The Unpardonable Hunter Biden Pardon

[INSIDE JW]

JUDICIAL WATCH SUES FOR RECORDS ON TRUMP’S WOULD-BE ASSASSIN

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Why is the FBI not releasing what it knows about President Trump’s
would-be assassin?

We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
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against the U.S. Department of Justice for all records regarding
Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to assassinate President Trump on
July 13, 2024, (_Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice_
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_(No.
1:25-cv-02216)).

We sued after the FBI failed to respond to a July 24, 2024, FOIA
request for:

> All records, including but not limited to, investigative reports,
> interview summaries (Forms 1023), letterhead memoranda, photos,
> audio/visual recordings, database inquiries, interagency
> communications, and any other records, whether contained in the
> Central Records System or cross-referenced files, related to Thomas
> Matthew Crooks, born September 20, 2003 in Butler Township, PA and
> died on July 13, 2024, who attempted the assassination of former
> President Donald Trump on July 13, 2024.
>
> All records of communication in any form, including but not
> limited to emails, text messages, encrypted app communications and
> voice recordings, between FBI officials and/or FBI sources,
> contractors, and assets on the one hand, and Thomas Matthew Crooks
> on the other hand.

On July 13, 2024, then-Republican presidential candidate Trump
survived an assassination
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attempt while speaking at an open-air campaign rally in Butler,
Pennsylvania. Trump was shot and wounded in his upper right ear by
20-year-old Crooks, who fired eight rounds from his perch on top of a
nearby building.

Crooks also killed one audience member, firefighter Corey Comperatore
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and critically injured two others. Crooks was shot and killed by the
counter sniper team of the United States Secret Service.

No more delays and excuses. The FBI should release what it has on the
man who tried to kill President Trump a full year ago. Attorney
General Bondi should direct a full and immediate response to our
lawsuit.

In March 2025, we sued
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the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security for records related to security
provided for the rally in Butler, PA (_Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S.
Department of Homeland Security_
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(No. 1:25-cv-00704)).

In September 2004, we sued
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the
Department of Homeland Security for Secret Service and other records
regarding potential increased protective services to former President
Trump’s security detail prior to the attempt on his life at his July
13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania (_Judicial Watch v. U.S.
Department of Homeland Security_
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_(No.
1:24-cv-02495)).

In August 2024, we obtained records
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from the district attorney’s office in Butler County, PA, detailing
the extensive preparation of local police for the rally at which
former President Trump was shot. The preparation included sniper
teams, counter assault teams and a quick response force. On August 9,
in response to a separate open records request, we obtained bodycam
footage of the July 13 assassination events from the Butler Township
Police Department.

JUDICIAL WATCH SUES JUSTICE DEPARTMENT FOR HUNTER BIDEN PARDON RECORDS

Joe Biden’s questionable pardons are all over the news, but we’re
focused on one in particular.

We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
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against the U.S. Department of Justice for all records from the
Offices of Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, and Associate
Attorney General regarding Joe Biden’s controversial pardon of
Hunter Biden (_Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of State_
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_(No.
1:25-cv-02143)).

On December 1, 2024, then-President Biden issued a full and
unconditional pardon
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to Hunter Biden
for any federal offenses “which he has committed or may have
committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014
through December 1, 2024.”

We sued after the Justice Department failed to respond to a December
2, 2024, FOIA request for:

> Records and communications of the Offices of the Attorney General,
> Deputy Attorney General, and/or Associate Attorney General or their
> designated representatives, about the pardoning of Robert Hunter
> Biden by his father, President Joe Biden.

The Biden Justice Department officials at issue are: then-Attorney
General Merrick Garland; then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco; and
then-Associate Attorney General Benjamin Mizer.

Fox News reported
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on June 5, 2025, that the pardon of Hunter Biden was the only one of
the over 1,500 pardons issued in the waning days of the Biden
Administration that President Biden signed by hand. All others were
signed by the so-called presidential autopen, the report states. The
pardon also covers the time Hunter Biden served on the board of
directors of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings.

The Hunter Biden pardon for undefined crimes going back a decade is
invalid on its face. The Trump Justice Department should immediately
release any and all records about the Biden pardon scandal.

