> Business Administration (SBA) minority business owner, Darryl Britt
> another minority business owner and Paul Young, a subcontractor of
> the men’s companies. Barnes has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to
> commit bribery of a public official and securities fraud. Britt has
> pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery of a public official
> and Young has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery of a
> public official.
>
> “The defendants sought to enrich themselves at the expense of
> American taxpayers through bribery and fraud,” said Matthew R.
> Galeotti, head of the Department of Justice (DOJ) criminal division.
> “Their scheme violated the public trust by corrupting the federal
> government’s procurement process. Anybody who cares about good and
> effective government should be concerned about the waste, fraud, and
> abuse in government agencies, including USAID.” Galeotti added
> that those who engage in bribery schemes to exploit the U.S. Small
> Business Administration’s vital economic programs for small
> businesses— whether individuals or corporations acting through
> them—will be held to account. The U.S. Attorney for the District
> of Maryland, where the case is being tried, emphasized that Watson
> was entrusted to serve the interests of the American people and his
> criminal actions for his own personal gain undermine the integrity
> of public institutions. “Public trust is the hallmark of our
> nation’s values, so corruption within a federal government agency
> is intolerable” the U.S. Attorney, Kelly O. Hayes, said.
>
> The elaborate scheme began in 2013 when Watson, while a USAID
> contracting officer, made a deal with Britt to steer government
> contracts his way in exchange for bribes. Britt’s company, Apprio,
> benefitted from the special minority exception and therefore did not
> receive much scrutiny but when it graduated from the program and was
> no longer eligible to be a prime business for new contracts with
> USAID under the initiative, they brought Barnes onboard. His
> minority-owned company, Vistant, shifted to the prime contractor
> that cashed in thanks to Watson’s influence between 2018 and 2022.
> Britt and Barnes concealed the bribes—cash, computers, cellular
> phones, jobs for relatives, down payments on two residential
> mortgages—by passing them through Young, the president of another
> subcontractor to the men’s businesses. Watson helped his
> accomplices by manipulating the procurement process at USAID by,
> among other things, recommending their companies to other agency
> decisionmakers for noncompetitive contracts, disclosing sensitive
> procurement information, providing positive performance evaluations,
> and approving increased funding and security clearances. “Watson
> exploited his position at USAID to line his pockets with bribes in
> exchange for more than $550 million in contracts,” according to
> Guy Ficco, chief of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal
> Investigation (IRS-CI). “While he helped three company owners and
> presidents bypass the fair bidding process, he was showered with
> cash and lavish gifts.”
>
> Judicial Watch has for years exposed inherent fraud, waste, and
> corruption at USAID. Most recently, we sued
>
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the agency for
> records involving $27 million in Gaza grants that went to
> “Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees.” The Biden administration
> claimed the recipients could not be disclosed because the agency’s
> workers could be put at risk by Israel. The involvement of
> employees
>
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> the U.S.-backed United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
> Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on
> Israel underscores the importance of transparency in who receives
> American taxpayer dollars and how the money is spent.

Until next week,



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