Memorial Day -- Honor Their Sacrifice

[INSIDE JW]

JUDICIAL WATCH SUES CHICAGO MAYOR FOR RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AGAINST
REPORTER

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On May 18, 2021, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office informed
multiple reporters that she would grant one-on-one interviews “only
to Black or Brown journalists
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The next day, the mayor released a letter
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doubling down on her discriminatory policy. Since that time, the Mayor
has granted at least one interview request from a self-identified
Latino reporter and none to white reporters.

Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Thomas Catenacci, a white male,
emailed Mayor Lightfoot’s office requesting a one-on-one interview
with the Mayor. The office never replied to the request or to two
additional follow up emails from Catenacci.

In response, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Daily Caller News
Foundation and Catenacci against the mayor for violating their First
Amendment Rights and Catenacci’s right to equal protection under the
Fourteenth Amendment (_Catenacci et al. v Lightfoot_
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(No. 1:21-cv-02852)).

We filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern
District of Illinois, Eastern Division. Christine Svenson of Svenson
Law Offices in Chicago, Illinois, is assisting us with the lawsuit.

Our suit alleges that Mayor Lightfoot purposefully discriminated
against Catenacci, “because of his race by stating that she would
only grant interview requests from ‘journalists of color’….”

“Preventing journalists from doing our jobs in such a blatantly
discriminatory way is wrong and does a disservice to our readers who
come from all backgrounds,” said Daily Caller reporter Thomas
Catenacci. “Every journalist and every person who consumes the news
should be concerned by Mayor Lightfoot’s actions. This affects
everyone. I look forward to holding the mayor accountable.”

“It’s absurd that an elected official believes she can
discriminate on the basis of race. Mayor Lightfoot's decision is
clearly blocking press freedom through racial discrimination,” Daily
Caller News Foundation Editor-in-Chief Ethan Barton said.

Racial discrimination has no place in America, especially in the halls
of government. Mayor Lightfoot’s admitted policy of race-based
discrimination is flagrantly illegal and immoral. Simply put, we’re
asking the court to find Mayor Lightfoot’s racist abuse unlawful.

(Mr. Catenacci and I appeared on Fox News to discuss the lawsuit. You
can view the report here
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JUDICIAL WATCH SEEKS INFORMATION ON SHOOTING OF ASHLI BABBITT ON
JANUARY 6

Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, small-business owner, and devout
Trump supporter was shot and killed by an unidentified law enforcement
officer as she attempted to climb through a broken interior window in
the Capitol Building, located outside the Speaker’s Lobby off the
House Floor, during the January 6 disturbance.

She was unarmed. At the time of the shooting, several
officers reportedly
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can
be seen in videos
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standing
in the crowd of protestors in which Babbitt was present.

The DC government is refusing to release information on the shooting,
so we filed a District of Columbia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
suit for police and medical examiner records concerning the U.S.
Capitol Police shooting, including the police and medical examiner
investigations (_Judicial Watch v. The District of Columbia_
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(No. 2021
CA 001710 B)).

We sued in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia after the
District of Columbia failed to respond to an April 8, 2021, FOIA
request submitted to the Metropolitan Police Department and to an
administrative appeal concerning an April 8, 2021, FOIA request to the
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The request to the police
department asks for:

All records, including but not limited to investigative reports,
photographs, witness statements, dispatch logs, schematics,
ballistics, video footage, and MPD officials’ electronic
communications, concerning the January 6, 2021, death of Ashli Babbitt
in the Capitol Building and its related investigation.

The request to the Chief Medical Examiner asks for:

All records, including but not limited to autopsy reports, toxicology
reports, notes, photographs, and OCME officials’ electronic
communications, related to the death on Jan. 6, 2021, of Ashli Babbitt
in the Capitol Building and its related investigation.

The normal course of action in a police-related shooting is to quickly
inform the public of the details – but the lack of transparency in
the killing of veteran Ashli Babbitt in the U.S. Capitol is
unprecedented and obviously political. That we must file a lawsuit for
basic information after five months of stonewalling is a scandal.

This is not our first lawsuit regarding January 6.

We recently sued
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the
Pentagon and the U.S. Park Police for information on the deployment of
troops and warnings about the January 6 U.S. Capitol disturbance.

In March 2021, we filed suit
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against
the U.S. Department of Defense for records about House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi’s January 8, 2021, telephone call with Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Pressure from a March 2021 Judicial Watch lawsuit
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helped
lead to the disclosure that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died
of natural causes
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In February 2021, we filed a lawsuit
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against
the Capitol Police for emails and video related to the January 6 riot.

