Judicial Watch VICTORY for Clean Elections!

[INSIDE JW]

Judicial Watch Victory: North Carolina Settles Voter Roll Lawsuit
after State Removes over 430,000 Inactive Names from Rolls

[[link removed]]
In a big win for us and voters in North Carolina, we settled
[[link removed]]
our lawsuit against the state and two of its counties after they
removed over 430,000 ineligible names from the voter rolls.

We filed the lawsuit
[[link removed]]
against the state, Mecklenburg County and Guilford County in April
2020 (_Judicial Watch v. North Carolina and North Carolina State Board
of Elections, et al. _
[[link removed].
3:20-cv- 211)).

In June 2019, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) had
released data
[[link removed]]
showing that voter registration rates in a significant proportion of
North Carolina’s 100 counties were close to, at or above 100% of
their age-eligible citizenry – statistics considered by the courts
to be a strong indication that a jurisdiction is not taking the steps
required by law to remove ineligible registrants. Our analysis also
showed that at the time of the EAC report the entire State of North
Carolina had a registration rate close to 100% of its age-eligible
citizenry.

On December 11, 2019, we sent notice-of-violation letters
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to the state and its two counties, warning them that lawsuits would be
filed if timely action were not taken to clean up the voter rolls.

In our April 2020 complaint
[[link removed]],
we argued that North Carolina, Mecklenburg County, and Guilford County
failed to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from
their registration rolls as required by the federal National Voter
Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). The lawsuit also claimed that these
jurisdictions violated the NVRA by failing to make available to us
public records concerning efforts to comply with the law.

On August 16, 2021, the EAC released its latest survey data
[[link removed]]
from the states.

In the settlement, we told the court:

[T]he total number of inactive registrations reported by North
Carolina dropped from about 1.2 million in 2019, to about 765,000 in
2021 (a 36% drop). The statewide percentage of inactive registrations
dropped from 17% in 2019, which the complaint alleged to be a national
outlier, to 10% in 2021, which is close to the median state inactive
rate. The number of registrations removed for failure to respond to an
address confirmation notice and vote in two consecutive elections has
increased, from about 220,000 for the period reported in 2019, to
about 590,000 for the period reported in 2021 (a 168% increase).
With respect to the two North Carolina counties, we told the court:

Data for Mecklenburg County and Guilford County also showed
improvement. From 2019 to 2021, the percentage of inactive
registrations reported in Mecklenburg County dropped from 15.5% to
13%, and in Guilford County from 19% to 11%. The number of
registrations removed for failure to respond to an address
confirmation notice and vote in two elections increased during that
same period, from roughly 21,000 to 51,000 in Mecklenburg County, and
from 7,000 to 33,000 in Guilford County (a 142% and 372% increase,
respectively). In light of Defendants’ substantial increases in
removals of ineligible voters since this suit commenced, Plaintiff has
determined in good faith that this legal action should not be pursued.

In 2020, we also sued Pennsylvania
[[link removed]],
and
Colorado
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for
failing to clean their voter rolls.

This is a win for the voters of North Carolina – because clean voter
rolls help pave the way to cleaner elections. After we filed our
federal lawsuit, North Carolina removed hundreds of thousands of
ineligible voters, people who have died or moved away.

North Carolina follows our voter roll clean-up successes in
California, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. And we are right now prepping
lawsuits against other states to force them to clean up their rolls.

In November 2021, we sent letters
[[link removed]]
to election
officials in 14 counties and five states—Arkansas, California,
Illinois, New York, and Oregon—notifying them of evident violations
of the NVRA. The letters detail how these states’ own reported data
show that their counties removed an “absurdly low” or
“impossible” number of inactive voter registrations under key
provisions of the NVRA. The letters threaten federal lawsuits unless
the violations are corrected in a timely fashion.

So, in short, North Carolina is just the beginning …

HILLARYGATE: TECHS ALLEGEDLY USED BY CLINTON TO SPY ON TRUMP WORKED
WITH DEFENSE AGENCY

We’re adding more fascinating detail to the growing pile of evidence
of Deep State collusion against President Trump.

