VICTORY: Court Orders DOJ to Provide Info on Jack Smith’s Communications with Fani Willis
Judicial Watch Sues for Records on Kamala Harris Travel Costs
Judicial Watch Asks Supreme Court to End Race-Based Congressional Districts
Judicial Watch’s Covid Community Corps Case Illustrates Need to Cut Waste

VICTORY: Court Orders DOJ to Provide Info on Jack Smith’s Communications with Fani Willis

A federal court ordered the Department of Justice to provide information on communications between Special Counsel Jack Smith and District Attorney Fani Willis regarding the prosecution of then-former President Donald Trump.

President Trump truly needs to overhaul the Justice Department from top to bottom. It is a scandal that a federal court had to order the Justice Department to admit the truth that their objections to producing records about collusion with Fani Willis had no basis in reality.

The Justice Department had continued to object to providing any information even after its prosecutions against Trump were shut down.

Judge Dabney L. Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that because the cases against Trump were closed, the Justice Department’s arguments against disclosure were no longer applicable:

Since DOJ filed its motion for summary judgment and supporting Declaration in March 2024, the Special Counsel’s criminal enforcement actions have been terminated…. The cases are “closed—not pending or contemplated—and therefore are not proceedings with which disclosure may interfere.” … Thus, the agency’s sole justification for invoking the Glomar doctrine under Exemption 7(A) is no longer applicable.

Accordingly, the Court will deny DOJ’s motion for summary judgment and grant the plaintiff’s cross motion. DOJ is directed to process the plaintiff’s FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request and either “disclose any [responsive] records or establish both that their contents are exempt from disclosure and that such exemption has not also been waived.”

We sued in October 2023 after the Department of Justice failed to comply with an August 2023 FOIA request for records detailing the “Fulton County District Attorney’s Office’s requesting or receiving federal funds or other federal assistance … regarding the investigation of former President Donald Trump” and others (Judicial Watch v U.S. Department of Justice (No. 23-cv-03110).

On December 18, 2023, the Justice Department issued its final response to this request, refusing to confirm or deny the existence of responsive records. It argued that releasing the records could be reasonably expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings. The Justice Department refused to change its position or inform the court in light of the “proceedings” against Trump that were shut down.

The court has now ordered Justice to meet with us on or before February 21, 2025, and to report the status of the discussion to the court.

We have several FOIA lawsuits related to the prosecutorial abuse targeting Trump:

In January 2025, the Superior Court in Fulton County, GA, issued an order granting $21,578 “attorney’s fees and costs” in the open records lawsuit for communications Willis had with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6 Committee. We recently received payment.

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 Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office that is targeting former President Donald Trump and other Americans.

(Before his appointment to investigate and prosecute Trump, Special Counsel Jack Smith previously 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 Jack Smith’s then-Public Integrity Section about a plan to launch criminal investigations into conservative tax-exempt groups. Read more here.)

In January 2024, we filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, for records regarding the hiring of Nathan Wade as a special prosecutor by District Attorney Fani Willis. Wade was hired to pursue unprecedented criminal investigations and prosecutions against former President Trump and others over the 2020 election disputes.

Through the New York Freedom of Information Law, in July 2023, we received the engagement letter showing New York County District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg paid $900 per hour for partners and $500 per hour for associates to the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher law firm for the purpose of suing Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in an effort to shut down the House Judiciary Committee’s oversight investigation into Bragg’s unprecedented indictment of former President Donald Trump.

Judicial Watch Sues for Records on Kamala Harris Travel Costs

It seems rather obvious that, in order to help Kamala Harris’s campaign, Biden agencies hid details of her international jaunts.

That’s my conclusion, as Judicial Watch was forced to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ VIP travel records (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:25-cv-00233)).

We sued after the Secret Service and the Air Force failed to respond to August 2024 requests for: “All records concerning use of U.S Government funds to provide security and/or other services to Vice President Kamala Harris and any companions while traveling.”

The Biden White House website reports that during her term as vice president, Kamala Harris made “17 foreign trips, traveling to 21 countries and meeting with over 150 world leaders …” There are no publicly available flight logs or other records that provide details about who accompanied her on these trips.