We have filed multiple federal lawsuits focused on Biden family
corruption.

A hearing was recently held in the May 2023 FOIA lawsuit
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against the National Archives for Biden family records and
communications regarding travel and finance transactions, as well as
communications between the Bidens and several known business
associates (_Judicial Watch, Inc. v. National Archives_
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(No. 1:23-cv-01432).

In February 2025, we filed a lawsuit
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against the Justice Department for records and communications
regarding the Internal Revenue Service’s investigation of Hunter
Biden (_Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice_
[[link removed]]
(No.1:24-cv-03387)).

In June 2024, we received records
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the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) showing Mike Morell, former
acting CIA director under President Obama, requesting CIA permission
to publish a letter
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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 (_Judicial Watch v. Central
Intelligence Agency_
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(No. 1:23-cv-01844)).

In October 2022, we sued the DOJ for all records in the possession of
FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten regarding an August
6, 2020, briefing provided to members of the U.S. Senate. Ron Johnson
(R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) raised concerns that the briefing was
intended to undermine the senators’ investigation of Hunter Biden
(_Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice_
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(No. 1:22-cv-02821)).

We filed a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department on April 20,
2022, for messages sent through the SMART
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(State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolkit) system that mention
Hunter Biden (_Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State_
[[link removed]
_(No.
1:22-cv-01066)).

In December 2020, State Department records
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obtained through a Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit showed that former U.S.
Ambassador to Ukraine Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch had specifically
warned in 2017 about corruption allegations against Burisma Holdings.
Previously in this case, State Department records
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included a
briefing checklist of a February 22, 2019, meeting in Kyiv between
then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and Sally Painter,
co-founder and chief operating officer of Blue Star Strategies, a
Democratic lobbying firm which was hired by Burisma Holdings to combat
corruption allegations. At the time of the meeting, Hunter Biden was
serving on the board of directors for Burisma Holdings (_Judicial
Watch v. U.S. Department of State_
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(No. 1:20-cv-00229)).

SEAN O’DONNELL, FORMER EPA INSPECTOR GENERAL, JOINS JUDICIAL WATCH

Sean O’Donnell, a distinguished former government attorney, has
joined the litigation team at Judicial Watch.

O’Donnell was U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Inspector
General
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from 2020 to
2025, where he was a lone voice in the EPA warning against “fast
money” and careless spending. His reputation as a relentless fighter
against fraud, waste, and abuse was earned, having taken the
agency’s Office of Inspector General from one that realized only $3
million in annual monetary impact to one realizing over $2 billion in
2024.

From 2020 to 2022, O’Donnell was acting Inspector General at the
U.S. Department of Defense where he successfully led over 1,800
oversight professionals, stationed across the globe, in fighting fraud
and waste, promoting effectiveness, and ensuring ethical conduct
throughout the Defense Department. During O’Donnell’s nearly
three-year tenure, his office recovered approximately $3.5 billion in
civil and criminal cases and issued 331 reports, identifying over
$1.25 billion in potential benefit to the Defense Department.

For 15 years, from 2005 to 2020, O’Donnell was at the U.S.
Department of Justice, where he served as an award-winning trial
attorney and prosecutor, focusing on white collar and fraud cases, as
well as corruption and national security matters. His areas of focus
at the Justice Department included investigating and litigating
whistleblower allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse committed by
government officials, contractors, and grantees. Through his work, the
Justice Department recovered over $4 billion for the government and
fraud victims.

Early in his career at the Justice Department, O’Donnell enforced
and ensured compliance with laws protecting the right to vote and the
integrity of elections, including the Voting Rights Act, the National
Voter Registration Act (NVRA), and the Help America Vote Act.

O’Donnell clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth
Circuit and on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of
Texas. He also spent time in private practice, working on intellectual
property and antitrust litigation.

O’Donnell has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Texas A&M
University, a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University
of Washington, and a master’s degree in economics and a law degree
from the University of Texas at Austin.

We’re happy to have Sean O’Donnell join the Judicial Watch team.
His tremendous experience at the Justice Department and as Inspector
General for both the EPA and the Defense Department is a perfect fit
for Judicial Watch and should make corrupt government officials
nervous.

