Justice Dept. Admits Criminal Investigation of USADF in Judicial Watch FOIA Case

After years of whistleblowing by Judicial Watch clients Jasmine Battle and Mateo Dunne, the U.S. Department of Justice publicly announced an ongoing criminal investigation of the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF). The news came in a status conference hearing in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

In August last year we sued the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF) after it failed to respond to a July 2025 FOIA request for records of its expenditures and deposits related to allegations of waste, fraud, and abuse committed by senior officials, contractors, and grantees.

We also wanted records regarding its retaliation against whistleblowers and its attempt to block Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) audits (Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. African Development Foundation (No. 1:25-cv-02623)).

An independent agency, the foundation was created in 1980 to provide development assistance to underserved and marginalized populations in conflict and post-conflict areas in Africa.

The Justice Department said at the hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that it would immediately begin producing documents related to those allegations with some redactions.

Mateo Dunne became general counsel of the foundation in October 2021 following a distinguished legal career in both private practice and public service. Jasmine Battle, an accomplished administrative professional, became executive assistant to the agency’s president and CEO in March 2022. Together, they raised internal alarms regarding misconduct and ultimately became whistleblowers after facing resistance and retaliation.

Battle and Dunne pursued every lawful avenue to expose corruption at USADF, including providing information to the U.S. Senate. Their disclosures resulted in a formal letter from Senator James E. Risch, Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, requesting an investigation into the agency.

As Senator Risch wrote in November 2023:

According to whistleblower complaints received by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC)—complaints that I understand have also been shared with the [Office of Inspector General]—current President and CEO Travis Adkins, former President and CEO C.D. Glin, Managing Director for Finance and Administration Mathieu Zahui, Chief Program Officer and former Acting President and CEO Elisabeth Feleke, and Chairman of the Board of Directors Jack Leslie are aware of, and may be complicit in, corrupt and potentially unlawful practices …

The whistleblower allegations that Senator Risch brought to light included misuse of official funds, conflict of interest and inappropriate partnerships, discriminatory employment practices, and retaliation against employees who dared to raise questions about this misconduct.

For years, Battle and Dunne cooperated with law enforcement, including the Department of Justice, resulting in the public announcement of an ongoing criminal investigation. For speaking out against a corrupt agency, they have been retaliated against, mistreated, and maligned. The systems that were created to protect them as whistleblowers, like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Inspector General, the Office of Special Counsel, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, have thus far failed them. This news of Justice Department involvement is vindication for the years they’ve spent exposing government corruption.

Maryland Democrats Still Trying to Gerrymander Congressional Districts 

You almost have to admire Maryland Democrats for their foolhardy persistence.

Our analysis of a Democrat-proposed 2026 congressional redistricting plan for Maryland shows that it is in key respects identical to the unconstitutional gerrymander struck down in a prior Judicial Watch lawsuit—but is even more partisan and less compact than the invalidated 2021 map.

The proposed 2026 plan re-creates the same distorted configuration rejected by Judge Lynne A. Battaglia for Maryland’s First Congressional District, which shares 97 percent of the geographic area of the unconstitutional 2021 district. As before, the district again crosses the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to link disparate regions—an arrangement the court previously found unlawful.

Our analysis also found that the proposed 2026 plan is less compact than both prior maps under all three compactness measures relied upon by Battaglia in invalidating the 2021 plan—directly violating the Maryland Constitution’s compactness requirement.

Additionally, the proposed redraw substantially increases county and municipal splits compared to the 2022 remedial map—another factor Battaglia cited in concluding the 2021 plan was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

Using the widely accepted efficiency gap metric, we determined that the proposed 2026 map is more partisan than both the 2021 map struck down as unconstitutional and the current 2022 remedial map now in effect.

We ascertained that the boundaries of Congressional Districts 2, 3, and 7 in Baltimore City closely track racial demographics, raising serious concerns about impermissible race-based districting.

Maryland is currently operating under a congressional map adopted in 2022, following our successful lawsuit on behalf of 12 registered Maryland voters. That suit challenged the state’s 2021 redistricting plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that diluted voters’ rights.

The current redistricting effort began in August after Governor Wes Moore suggested revisiting the state’s map amid national redistricting disputes. Republicans have warned that the proposal is designed to eliminate Maryland’s lone Republican member of Congress, Rep. Andy Harris—by resurrecting the same district configuration already ruled unconstitutional.

This is a rerun of an unlawful gerrymander that a court already threw out. Maryland Democrats appear determined to entrench partisan power at the expense of constitutional limits and voters’ rights. We are watching these developments closely.

We are a national leader in election integrity and voting rights litigation, with a record of successful lawsuits enforcing constitutional redistricting standards and cleaning voter rolls nationwide.

Our election law efforts are led by Senior Attorney Robert Popper, who previously served in the Voting Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where he managed voting rights investigations and litigation across dozens of states.

In January 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 7–2 in favor of granting standing in a historic case we filed on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors. The case challenges an Illinois law allowing the counting of ballots received up to 14 days after Election Day.

In November 2025, the Supreme Court granted review in a landmark election integrity case we brought on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Mississippi. The case seeks to uphold a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which struck down a Mississippi law unconstitutionally allowing election officials to count mail-in ballots received up to five days after Election Day.

Federal courts in Oregon, California and Illinois have ruled that Judicial Watch’s lawsuits against those states to force them to clean their voter rolls may proceed.

We announced in May 2025 that our work led to the removal of more than five million ineligible names from voter rolls nationwide.

Judicial Watch Sues ODNI for Records on China Corruption Report

In March 2025, after more than a year of delays and repeated pressure from lawmakers, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) finally released a congressionally mandated unclassified report on the wealth and corrupt activities of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership.