We obviously won’t let this go. As the corrupt political class here
in DC advocates for a “commission,” you can trust Judicial Watch
to do a thorough, honest, independent and hard-hitting investigation.

JUDICIAL WATCH ATTORNEY TESTIFIES ON LEFT’S ELECTION LAW GAMBIT

“H.R. 4 goes far beyond any civil rights law enacted during the
height of the civil rights era,” Judicial Watch Senior Attorney T.
Russell Nobile told a House committee this week. “Rather, it is part
of a grander plan to shift control of American elections away from
individual state legislatures and into the hands of a single federal
bureaucratic department.”

Regarding the Democrats’ Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019, H.R.
4, which would dramatically increase the role of the federal
government, specifically the Justice Department, in overseeing
elections, Nobile added in prepared remarks:

It accomplishes this by giving the Attorney General a previously
unseen level of authority over elections. Even more troubling than
this change to our constitutional tradition of leaving elections to
the states, H.R. 4 will ultimately lead to lasting damage to the
Department of Justice’s credibility.

H.R. 4 proves that Congress indeed hides elephants in mouse holes.
Buried deep in its final pages, H.R. 4 grants the Attorney General
authority to enjoin “any act prohibited by the 14th or 15th
Amendment” of the Constitution. This little-noticed provision will
abolish a long-standing legal principle, leading to highly contentious
litigation between states and the Attorney General. It is difficult to
overstate the risk that this new law creates to the Department of
Justice and the states. Congress should end this unprecedented effort
to further inject the Justice Department into partisan election
disputes before it goes any further

This proposed change is a major power shift, allowing the Justice
Department to become involved in a whole range of 14th Amendment cases
that previously it would have been unable to pursue. The opportunity
for any administration, Republican or Democratic, to exploit this new
law is significant.

This little-noticed provision will abolish a longstanding legal
principle, leading to highly contentious litigation between states and
the Attorney General. It is difficult to overstate the risk that this
new law creates to the Department of Justice and the states. Congress
should end this unprecedented effort to further inject the Justice
Department into partisan election disputes before it goes any further.


Nobile testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary’s
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties
during a hearing titled “Oversight of the Voting Rights Act: A
Continuing Record of Discrimination.”

Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting
rights. As part of this effort, we assembled a team of highly
experienced voting rights attorneys who have fought gerrymandering in
Maryland, stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up
voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other
achievements
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T. Russell Nobile joined us as a senior attorney in May 2019. Mr.
Nobile has appeared before federal courts across the country and has a
wealth of experience developing, analyzing, and presenting
investigative findings involving difficult and sensitive questions of
state and federal law.

Mr. Nobile previously served for seven years as a trial attorney for
the United States Department of Justice, where he brought complex
enforcement actions involving disparate-treatment or disparate-impact
claims of discrimination, as well as actions enforcing the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Help America Vote Act,
National Voter Registration Act, The Violent Crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act of 1994, and other federal laws.

CONGRESS’S VIP AIR MARSHAL PROGRAM CANCELED AFTER MAXINE WATERS
DEBACLE

Your Judicial Watch gets results. We recently exposed a congressional
perk that put the rest of us at higher risk when flying. Thanks to our
educational exposé, the perk has been “cancelled” Our _Corruption
Chronicles_ blog, which first exposed the scandal, reports
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A scandal-plagued “VIP” program that provided members of Congress
with Federal Air Marshals (FAM) often yanked from high-risk fights has
been canceled after Judicial Watch exposed
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it earlier this month. As a result, hundreds of FAM are sitting idly
at airports around the U.S. because the “VIP missions have
stopped,” according to a federal law enforcement source with
firsthand knowledge of the situation. A veteran air marshal who asked
not to be identified said “the Washington Field Office in Washington
D.C. was almost exclusively dedicated to VIP services for Congress.”
Another longtime FAM told Judicial Watch he was deployed on several
VIP missions with low-profile members of Congress. He said so many
FAMs were on standby for the VIP congressional program that now he and
many of his colleagues are “sitting around the airport waiting for a
mission.”

Sonya Hightower-LaBosco, a retired FAM who serves as executive
director of the Air Marshal National Council, confirmed to Judicial
Watch this week that dozens of air marshals that evidently would have
been delegated to members of Congress as part of the VIP initiative
are waiting for assignments at airports nationwide. “Right now,
there are almost 60 in D.C., 40 in Charlotte and another 40 in
Orlando,” Hightower-LaBosco said. From January through April the
covert VIP service dedicated more than 900 FAM on demand to members of
Congress, Hightower-LaBosco said, citing agency data. The politicians
often already traveled with plenty of security on flights that did not
meet the threat criteria, usually determined by the FBI, for air
marshals. In many instances FAMs were plucked from high-risk flights
to accompany an elected official, leaving the high-risk plane with no
coverage.

