Judicial Watch Sues for Records on Trump’s Would-Be Assassin 

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 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 (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 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, 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 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 (No. 1:25-cv-00704)).

In September 2004, we sued 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 (No. 1:24-cv-02495)).

In August 2024, we obtained records 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 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 (No. 1:25-cv-02143)).

On December 1, 2024, then-President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon 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 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 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 (No. 1:23-cv-01432).

In February 2025, we filed a lawsuit 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 (No.1:24-cv-03387)).

In June 2024, we received records from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) showing 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 (Judicial Watch v. Central Intelligence Agency (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 (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 (State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolkit) system that mention Hunter Biden (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:22-cv-01066)).

In December 2020, State Department records 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 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 (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 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:

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. “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 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 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 of 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. 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, 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 made 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 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.

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 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...