Trump Assassination
Judicial Watch Applauds Judge Cannon’s Decision to End Rogue Special Counsel Prosecution of Trump
Judicial Watch Sues over Scuffle Involving VP Harris’ Secret Service Detail
Judicial Watch Asks Court to Retain Lawsuit to Clean Up Voter Rolls in Illinois
TSA Has No Idea How Air Marshal Reassignments Affected Security
Trump Assassination:
Every Judicial Watch supporter and every patriotic American is praying for President Trump, his family, the family of the Trump supporter who was murdered, and those injured on Saturday.
The radical Left has attempted to mass murder Republican congressmen, as well as Justice Kavanaugh and his family. Recently, Democratic Party leaders, through unhinged rhetoric, false allegations of misconduct, proposed legislation, and sham prosecutions, have increased the risk of assassination of President Trump, as well as violence against his supporters.
Americans can be assured that Judicial Watch has already initiated an independent investigation into the catastrophic Secret Service failures that day.
Judicial Watch Applauds Judge Cannon’s Decision to End Rogue Special Counsel Prosecution of Trump
Judicial Watch applauds Judge Cannon’s principled decision to end Jack Smith’s unconstitutional criminal proceeding that has so abused former President Trump and the rule of law.
I am an eyewitness to these abuses, as I was harassed personally by Jack Smith’s rogue operation.
Cannon’s decision, “based on the unlawful appointment and funding” of Special Counsel Smith, is a victory for the U.S. Constitution and accountable government. This case never should have seen the light of day. We have long called out the unconstitutional “special counsels” and their attendant abuses of former President Donald Trump and other innocent political targets. As Judge Cannon noted in her opinion:
The bottom line is this: The Appointments Clause is a critical constitutional restriction stemming from the separation of powers, and it gives Congress a considered role in determining the propriety of vesting appointment power for inferior officers. The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers. If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so. He can be appointed and confirmed through the default method prescribed in the Appointments Clause, as Congress has directed for United States Attorneys throughout American history … or Congress can authorize his appointment through enactment of positive statutory law consistent with the Appointments Clause.
We have several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits related to the prosecutorial abuses targeting Trump
In February 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice asked a federal court to allow the agency to keep secret the names of top staffers working in Jack Smith’s office targeting Trump and other Americans.
(Before his appointment to investigate and prosecute Trump, Jack Smith was at the center of several controversial issues, the IRS scandal among them. In 2014, a Judicial Watch investigation revealed that top IRS officials had been in communication with Smith’s then-Public Integrity Section about a plan to launch criminal investigations into conservative tax-exempt groups. Read more here.)
In October 2023, we sued the DOJ for records and communications between the Office of U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney’s office regarding requests/receipt of federal funding/assistance in the investigation of former President Trump and his 18 codefendants in the Fulton County indictment of August 14, 2023. To date, the DOJ is refusing to confirm or deny the existence of records, claiming that to do so would interfere with enforcement proceedings. Judicial Watch’s litigation challenging this is continuing.
This decision was a big victory for Trump and the rule of the law but the corrupted Biden Justice Department won’t stop trying to abuse him – so there will be much more work to be done!
Judicial Watch Sues over Scuffle Involving VP Harris’ Secret Service Detail
The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump is not the first black mark on the Biden Secret Service.
We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for records relating to an incident at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland in which a Secret Service agent assigned to protect Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly got into a scuffle with colleagues (Judicial Watch v. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:24-cv-01705)).
According to an April 24 report in the Washington Examiner, a Secret Service agent was removed from her duties after physically attacking the commanding agent in charge and other agents who tried to subdue her.
A later report states: “The agents involved in restraining [Michelle] Herczeg were especially concerned because she still had her gun in the holster. They wrestled her to the ground, took the gun from her, cuffed her, and then removed her from the terminal.” The report also states that, following the incident at Joint Base Andrews, which is the home base for Air Force One and Air Force Two:
Secret Service agents and officers are privately questioning the hiring process and whether the agency had adequately screened Herczeg’s background. Some also wonder whether her hire was part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion push in response to years of staff shortages that may have required the agency to lower its once-strict employment standards and physical performance to reach quotas for female agents and officers.
We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after DHS failed to respond to an April 25, 2024, FOIA request for:
All records related to a reported incident at Joint Base Andrews in which a Secret Service agent was involved in an altercation with colleagues on or about April 23, 2024, including but not limited to incident reports, Vice Presidential protective detail agents’ emails and text messages, and emails and text messages of the following USSS officials: Director Kimberly Cheatle, Deputy Dir. Ronald Rowe, Chief Operating Officer Cynthia Radway, Asst. Dir. Michael Plati, Asst. Dir. Brian Lambert, Chief Human, Capital Officer Denise Walker Hall, Asst. Dir. David Smith, Asst. Dir. Miltom Wilson, Uniformed Division Chief Michael Buck, Chief Counsel Thomas Huse, and Chief of Communications Anthony Guglielmi.