That was the case during Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ recent trip to
Minnesota. Two FAMs were pulled from a high-risk fight to accompany
the California Democrat on the mid-April jaunt, though she was already
covered by a four-man detail, according to multiple law enforcement
sources interviewed by Judicial Watch. The veteran FAM sources say the
politician had two air marshals reassigned to a plane that would
otherwise not qualify because it was not considered high-risk. The
transfer forced the high-risk flight to complete its trip without the
two air marshals originally assigned to it. Waters received the extra
security while traveling to Brooklyn Center, a Minneapolis suburb,
after police shot and killed a black man with an open warrant related
to an aggravated armed robbery
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The Derek Chauvin trial was wrapping up around 10 miles away and the
82-year-old lawmaker incited the crowd, encouraging protestors to
“get more confrontational
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if the former Minneapolis cop was not convicted of murder for George
Floyd’s death. “We gotta stay on the street, we’ve got to get
more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational, we’ve got to
make sure that they know that we mean business,” Waters said ahead
of closing arguments in Chauvin’s trial. The former officer was
convicted and the judge presiding over the trial called the
congresswoman’s comments “abhorrent
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Last month Judicial Watch filed a complaint
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with
the chairman of the House Office of Congressional Ethics against
Waters for violating House ethics rules by encouraging violence and
attempting to intimidate the jury in the Chauvin trial.

Coverage of Waters’ abuse of the VIP air marshal service apparently
led to the program’s cancelation, according to numerous government
officials interviewed by Judicial Watch. “They were not scheduling
us to make sure we were available for the VIPs,” said a longtime air
marshal, who is celebrating that the program is finally “done.”
FAM are federal law enforcement officers whose primary function is to
protect commercial passenger flights
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by deterring and countering
the risk of terrorist activity, aircraft piracy and other crimes to
protect the nation’s transportation infrastructure. The VIP service
for Congress “left a glaring hole in America’s aviation
security,” according to a whistleblower complaint filed this year by
the Air Marshal National Council with the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) Inspector General. The group represents around 2,000
air marshals nationwide. In an interview with Judicial Watch, the
group’s president, David Londo, called the VIP program
“scandalous.” A veteran air marshal said he and many colleagues on
the force often asked: “Why are we really here? To protect against
terrorism or babysitting?”

MEMORIAL DAY – HONOR THEIR SACRIFICE

Memorial Day is when our nation honors the ultimate sacrifice of
untold numbers of fellow Americans – Americans who gave their lives
to preserve and defend our God-given freedoms and our constitutional
republic.

I often, on occasions such as this, reflect on the Veterans Day speech
given in 1985 by then-President Ronald Reagan. Much of his speech
applies to Memorial Day, especially this portion, which remains timely
today:

And the living have a responsibility to remember the conditions that
led to the wars in which our heroes died. Perhaps we can start by
remembering this: that all of those who died for us and our country
were, in one way or another, victims of a peace process that failed;
victims of a decision to forget certain things; to forget, for
instance, that the surest way to keep a peace going is to stay strong.


Weakness, after all, is a temptation — it tempts the pugnacious to
assert themselves — but strength is a declaration that cannot be
misunderstood. Strength is a condition that declares actions have
consequences. Strength is a prudent warning to the belligerent that
aggression need not go unanswered.

Peace fails when we forget what we stand for. It fails when we forget
that our Republic is based on firm principles, principles that have
real meaning, that with them, we are the last, best hope of man on
Earth; without them, we’re little more than the crust of a
continent. Peace also fails when we forget to bring to the bargaining
table God’s first intellectual gift to man: common sense. Common
sense gives us a realistic knowledge of human beings and how they
think, how they live in the world, what motivates them. Common sense
tells us that man has magic in him, but also clay. Common sense can
tell the difference between right and wrong. Common sense forgives
error, but it always recognizes it to be error first.

We endanger the peace and confuse all issues when we obscure the
truth; when we refuse to name an act for what it is; when we refuse to
see the obvious and seek safety in Almighty. Peace is only maintained
and won by those who have clear eyes and brave minds.

I’d like to think many Americans have “clear eyes and brave
minds” and these patriots desire the same qualities in our political
and judicial leaders who too often avoid confronting – and even
promote – the ideology of communism that so many Americans died
trying to defeat.

Judicial Watch will not “forget what we stand for,” and in its
modest efforts to preserve and protect the rule of law will always
seek to vindicate the sacrifices of our fallen warriors.

God bless you and God bless America!

Until next week...





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