The latest: Four people mentioned in the indictment of Michael
Sussmann by Special Counsel John Durham were paid for work with the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 2016-2021 and
appeared to be interested in targeting Trump campaign adviser Steve
Bannon.

We learned this in 127 pages
[[link removed]]
of records of communications among the four that we received from the
Georgia Institute of Technology through an October 13, 2021, Georgia
Open Records Act request. The four individuals are Rodney Joffe
[[link removed]],
April Lorenzen
[[link removed]],
David
Dagon
[[link removed]],
and Manos Antonakakis
[[link removed]].

According to _The New York Times_
[[link removed]


Mr. Durham used a 27-page indictment
[[link removed]]
to lay out a far more expansive tale, one in which four computer
scientists who were not charged in the case ‘exploited’ their
access to internet data to develop an explosive theory about
cyberconnections in 2016 between Donald J. Trump’s company and a
Kremlin-linked bank — a theory, he insinuated, they did not really
believe.

***
The indictment’s “Originator-1” is April Lorenzen, chief data
scientist at the information services firm Zetalytics. Her lawyer,
Michael J. Connolly, said she has “dedicated her life to the
critical work of thwarting dangerous cyberattacks on our country,”
adding: “Any suggestion that she engaged in wrongdoing is
unequivocally false.”

The indictment’s “Researcher-1” is another computer scientist at
Georgia Tech, Manos Antonakakis. “Researcher-2” is Mr. Dagon. And
“Tech Executive-1” is Mr. Joffe, who in 2013 received the F.B.I.
Director’s Award
[[link removed]]
for helping crack a cybercrime case, and retired this month from
Neustar, another information services company.
In a court filing
[[link removed]]
last week, Durham alleged this operation directly spied on Trump
Tower, Trump’s home, and the Trump White House by exploiting
“access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data.”

The anti-Trump operation used the “assistance of researchers at a
U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts
of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government
cybersecurity research contract.”

Here is some of what the four wrote to each other.

On November 18, 2016, a redacted email
[[link removed]]
address writes on “behalf of Manos Antonakakis” to two Georgia
Tech officials in an email titled “Signed DARPA Contract:”

Hey Ashley,

Please send to Michael the signed contract for their records.

Thanks,

Manos
On November 21, 2016, Ashley Williams, a Georgia Tech contracting
officer, replies:

Good morning!!

Attached is a copy of the new award for your records. Please note the
contract is subject to publication restrictions identified in the DD
254. I'm actively working with AFRL [likely Air Force Research
Laboratory] to revise the DD 254 to clarify that fundamental research
is excluded from the publication restrictions. Although we’ve signed
the contract award and I have to defer project initiation until the
publication restrictions are resolved by the AFRL sponsor.

Let me know if you have any questions.
On August 2, 2016, Antonakakis writes
[[link removed]]
to Danielle Gambino and Keromytis, Angelos, a DARPA employee:

The subs and I, would like to have the permission to begin spending
against the project from August 15th. This is the date when students
needs to be hired [as graduate research assistants], so we can execute
against the goals we have set in the SOW [statement of work] this
year.

UNC, GT and UGA would require an acknowledgment from you (or DARPA)
that we are allowed to do that. I guess, once we are done negotiating
the contract we will have to have as an effective start date the
August 15th. If we cannot do that, it appears that it will complicate
things for all three schools, as we cannot immediately hire the
students necessary that will execute against the set milestones.

Please let me know how you think we should resolve this issue.
At 2:55 p.m. Angelos replies, “I'm ok with that, but I seriously
doubt the contracting officer will agree.”

At 3:16 p.m. Gambino also replies:

As usual, Angelos is correct!

Working with contracting to authorize pre-award work can take a while
and typically is not allowed until closer to contract award. Although
I certainly appreciate your eagerness to start working, we are at the
very start of the contracting process - this is really way too early
for this type of request. (The contract specialists haven't even been
assigned yet.)