All SF-50s, SF-52s, training completion forms, and disciplinary records of Secret Service Agent Michelle Herczeg.
All USSS and DHS policy documents related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the hiring, employment, training and discipline of Secret Service agents.
Prior to the altercation, Herczeg reportedly arrived at Joint Base Andrews “and began acting erratically, grabbing another senior agent’s personal phone and deleting applications on it, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The other agent, a shift leader, was able to recover his phone and then acted as if nothing had happened.”
The catastrophic security failure behind the attempted assassination of Trump shows how the management and quality of Secret Service personnel are urgent issues. The Secret Service’s illicit cover-up of these documents about the Kamala Harris protective detail incident is not reassuring.
Judicial Watch Asks Court to Retain Lawsuit to Clean Up Voter Rolls in Illinois
Illinois is fighting a federal law requiring it to clean up its voter rolls.
We asked a federal court to reject the state’s motion to dismiss and end our National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) lawsuit to clean up the state’s voting rolls (Judicial Watch, Inc. et al v. The Illinois State Board of Elections et al. (No. 1:24-cv-01867)).
We sued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, on behalf of the nonprofit organizations Illinois Family Action, Breakthrough Ideas, and Carol J. Davis, who is a lawfully registered voter in Illinois.
In our original complaint, we point out that 23 Illinois counties, with a combined registration list of 980,089 voters, reported removing a combined total of only 100 registrations in the last two-year reporting period under a crucial provision of the NVRA. This is an “absurdly small” number, and there “is no possible way these counties can be conducting a general program that makes reasonable effort to cancel registrations of voters who have become ineligible because of a change of residence while removing so few registrations.”
We point out:
Aside from the outright failure of 23 Illinois counties to remove registrants who fail to respond to Confirmation Notices [as required by NVRA], the complaint also listed counties who lack data that is crucial to list maintenance efforts under the NVRA. Again relying on Defendants’ own admissions to the EAC [Election Assistance Commission], the complaint notes that 34 counties could only report “Data not available” regarding Confirmation Notice removals, and 19 of these reported the same thing for death removals. In addition, 29 counties reported “Data not available” regarding the number of Confirmation Notices sent, and 22 counties said the same thing about the number of inactive registrations. In all, “[f]ifty-two of 108 Illinois jurisdictions failed to report any data to the EAC in one or more of the crucial data categories identified above.” For her part, Defendant Matthews confirmed that she “does not have access to local election authorities’ list maintenance records.” Apparently, no one in Illinois has access to this data.
Our attorneys argue:
1. Defendants have failed to implement the NVRA’s required “general program that makes a reasonable effort” to remove voters who have moved or died;
2. Defendant Matthews, who is Illinois’ chief State election official…has failed in her duty to coordinate state responsibilities under the Act; and
3. Defendants have failed to retain and provide to Plaintiffs NVRA-related records they are required to provide. The support for these allegations derives primarily from Defendants’ own admissions, in response to a survey conducted every two years by the federal Election Assistance Commission as it prepares a mandatory report to Congress, and in their correspondence with Plaintiffs.
Dirty voter rolls can mean dirty elections, and Illinois’ voting rolls are a mess. Rather than trying to shut down our lawsuit, Illinois should take immediate steps to clean its rolls to both prevent fraud and increase voter confidence in the elections.
As you know, we are a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. We 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.
Robert Popper, a Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads our election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.
In May 2024, we sued California to force the clean-up of its voter rolls. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Judicial Watch and the Libertarian Party of California, asks the court to compel California to make “a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls” as required by federal law.
In December 2023, we sent notice letters to election officials in the District of Columbia, California, and Illinois, notifying them of evident violations of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. The letters point out that these jurisdictions publicly reported removing few or no ineligible voter registrations under a key provision of the NVRA. The letters threatened federal lawsuits unless the violations were corrected in a timely fashion. In response to Judicial Watch’s inquiries, Washington, DC, officials admitted that they had not complied with the NVRA, promptly removed 65,544 outdated names from the voting rolls, promised to remove 37,962 more, and designated another 73,522 registrations as “inactive.” NVRA lawsuits subsequently were commenced against California and Illinois.
