Judicial Watch Sues Chicago Mayor for
Racial Discrimination against Reporter
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.” The next day, the mayor released a
letter 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 (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.)
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 can
be seen in videos, 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 (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 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 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 helped
lead to the disclosure that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died
of natural
causes.
In February 2021, we filed a lawsuit 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.
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:
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
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. 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” 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”
Last month Judicial Watch filed a complaint 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 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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