Please don't hesitate to reach out to me with any other questions.
On January 9, 2017, a DARPA employee, Kelly McLaughlin, follows up
with Antonakakis. She writes:

Manos,

DARPA put $153,138 on the Georgia Tech Transparent Computing (TC)
contract back in October, 2016 to cover the costs proposed in the
attached SOW. The SOW asked for 0.83 month of your academic salary,
salary for one Research Engineer, David Dagon, and funds for four
graduate student research assistants. Were the proposed grad student
costs supposed to cover UNC grad students or Georgia Tech grad
students? The SOW shows them as Georgia Tech students.

Please let me know if these funds were supposed to cover UNC. If so,
the TC BFM, Laurisa Goergen, will reach out to the TC admin POC for
Georgia Tech to see what, if anything, can be done at this point.

Please let me know if you have any questions.
Emails indicate that Neustar employees
[[link removed]]
may have visited Georgia Tech to collaborate with Antonakakis. On May
27, 2016, Atreya Mohan from Neustar writes in an email with the
subject line “Introducing Peter Burke:”

Hello Manos

Just wanted to introduce you to Peter (our SVP Engg and Operations).

Peter. We contact Manos on his gmail account for consulting purposes
and his Georgia Tech email address for interactions that relate with
the university (example: sponsorship etc)”
Burke replies:

Hi Manos,

It was great to meet you today – it is very interesting work that
you do and I see great opportunities to collaborate with you.

I would like to try to figure out a time to come and spend more time
with so that you can continue my education :-)

I am guessing you are based in Atlanta?
Antonakakis writes that evening:

Hey Mohan,

Many thanks for the intro. Peter, the pleasure was all mine!

Yes, you should come and visit us. I would suggest sometime in
September, when the semester starts and my students are back from
their internships in the bay area. You are more than welcome to visit
sooner, but it will be just me and my three postdocs.
The Neustar team is always welcome to visit my lab. Anytime you,
Rodney, Brian or anyone else want to visit.
Antonakakis responds to this chain again on July 14, 2016, writing:

Gentlemen,

By now all of you should be aware of the great news from DARPA. We
have a 5 year long collaboration ahead of us, so I think it would make
sense for the Neustar team to visit Atlanta and my lab.

How is the week of August 15 looks like for you? Mine is completely
open. Perhaps, we should schedule the visit then?
The emails highlight that the ‘tech’ experts implicated in the
Durham indictment were very much interested in the fake dossier used
to smear President Trump.

In an email
[[link removed]]
to Antonakakis on January 29, 2017, Dagon writes:

The Russians are killing spies with knowledge of the dossier
materials:

[link removed]


Oh, and Trump purged the National Security Council (removing General
Dunford) and put Steve Bannon (his PR guy) on the NSC:

[link removed]


My guess: The purged NSC will now say that Russia has given us great
intel on ISIS, and that we should lift sanctions now that Russia is
helping. (The public will have no way to judget [sic] this.)

All this to protect Trump from the dossier materials.
Antonakakis replies the same day, “What the [f*ck] is going on?
Can you please explain why GOP is not doing something?”

He then writes again a few minutes later:

Some in the GOP knows what's up (Graham, McCain), but most are all too
happy to have their narrow, specific agendas advanced (e.g., removing
social security, ACA/Obama-care repeal, more tax cuts for companies,
etc.) They put party ahead of country, in short.

In 2018 the Senate (and maybe the House) may flip, and there will then
be real investigations (but again, party will be ahead of country, as
Democrats look into corruption for narrow purposes).

Now that the Russians are killing people with knowledge of the
dossier, we can hope for a defector who gets to a non-US embassy in
Moscow.
An August 25, 2016, email
[[link removed]]
from Joffe to Antonakakis, Dagon and Lorenzen indicates a possible
interest in investigating Steve Bannon. The subject line is “To be
added….” Joffe writes: “They think he may have some baggage...
;-)” A link to a _Washington Post_
[[link removed]]
opinion piece is included.