Just before her last official trip in early January 2025, AP reported that her husband, Doug Emhoff, was expected to accompany her to Singapore, Bahrain and Germany. However, this is the only non-governmental person specifically mentioned as accompanying her on any official trip.

Our investigations into government travel records are extensive.

In 2021, we uncovered White House travel records from the Secret Service in response to FOIA requests for all records concerning the use of U.S. government funds to provide security and/or any other services to President Biden and any companions. These records detailed Secret Service travel costs of $2,252,600.50 for President Joe Biden through August 8, 2021, for travel to Delaware and other domestic locations.

In June 2020, we received records from the U.S. Secret Service showing that during the first five-and-a-half years of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden traveled extensively while receiving a Secret Service protective detail. During the time period of the records provided, Hunter Biden took 411 separate domestic and international flights, including to 29 different foreign countries. He visited China five times. (During the last year and a half of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden served on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings while his father was heading up Ukraine policy.)

In September 2018, we sued for information on the travel expenses of President Trump. From a separate lawsuit, Secret Service produced expense records totaling $3,024,036.50, which brought the known total for presidential travel expenses at that time to $17,224,938.46 and included the operation of Air Force One.

In September 2017, we obtained travel records from the Secret Service in response to a FOIA lawsuit, which brought the known total of travel expenses for former President Barack Obama and his family to $105,662,975.27. To date, Judicial Watch has uncovered total travel expenses of the Obamas amounting to $114,691,322.17.

In 2016, we sued for records concerning travel costs for members of Congress.

In 2011, we reported on records detailing a massive Pelosi-led bipartisan congressional junket to the Detroit Auto Show, as well as records showing Michelle Obama’s family trip to Africa cost taxpayers at least $424,142.

We uncovered that the Obama’s 2009 “date night” trip to New York for dinner and a Broadway show cost taxpayers over $11,000 in Secret Service costs alone.

Beginning in 2009, after the media failed to follow up on concerns raised about Nancy Pelosi’s use of luxury Air Force jets to travel between her congressional district and DC, our FOIA requests exposed her abuse of this travel perk. We uncovered that Pelosi’s military travel to Italy and Ukraine in 2015 cost the taxpayers $184,587.81, as well as $2,100,744.59 over one two-year period — $101,429.14 of which was for in-flight expenses, including food and alcohol.

Judicial Watch Asks Supreme Court to End Race-Based Congressional Districts

The Left, with the help of the courts, wants to keep using race as a basis for creating congressional districts.

We filed an amici curiae (friend of the court) brief along with the Allied Educational Foundation (AEF), asking the Supreme Court to eliminate this woke, race-based congressional districting and ban the use of racial preferences in drawing up “majority minority” districts.

Judicial Watch and AEF ask the court to affirm a lower court ruling that would prevent specifically crowding minority voters into congressional districts.

This amici brief comes in the case Louisiana v. Phillip Callais et al. (No. 24-109), which is on appeal from the U.S. District Court Western District of Louisiana where the lower court ruled 2-1 to stop the use of a racially-drawn congressional map for future elections.

In our amici brief, we and AEF argue:

This Court has compared race-based districting to segregation of “public parks, . . . buses, . . . and schools,” and warned that we “should not be carving electorates into racial blocs.”

There should be no question that race-based division of citizens for purposes of redistricting is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, the “central purpose” of which “is to prevent the States from purposefully discriminating between individuals on the basis of race….” Racial gerrymandering, like all “[r]acial classifications of any sort” cause “lasting harm to our society” because “[t]hey reinforce the belief, held by too many for too much of our history, that individuals should be judged by the color of their skin.”

In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of our challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.

The Biden administration jumped into this case at the last minute, seeking to maintain the race-based status quo requiring separating and segregating voters by race for congressional elections. The Trump Justice Department should urge the court to restore non-discrimination as the foundation of voting rights once again.