U.S. INVESTS MILLIONS TO CRACK DOWN ON SKYROCKETING FOOD STAMP FRAUD

Your tax dollars are being handed out fraudulently by the billions
through our porous food stamp program, as our _Corruption Chronicles_
blog reports
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> Fraud and corruption are so rampant within the nation’s mammoth
> food stamp program that the government is quietly investing millions
> of dollars in a special initiative aimed at cracking down on the
> waste that has long plagued it. In fiscal year 2024 nearly 42
> million low-income households got food stamps at a cost of around
> $94 billion. A substantial chunk of approximately $10 billion
> annually is paid out fraudulently and without proper intervention
> the figure will only grow, according to a recent academic study
>
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> “Despite a 350 percent increase in spending on efforts to improve
> program integrity over the past decade, waste and
> fraud—particularly from benefit trafficking and eligibility
> misreporting—remain pervasive,” researchers found.
>
> This month the agency that administers the scandal-plagued welfare
> program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), announced it is
> spending $5 million
>
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on a Fraud
> Framework aimed at cutting back on waste in the bloated food stamp
> system, which was renamed Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
> (SNAP) by the Obama administration to eliminate the stigma of
> receiving public assistance. States, which distribute benefits and
> determine eligibility, will receive up to $750,000 in funding to
> help correct a problem they have essentially created. For years
> there have been increased reports of food stamp theft by criminal
> actors through card skimming schemes of the Electronic Benefits
> Transfer (EBT) system that allows recipients to pay for food using
> the taxpayer-funded program as well as SNAP recipients intentionally
> committing fraud by violating program rules. This includes
> falsifying income or identity to be eligible for benefits they may
> not be entitled to, or by using benefits for anything other than
> their intended purpose.
>
> The $5 million Fraud Framework will reportedly tackle the problem by
> strengthening efforts to detect potential scams at the time of
> application, enhancing internal controls to protect against employee
> fraud, and improving documentation around recipient fraud or benefit
> theft processes. The framework will also better assess the impact of
> current integrity efforts and initiatives through active monitoring
> of a defined set of metrics and conduct “recipient integrity
> education” that improves messaging through various channels, in
> multiple languages, and in plain language rather than in legal
> jargon. The new educational material will also ensure that food
> stamp recipients as well as the public understand what SNAP fraud is
> and how to avoid becoming victims or committing program violations.
> Amusingly, the USDA writes in the grant announcement that it has
> “zero tolerance for fraud” and continues to implement measures
> to improve program integrity.
>
> The reality is that the problem has long persisted, peaking in
> recent years with a multitude of incidents that have fleeced
> American taxpayers out of large sums. Just weeks ago, Judicial Watch
> reported
>
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> on a case involving a bribed USDA employee who federal prosecutors
> say helped run “one of the largest food stamp frauds in U.S.
> history.” Adding insult to injury the longtime USDA staffer,
> Arlasa Davis, worked in a special division responsible for
> identifying fraud. For more than five years Davis and her
> conspirators ran a “sprawling fraud and bribery scheme that
> generated over $66 million” in unauthorized food stamp
> transactions, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). The
> Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) found that Davis abused her
> position and privileged access to confidential government databases
> to help the others in the ring embezzle food stamp benefits by
> driving tens of millions of dollars in phony transactions. The
> disgraced USDA veteran and her accomplices were recently charged
> with conspiracy to steal government funds and misappropriate USDA
> benefits and Davis was additionally charged with bribery and honest
> services fraud.
>
> With SNAP fraud at an all-time high the USDA launched a special
> system last year to facilitate the replacement
>
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>
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> the welfare benefit when recipients claim it stolen. In the
> program’s first two years the government doled out a hefty $61.5
> million to replace pilfered food stamps in 127,290 cases. That
> figure has since increased to a whopping $102,425,077 to replace
> 226,196 of the 691,604 benefits reported stolen, according to the
> latest figures published in the SNAP Replacement of Stolen Benefits
> Dashboard
>
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> Recipients in practically every state have submitted claims with New
> York leading the pack at 33,468, followed by California (32,258),
> Alabama (26,919) and Oklahoma (21,553). The new $5 million fraud
> framework is expected to drastically cut down on those figures.