Was the Defense Department’s DARPA funding and sensitive data
misused by the Clinton campaign to spy on the Trump White House? If
so, the criminal liability for those involved may be significant.

JUDICIAL WATCH SUES CIA FOR RECORDS OF CONTACTS WITH INDICTED CLINTON
CAMPAIGN LAWYER MICHAEL SUSSMANN

We’ve been quite interested in the CIA’s role in the Deep
State’s efforts to take out President Trump. As you’ll recall, we
sued
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in
December to find out what the heads of the CIA and Defense Department
were discussing about the president.

Now it’s being reported that the CIA was in contact with a disgraced
Clinton campaign attorney. And so we filed a FOIA suit against the CIA
for records of meetings and phone conversations between any CIA
personnel and former Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, who has been
charged in Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation with making a
false statement to a federal agent (_Judicial Watch v. Central
Intelligence Agency_
[[link removed]]
(No. 1:22-cv-00412)).

We sued after the CIA failed to reply to an October 26, 2021, FOIA
request for:

All records regarding any meetings or telephonic conversations between
any official or employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and Mr.
Michael Sussmann (formerly an attorney with Perkins Coie) between
January 1, 2015 and the present. This request includes, but is not
limited to, all notes, transcripts, summaries, or other records
created in preparation for, during, or pursuant to the meetings or
conversations.
On February 11, Durham, who is investigating the origins of the
Trump-Russia investigation, filed a motion that focused on potential
conflicts of interest related to the representation of Sussmann, who
has been charged
[[link removed]]
with
making a false statement to a federal agent. Sussmann has pleaded not
guilty.

According to a February 15, 2022, Fox News report
[[link removed]],
a spokesperson for the individual labeled in Durham’s latest filing
as “Tech Executive-1” has seemingly identified the CIA as the
“second” federal government agency to which Sussmann provided an
“updated set of allegations” to “establish ‘an inference’
and ‘narrative’” tying Donald Trump to Russia.

Durham writes in the latest filing
[[link removed]


[O]n February 9, 2017, [Sussman] provided an updated set of
allegations – including the [Alfa Bank] data and additional
allegations relating to Trump – to a second agency of the U.S.
government (“Agency-2”). The Government’s evidence at trial will
establish that these additional allegations relied, in part, on the
purported DNS traffic that Tech Executive-1 and others had assembled
pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s New York City apartment
building, the EOP, and the aforementioned healthcare provider. In his
meeting with Agency-2, the defendant provided data which he claimed
reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of
internet protocol (“IP”) addresses affiliated with a Russian
mobile phone provider (“Russian Phone Provider-1”). The defendant
further claimed that these lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or his
associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in
the vicinity of the White House and other locations. The Special
Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations.
The CIA is in cover-up mode about its communications with the
lawyer implicated in a shady spy operation against President Trump.
What is the CIA hiding about its role in this plot against President
Trump?

POPPER TESTIFIES BEFORE FLORIDA HOUSE CONGRESSIONAL REDISTRICTING
SUBCOMMITTEE

Senior Judicial Watch Attorney Robert Popper testified this week
before the Florida House Congressional Redistricting Subcommittee
during consideration of “PCB CRS 22-01 – Establishing the
Congressional Districts of the State.”

Popper’s testimony focused on how Florida’s proposed 3rd
Congressional District would be subject to legal challenge as a racial
gerrymander if Florida’s state legislature approves the new map.