To try to understand what was going on, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for records of its preparation of the report (Judicial Watch Inc. v. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (No. 1:26-cv-00199)).

We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Director of National Intelligence failed to respond to a March 7, 2025, FOIA request for:

• All records relied upon during ODNI’s preparation of its report regarding the wealth and corrupt activities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For purposes of clarification, the report was mandated by Sec. 6501 of the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 (P.L. 117-263).
• All communications between ODNI personnel involved in the preparation of the report and any official or employee of the Department of State regarding the report, or its submission to Congress.
• All communications between ODNI personnel involved in the preparation of the report and the Executive Office of the President regarding the report, or its submission to Congress.

The 2022 legislation mandating the report gave a deadline of December 2023.

In June 2024, China was reported to have lobbied strongly against the report’s release. The report was not delivered until March 2025 – after Donald Trump had become president and a new director of national intelligence was in place.

The seven-page report, titled “Wealth and Corrupt Activities of the Leadership of the Chinese Communist Party,” states:

Corruption is an endemic feature of and challenge for China, enabled by a political system with power highly centralized in the hands of the CCP, a CCP-centric concept of the rule of law, a lack of independent checks on public officials, and limited transparency.

***

Corruption within China is primarily due to structural features that centralize power, eschew independent checks or accountability—especially at the provincial level—and produce perverse incentives for political advancement and financial enrichment.

There is heavy resistance to transparency when it comes to what the Deep State knows about the Chinese Communist Party. The long delay of this intelligence report on China’s corruption and systemic graft reflects poorly on the Biden-era intelligence community.

We have reported extensively on China’s influence in the United States.

In November 2025, we sued the U.S. Department of Education for records on the University of Michigan’s connections to China, including related communications with the U.S. Department of Justice.

In July 2025, we received records from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about Gov. Tim Walz’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). A DHS and FBI counter-intelligence investigation into Walz’s CCP connections determined that “China [was] happy” with Walz being selected as Kamala Harris’s running mate on the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket. Walz’s connections to the CCP were extensive and a concern to the intelligence community, according to the documents produced.

In July 2024, we sued the U.S. Department of Treasury for records of communication between the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regarding the purchase of U.S. farmland by foreign entities, including China and other foreign powers.

Our investigations and FOIA lawsuits uncovered much is publicly known about Covid-19’s connections with China, including FBI records released in April 2024 referencing 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.”

Judicial Watch Urges Justice Dept. to Investigate Florida County for Woke Quota Scheme 

The Board of County Commissioners in Hillsborough County, Florida, created a Diversity Advisory Council – and they decided to staff it on the basis of race, sexual preference, gender identity, and disability.

We have submitted a formal request to the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division for an investigation of this scheme. This woke racism and sexism is a textbook violation of the Constitution. Government bodies exist to serve all citizens equally—not to segregate Americans into woke identity groups. The Trump Justice Department should take action.

In the letter sent to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, we assert that Hillsborough County’s Diversity Advisory Council violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:

Judicial Watch requests the Office of Civil Rights investigate Hillsborough County, Florida’s Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) for its use of race, sexual preference, gender identity, and disability to appoint members to its Diversity Advisory Council. This practice violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The [Commissioners] created the Diversity Advisory Council as a governmental body structured around explicit identity-based classifications.

The Diversity Advisory Council is explicitly structured around identity classifications, requiring representation from specific racial, ethnic, sexual orientation, and disability groups. Council members are appointed in fixed numbers by identity category, with vacancies filled group-by-group rather than through a race-neutral or merit-based process.

In addition to arguing that the appointment process violates racial and sex discrimination law, we argue that the Diversity Advisory Council’s structure rests on impermissible stereotyping rejected by the Supreme Court, assuming individuals’ viewpoints are defined by their sex or gender identity:

[T]he criteria sort applicants into preferred identity groups without any meaningful connection to the substance of the advice sought. Such arbitrary distinctions, untethered to any legitimate government objective… therefore violate the equal protection clause.

We previously submitted public records requests in June and December 2025 for documents related to the Commissioners’ use of these unconstitutional eligibility criteria and now urge the Justice Department “to open a formal investigation into Hillsborough County’s Board of County Commissioners and take appropriate remedial actions.”

We frequently go to court to argue against unconstitutional diversity practices.

In May 2025, we uncovered records from the U.S. Military Academy West Point, revealing that speakers at the March 2024 “Founders Day” event were instructed to “AVOID saying ‘removed,’ ‘replaced,’ ‘deleted’ [when referring to the new mission statement] – just refer to the ‘updated mission statement and reinforce that the motto remains unchanged.” [Emphasis in original] The records also tied Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts to the mission statement controversy.

In January 2025, the City of San Francisco, CA, in a 7-3 vote by the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco, authorized a settlement agreement in a taxpayer lawsuit we brought against the City, agreeing to discontinue its discriminatory guaranteed-income program funded by taxpayer money in favor of transgender individuals with a preference for biological black and Latino men who identify as women. The agreement commits the city to pay $3,250 in attorney fees and costs and not to create a new guaranteed income program with the same eligibility criteria.

In November 2024, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of War for information regarding the rebranding of West Point’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) office to “Office of Engagement and Retention.”

In July 2023, we exposed records from the U.S. Air Force Academy, a component of the War Department, which included instructional materials and emails that addressed topics such as Critical Race Theory, “white privilege,” and Black Lives Matter.

In March 2023, records from the War Department showed the Air Force Academy had made race and gender instruction a top priority in the training of cadets.

Until next week,