For nearly 30 years Judicial Watch has been holding successive governments and administrations to account. Tom Fitton has been at the helm as President since 1998 and is known as one of the most fearless conservative activists whose desire to seek truth makes him one of the biggest enemies to governments who cover up facts for their own benefit. No other organisation in America uses the Freedom of Information law in such a logical joined up way and is never afraid to use the courts to force the disclosure of hidden...
For nearly 30 years Judicial Watch has been holding successive governments and administrations to account.
Tom Fitton has been at the helm as President since 1998 and is known as one of the most fearless conservative activists whose desire to seek truth makes him one of the biggest enemies to governments who cover up facts for their own benefit.
No other organisation in America uses the Freedom of Information law in such a logical joined up way and is never afraid to use the courts to force the disclosure of hidden documents.
Time and time again the veil is lifted and the public see the truth and often Judicial Watch are behind this reveal.
It was an absolute honour to speak with Tom, so join us as he unpacks some of the requests they have made and how they often have to fight to see the truth exposed.
Tom Fitton is the President of Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption. Founded in 1994, Judicial Watch seeks to ensure government and judicial officials act ethically and do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American public. With 20 years of experience in conservative public policy, Tom Fitton has helped lead Judicial Watch since 1998 and overseen its tremendous growth and success in recent years. Under Fitton’s leadership, Judicial Watch was named one of Washington’s top ten most effective government watchdog organizations by The Hill newspaper.
Mr. Fitton provides Judicial Watch with strategic guidance and leadership on Judicial Watch’s comprehensive efforts to fight government corruption. He is a nationally recognized expert on government corruption, immigration enforcement, congressional and judicial ethics, and open government.
A former talk radio and television host and analyst, Tom is well known across the country as a national spokesperson for the conservative cause. He has been quoted in TIME, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, and most every other major newspaper in the country. He has also appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, C-SPAN and MSNBC.
Mr. Fitton has authored numerous articles such as “Judicial Activism Hurts our Courts,” “What Bill Clinton Knew About bin Laden,” “Following Terrorism’s Money Trail,” “Senate Abandons Judicial Nominees,” “Every Town is a Border Town,” “Obama’s Records Problem” and “Jesse Jackson Exposed.” Judicial Watch also publishes the monthly 375,000+ circulation Verdict newsletter and runs the cutting-edge Internet site JudicialWatch.org, which includes the oft-cited Corruption Chronicles blog. Mr. Fitton gained national attention as a political analyst, previously working for America’s Voice and National Empowerment Television. He is a former employee of the International Policy Forum, the Leadership Institute, and Accuracy in Media.Mr. Fitton holds a B.A. in English from George Washington University.
A Republic Under Assault: The Left's Ongoing Attack on American Freedom (Judicial Watch) available from Amazon in hardcover, e-book and in audiobook...
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Interview recorded 4.5.23
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Transcript
(Hearts of Oak)
Hello Hearts of Oak and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch. I had the privilege of meeting Tom over in CPAC six weeks ago and we talk about many things. What Judicial Watch do is use freedom of information and I haven't seen it used so effectively as Judicial Watch do and Tom has been the president for 25 years and we go into a whole range of issues that, without Judicial Watch, the public would not be aware of the truth.
So we go into Biden targeting Christians and an FOI that Judicial Watch have just put in on the FBI and they're targeting of Roman Catholic churches. Universities control from abroad. This is a story about a university receiving half a billion from Qatar. Is that good? Is that bad?
And how does it influence the education sector. The growing power of the CCP, we look at CCP police stations in New York and you saw maybe six weeks ago there was an arrest of two people.
Actually it was Judicial Watch that initially put in that FOI. Without their work you wouldn't have seen the arrest and the exposure of that. Election integrity, they put in many different FOIs in regards to states, and states have been forced to clean up their electoral rolls.