Popper’s testimony
[[link removed]]
points out that the Supreme Court has held:

“[R]edistricting legislation that is so extremely irregular on its
face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate
the races for purposes of voting, without regard for traditional
districting principles and without sufficiently compelling
justification” states a federal, constitutional claim under the
Equal Protection Clause.
Popper notes that District 3 is vulnerable to being legally
challenged:

Turning to Congressional District 3 in the proposed plan, I believe it
will be vulnerable to a serious—and probably a winning—Shaw-type
claim under the Fourteenth Amendment. I understand that there will be
little dispute that the district was drawn with its racial
characteristics as the predominant consideration. I also understand
that the shape of the district will be well-explained by the effort to
include African-American populations around Tallahassee and
Jacksonville. Moreover, the district clearly violates traditional
districting criteria. Its Popper-Polsby
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score is 10%, and its Reock score
[[link removed]]
is 11%. These are very low
compactness scores for any U.S. congressional district, and in both
cases these are the lowest compactness scores in the State of Florida.
We are a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. We
have assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys
who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter
rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other
achievements
[[link removed]].

In December 2021, we filed a lawsuit
[[link removed]]
on behalf
of 12 registered Maryland voters who object to Maryland’s 2021
congressional redistricting plan on the grounds that it diminishes
their rights to participate in elections for the U.S. Congress on an
equal basis with other Maryland voters, in violation of the Maryland
Constitution.

Robert Popper joined our legal team as a senior attorney in 2013.
Popper specializes in gerrymandering cases. In 1991, with Professor
Daniel Polsby, Popper wrote an article describing a mathematical way
to measure the geographic compactness of congressional districts. This
standard is now known as the “Polsby/Popper
[[link removed]
criterion and is one of the most widely used tests of district
compactness. In 1997, Popper brought a lawsuit that ultimately led to
New York’s 12th Congressional District being enjoined as an
unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In 2005, Popper joined the Voting
Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of
Justice, where he worked for eight years. In his time at DOJ, he
managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees,
and settlements in dozens of states.

CALIFORNIA ON SHAKY GROUND IN ENACTING GENDER QUOTAS FOR CORPORATE
BOARDS

It seems that California didn’t rely too heavily on science in
deciding that the state’s corporations needed a quota of women on
their boards. As you know, we sued to stop it.

This week we released 220 pages
[[link removed]]
of
trial testimony by our expert witness, Jonathan Klick
[[link removed]],
Ph.D., J.D. Klick, an
expert in econometrics, statistics and corporate law, testified during
the 27-day trial that the studies on which California relies to prove
its case are deficient and unreliable.

The trial came to a close this week and we await a decision by the
Court.

Our expert’s testimony came on days 15 and 16 of the trial in
California Superior Court challenging the constitutionality of
California’s gender quotas for corporate boards of directors (_Robin
Crest et al. v. Alex Padilla_
[[link removed]]
(No.19STCV27561)). We filed the lawsuit
[[link removed]]
in Los Angeles County Superior Court in 2019 on behalf of California
taxpayers Robin Crest, Earl De Vries and Judy De Vries. Closing
arguments were held this week.

Our lawsuit challenges a 2018 law known as Senate Bill 826, which
requires every publicly held corporation headquartered in California
to have at least one director “who self-identifies her gender as a
woman” on its board of directors by December 31, 2019. The law also
requires corporations to have up to three such persons on their boards
by December 31, 2021, depending on the size of the board.

In our lawsuit, we argue
[[link removed]]
that the quotas for women on corporate boards violate the Equal
Protection Clause of the California Constitution, among other
provisions.

At trial, government lawyers defending the quota have alleged that
gender quotas not only remedy discrimination but also improve overall
corporate performance.

Our expert analysis
[[link removed]]
rejects this: “the evidence offered for each of these points
(underrepresentation of women on boards, discrimination as the cause
of this underrepresentation, and that research shows a differential
benefit of appointing women, as opposed to men, in terms of firm
performance) is deficient and unreliable.”