UNPREPARED BORDER PATROL RELEASED ALIENS FROM TERRORIST NATION

The aliens pouring over our border under the Biden administration
weren’t all innocent Mexican families, as our _Corruption
Chronicles_ blog reports
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many were threats to our national security:

> Federal agents at one of the nation’s busiest border crossings
> failed to screen illegal immigrants from a country that poses a
> security threat to the United States as record numbers of the
> Special Interest Aliens (SIAs) poured in through its California
> sector. The SIAs—identified by the Department of Homeland Security
> (DHS) as foreign nationals originating from countries with possible
> or established links to terrorism—from Central Asia were being
> smuggled into the U.S. through Mexico in record numbers yet Border
> Patrol agents in San Diego did not have a process for identifying or
> vetting them like their counterparts in other southwest border
> sectors during an unprecedented illegal immigration crisis. The
> lapse resulted in missed opportunities to identify aliens who posed
> a potential risk to national security and to collect information
> about smuggling networks, according to a report
>
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> public—with extensive redactions—this month by the DHS Inspector
> General.
>
> The watchdog reveals that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents
> encountered more than a fourfold increase of SIAs from one Central
> Asian country with known terrorist ties, from approximately 3,000 in
> fiscal year 2022 to an alarming 13,000 in 2023, yet the frontline
> DHS agency did not have a consistent mechanism to identify and
> provide additional screening of the potentially dangerous migrants.
> The specific country is redacted throughout the lengthy DHS report
> but it is likely Uzbekistan, a Muslim former Soviet nation that the
> Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) confirms
>
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> is home to a number of renowned terrorist groups including Islamic
> Jihad Union (IJU), Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Islamic
> State of Iraq and ash-Sham-Khorasan (ISIS-K). “According to CBP,
> smuggling networks scheduled aliens’ flights to Latin America, and
> then organized their travel by land through Baja California,
> Mexico,” the DHS IG report states. “Subsequently aliens often
> arrived at the U.S. border in San Diego and nearby areas.” Many
> scheduled appointments with the Biden administration’s disastrous
> CBP One App, which released hundreds of thousands of otherwise
> inadmissible illegal immigrants into the U.S., including those from
> hostile nations
>
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>
> The probe found that because CBP did not have an agency-wide policy
> to identify aliens from certain countries as SIAs, thousands of
> illegal immigrants from nations with links to terrorism entered at
> least one region that did not provide additional screening. The
> biggest offender was the then highly transited San Diego sector,
> where authorities estimate 65% of SIAs from the unnamed Central
> Asian nation with terrorist ties entered the U.S. during the first
> half of 2023 alone. The abrupt surge caused alarm among CBP
> officials who expressed concerns that smuggling networks responsible
> for the increase of migration could pose a national security threat,
> the DHS watchdog report reveals. The probe focuses on this narrow
> period of the Biden administration’s years-long open border
> disaster that welcomed a ghastly 7.6 million illegal immigrants,
> including hundreds of thousands with serious criminal records. By
> the time the SIA lapse was exposed in July 2023, the problem was out
> of control. San Diego Border Patrol task force agents (TFOs)
> assigned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Joint
> Terrorism Task Force requested that frontline officers screen SIAs,
> but that did not occur. “Agents told us there were too many aliens
> in custody matching TFOs’ requests to interview before releasing
> them,” the report says.
>
> The terrorist threat to the U.S. skyrocketed
>
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> under the dangerous Biden-Harris open border policies with more than
> 1.7 million illegal immigrants from countries that DHS determined
> pose a national security threat to the United States entering the
> country and dozens that appear on the terrorist watchlist released
> into American communities. SIAs came from some 26 nations, including
> Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Syria, and Turkey,
> China, North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan,
> and Venezuela. Afghan Mohammad Kharwin is an example of a terrorist
> released in the U.S. after getting arrested by Border Patrol near
> Imperial Beach, California in early 2023. Immigration and Customs
> Enforcement (ICE) placed him on its non-detained docket along with
> millions of other illegal aliens and instructed him to report to an
> ICE office in Sacramento, California even though he is a member of
> Hezb-e-Islami, a group responsible for attacks in Afghanistan that
> killed at least nine American soldiers and civilians from 2013 to
> 2015.

Until Next Week...





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