In July 2023 we filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, which struck down Maine’s policy restricting the use and distribution of the state’s voter registration list (Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Shenna Bellows (No. 23-1361). According to a national study conducted by Judicial Watch in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate was 101% of eligible voters.
In July 2023 we also settled a federal election integrity lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Elections, and its director, which now grants access to the current centralized statewide list of registered voters for the state for the past 15 elections.
In April 2023, Pennsylvania settled with us and admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from Judicial Watch. The settlement commits Pennsylvania and five of its counties to extensive public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years.
In March 2023, Colorado agreed to settle our NVRA lawsuit alleging that Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its rolls. The settlement agreement requires Colorado to provide Judicial Watch with the most recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.
In February 2023, Los Angeles County confirmed the removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since last year, under the terms of a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit Judicial Watch filed in 2017.
We settled a federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps going forward to clean its voter registration lists.
Kentucky also removed hundreds of thousands of old registrations after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.
In February 2022, we settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 inactive registrations from its voter rolls.
In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of our challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.
We’ll keep you update and this and our other election law cases as events warrant!
TSA Has No Idea How Air Marshal Reassignments Affected Security
Trying to cope with its disastrous border policies, the Biden administration misused skilled air marshals to “babysit” the people coming across. And it has no idea what that meant for our air security, as our Corruption Chronicles blog reports.
The federal agency created after 9/11 to protect the nation’s transportation system has no idea how aviation security was impacted when it plucked Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) agents from their critical duties to help with the Mexican border crisis. FAMS operates under the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and in the last few years the agency has forced the highly trained aviation security specialists to assist Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with the onslaught of illegal immigrants entering the country under Biden’s disastrous open border policies. The deployments outraged air marshals around the country and led to accusations of fraud, waste, and abuse of authority by TSA and FAMS leadership for unlawfully sending assets to the southern border to perform duties unrelated to transportation. FAMS is charged with protecting commercial passenger flights by deterring and countering the risk of terrorist activity, a mission impossible to fulfill from the southwest border.
When the highly trained law enforcement agents were reassigned to babysit the influx of illegal immigrants the Air Marshal National Council, which represents thousands of officers nationwide, filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General and requested that the watchdog investigate the questionable deployment of TSA assets to El Paso, Laredo and McAllen Texas, San Diego California and Tucson and Yuma Arizona. The council pointed out that the air marshals were assigned to perform hospital watch, transportation duties, law enforcement searches, welfare checks and entry control, which have no relation to TSA’s core mission of transportation security. The first recent wave of air marshals—45 officers and two supervisors—was dispatched to El Paso and Yuma on October 30, 2022, for 21-day rotations. More were assigned later to other busy locations overrun with migrants.
The TSA admits it does not know the operational impacts that the air marshal border deployments had on transportation security. “TSA cannot assure deployments did not impact FAMS’ mission to mitigate potential risks and threats to our Nation’s transportation system,” according to a DHS report issued days ago thanks to the Air Marshal National Council’s request to probe the matter. The agency did not bother to establish baseline quantifiable and measurable goals from which it could measure the effectiveness of its primary operations while air marshals were assigned to assist CBP at the southwest border, the 17-page report says. TSA incurred approximately $45 million in travel and payroll costs, but the agency was eventually reimbursed by CBP, which also operates under DHS.
Under the agreement with CBP, air marshals played the role of “immigration officers,” to perform the following duties: Escorting migrants from the point of apprehension to processing, between various Border Patrol Sector facilities, or to another entity with jurisdiction over post-processing custody; escorting migrants to and from local health providers and hospitals; conducting searches, including pat downs, and placing or removing handcuffs or restraint devices on migrants in custody before they are transported; securing CBP facilities, including detention cells, and authorizing access to various entry controlled points; escorting migrants between processing checkpoints within the facility; assisting with staffing the unaccompanied female housing facility; observing migrants in holding areas to assess their safety and well-being while awaiting processing or transportation.
Perhaps to discourage more Mexican border deployments, the DHS IG report, which has large redactions to protect sensitive information, stresses that FAMS is a risk and intelligence-based federal law enforcement organization. “TSA employs approximately [redacted] air marshals to assess, address, and mitigate potential risks and threats to our Nation’s transportation system,” the DHS watchdog writes, stating the obvious. “In addition to providing in-flight security, air marshals carry out a variety of other law enforcement–related functions.” Babysitting illegal immigrants is most certainly not one of them. FAMS was created in 1961 as a small force of only 18 “sky marshals” to counter airplane hijackers. After the 2001 terrorist attacks the force grew tremendously and plays a major role in protecting the nation’s civil aviation system.
Until next week,
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