Klick testified further in trial that:

[M]ost of the results [on corporate performance related to gender
composition of boards], including the one cited in SB-826, don’t
involve even regressions, much less more sophisticated designs. And
likewise, as with the earlier study, the Credit Suisse study, provides
no indication of statistical significance as between the differences.
During the trial, Klick was on the stand for two days and testified
exhaustively about the statistical techniques and types of scientific
investigations that would be required to show a causal relationship
between gender quotas and increased corporate performance. During his
testimony, Klick took the court through the “numerous independent
studies” cited in Senate Bill 826 and an accompanying legislative
report that allegedly demonstrate “publicly held companies perform
better when women serve on their boards of directors.” Klick
summarized
[[link removed]]
for the court the deficiencies and unreliability of most studies:

[T]he general, overall statement I would like to make is the
literature generically on women and boards is relatively
unsophisticated. What I mean by that is the sort of natural
experiments that I was talking about, which again by the late 1990s
had become the standard in empirical policy analysis, empirical
inference of this sort is largely absent in the literature [on women
on boards of directors] as a whole.
Beyond generalizations, Klick also provided the court detailed
explanations
[[link removed]]
of why the numerous studies and analyses relied on by the California
legislature were deficient and unreliable. He also pointed out a
plethora of other studies contradicting the presuppositions behind
Bill 826, which the legislature simply ignored. In addition, Klick
testified that the conclusions of a comprehensive literature review he
performed in 2017, before this case arose, focusing on studies that
examined the relationship between gender quotas, corporate performance
and the beneficial effects of quotas on women in the workplace
generally:

Remember that correlation isn’t causation.

But there are things that we can do through regression techniques and
through natural experiments and more sophisticated designs that gets
us more confidence in determining whether or not a given correlation
is causation, and we’ve had those tools for at least 20, 25 years
now.

And they are the tools that modern social scientists and policy
analysts, financial people use every day, and it’s a reasonably
strong consensus about the value of these tools.

If we look at the literature that was used directly in support of 826,
those tools largely seem absent…. seem to have been ignored, or, at
least, unremarked on in the route to 826 and the advocacy for 826. On
the particular results that we think we can draw from the literature
… a representative picture of the literature … is that it draws no
definitive conclusions.

[M]any of the studies lead to a statistically insignificant
relationship between board composition and various outcomes for firms.
Of the studies that don’t find a zero or statistically zero effect,
there are, largely speaking, as many studies that find positive
effects as find negative effects. And that’s even before we put any
filters on quality of the studies and things like that.

That’s what I found for sure in my literature review that I did
prior to this case.

***

I’m not the only one that’s done an academic literature review in
this area. There’s been a handful of them, and they uniformly have
come to the same conclusion.

Perhaps my favorite one, just because of the … source of it is a
literature review written in 2014 in the _Delaware Journal of
Corporate Law_ by Deborah Rhode and Amanda Packel…. [T]he reason
this is so notable is Deborah Rhode, she’s deceased now … was at
Yale, and later when she was at the Stanford Law School, she really
was a founding mother of feminist legal studies and those sorts of
things – but she also was a great academic and a very honest
academic. And in her literature review in 2014 she said, you know, as
much as people might want there to be a business case for diversity,
the current literature does not support it.

***

[T]hose are just two, my literature review and Deborah Rhode’s
literature review, and there are others that come to roughly the same
conclusion. I think that’s probably the most fair and honest reading
of this literature.
This historic trial shows a discriminatory gender quota mandate
that is blatantly unlawful and unconstitutional. After weeks of
taxpayer money being used to defend the law, we hope the trial court
will strike down these pernicious gender quotas.

This isn’t our only action in this area.

In September 2020, we also filed a taxpayer lawsuit
[[link removed]]
to
prevent California from enforcing Assembly Bill 979, which requires
the same corporation subject to the gender-based quota also to satisfy
racial, ethnic, sexual preference and transgender status quotas by the
end of the 2021 calendar year.

In January 2021, we filed a public comment
[[link removed]]
with the Securities and Exchange Commission in response to a proposed
rule change requiring race and gender quotas on the boards of
corporations listed on the Nasdaq exchange.

Federal and state constitutional and legal prohibitions banning
discrimination are under assault by the extremist Left and Judicial
Watch is front and center in court and in the public square defending
the rule of law against this pernicious effort.

Until next week...





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