The Allied Educational Foundation is a charitable and educational foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life through education. In furtherance of that goal, the foundation has engaged in a number of projects, which include, but are not limited to, educational and health conferences domestically and abroad. AEF has partnered frequently with us to fight government and judicial corruption and to promote a return to ethics and morality in the nation’s public life.

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 its 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 November last year we filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the United States Supreme Court challenging the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the case filed on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors from Illinois to prevent state election officials from extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law (Rep. Michael J. Bost et al. v. Illinois State Board of Elections and Bernadette Matthews (No. 1:22-cv-02754, 23-2644)).

In May 2024, we sued California under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) to force it to clean up 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 March 2024, Judicial Watch, Breakthrough Ideas, Illinois Family Action, and Carol J. Davis sued Illinois officials under the NVRA to force them to clean the State’s voter rolls.

In December 2023, a notice letter was sent to election officials in the District of Columbia notifying them of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. The letter pointed out that D.C. publicly reported removing few or no ineligible voter registrations under a key provision of the NVRA. The letter threatened a federal lawsuit 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.”

In July 2023 Judicial Watch 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.

We have had other election law victories in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Los Angeles County, New York City, and Kentucky, as well as North Carolina.

Judicial Watch’s Covid Community Corps Case Illustrates Need to Cut Waste

We’ve been exposing government waste for years, and we’re delighted with President Trump’s efforts through his Department of Government Efficiency. Our Corruption Chronicles blog has one example of our independent work exposing waste, fraud, and abuse:

President Trump’s temporary funding freeze to reign in Biden’s spending binge has ignited outrage among the left, and an ongoing Judicial Watch case that has already exposed $505 million dollars (and counting) in government waste helps illustrate why the new order is vital to protect American taxpayers. It involves awarding billions of dollars to a “grassroots network of community leaders people know and trust” to propagandize and politicize the controversial Covid vaccine by, among other things, increasing vaccine uptake in vulnerable and minority communities. It was part of a $3 billion program to support outreach efforts in states by using a specially createdCovid-19 Community Corps operated by leftists. Judicial Watch requested records from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and was forced to sue in federal court because the government failed to provide the documents, which are still trickling in under the terms of the lawsuit.

It is likely that the scandal-plagued program, which was only exposed because Judicial Watch litigated to obtain records, would receive scrutiny under the new Trump rules aimed at cutting government waste. The policy has caused outrage among many Democrats as well as liberal groups that benefited financially from Biden’s government cash giveaway. The brouhaha was triggered by a memorandum issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which oversees the performance of federal agencies and administers the federal budget, to the heads of executive departments and agencies calling for a temporary pause of grants, loans and other financial assistance programs. “Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again,” the memo reads. It also says that the use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that fails to improve the lives of those they serve.

To implement the new policy each agency is asked to complete a comprehensive analysis of programs to identify those that may be implicated by any of Trump’s executive orders. “In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion], woke gender ideology, and the green new deal,” the OMB memo states. “This temporary pause will provide the Administration time to review agency programs and determine the best uses of the funding for those programs consistent with the law and the President’s priorities.” Federal agencies are also directed to pause all activities associated with open federal funding announcements officially known as Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO).

The funding pause is necessary because the administration must review federal programs to ensure that they are being executed in accordance with the law and the new president’s policies, a White House statement explains. One mainstream newspaper reported that the move to crack down on waste “caused mass chaos and confusion across Washington.” Another major paper referred to it as an “explosive Trump administrative order that froze trillions of dollars of federal grants and loans” and received “widespread condemnation and confusion.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified to a hostile mainstream media that specializes in trashing all things Trump that efforts to “end the egregious waste of federal funding” will continue.

Judicial Watch’s Covid-19 Community Corps case is one of many that can be used to demonstrate why the new Trump order is essential to evaluate future expenditures. The records we obtained reveal that one notable recipient of taxpayer dollars to promote vaccines under Biden’s multi-billion-dollar plan is the Washington, D.C., Episcopal Diocese, whose leftist bishop, Mariann Edgar Budde, politicized her recent presidential inauguration sermon at the National Cathedral by urging Trump to show mercy to illegal immigrants as well as LGBTQ+ individuals.

Until next week,

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