They've just put an FOI on Trump raid records to reveal all of those. I think 8,000 records need to be revealed. Judicial Watch have put that in. Gain of function. Again, a lot of stuff has been exposed. Hunter Biden. There are so many issues which they address, and without them, these would not be exposed to the public. So Tom shares many of those stories and talks about how actually what they do can be used abroad and replicated because many countries around the world have an FOI system, certainly in the UK and Europe. And I think we need to be aware of what we can do as citizens and actually use the institution, the legal system that we have to force the government to account.
So tune in, listen to Tom share his 25 years worth of experience heading up as President of Judicial Watch.
And hello, Hearts of Oak. Today it is an honour to talk to the President of Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton. Tom, thank you for your time today.
(Tom Fitton)
You're welcome, Peter. Thank you for having me.
Not at all. And you can follow Tom on Twitter. All the handles are there on the screen, @TomFitton and judicialwatch.org, at @JudicialWatch on Twitter. And his latest book, just to give you an idea, published in 2020 is A Republic Under Assault, the left's ongoing attack on American freedom, which really addresses the deep state voter fraud, illegal immigration.
And there's a lot packed into that. So I'd encourage our viewers after this, if they want to
delve a little bit more deeply into some of the things that Tom has discussed, the book is available everywhere. Now, Tom, for our non-US viewers, could you maybe take a moment and introduce yourself before we get into the work of Judicial Watch?
Well, thank you, Peter, and I won't presume our fellow Americans here in the United States know who we are. So, we're a non-profit educational foundation. We're essentially a government watchdog group. We use often a law here in the United States, it's the bulk of our litigation, called the Freedom of Information Act, which is an open records law that allows federal level access to records. And of course, states do it as well. They have similar laws, so we sue there. So we've been able to uncover all sorts of records about corruption issues that the media isn't terribly interested in pursuing, the Congress is arguably incapable of pursuing, but the American people desperately want to know about.
And one of the things we do is we represent whistle-blowers, those who've been victimized by the government for daring to blow the whistle on government misconduct, meaning government officials, and then of course the victims of government misconduct as well.
And so in doing so, we not only advance the rule of law, but we educate Americans and and other concerned citizens across the world, frankly, about the importance of clean government, honest government, and transparent government.
Well, I think just on you, one thing I read on your Wikipedia, which is always good fun to read, and that in 2022, researchers found that Fitton was the third most prolific purveyor of election misinformation on Twitter during the late months of 2020.
That's quite a badge of honour, isn't it?
I was hoping for at least a silver medal. Well, the left is obsessed with depicting anything they dispute or hate
as quote disinformation and of course, the communist left, which is on the rise here in the United States.
They really like compiling lists. So I'm all sorts of lists that I'm sure they'll go to if they advance the revolution far enough along, to put me in jail or worse, but these are serious times and I'm half joking, but I, that book title is prescient, isn't it? Republic Under Assault. I often confuse it because I can, it sounds like a Star Wars movie title to me, but our Republic is under assault. And we have this constitutional system here in the United States that the left has decided is not convenient to them anymore. And so they've let folks who don't follow the rule of law and don't care about protecting the institutions that protect our Liberty, they're running the show for, in my view, an entire political party with the acquiescence, if not too often the allegiance of the other political party, the Republicans.
On your website, and I've worked with FOIs here, we have a similar system in the UK, but how you have used them is on another level. I think on the, on your website the document archive section there are 27,000 documents. I mean that is a huge resource of information and it really is a window on government corruption that you've just made available to the public to use as they see fit.
Yeah, I don't, it would be difficult to overstate the nature of our work in terms of the scope in what we've been able to uncover. We have thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests, I could come up with a number which may or may not be correct, but it's thousands and it would be shocking if the actual number was certified for you. And I know it's hundreds of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, so there's no one more, there's no one who does more litigation to uncover what the government's up to, not only here in the United States, but worldwide. And you know, I know it's this is more of an international audience is that, you know, we're kind of unusual here in the United States, given our work. Now, I'm pleased to say, because of our aggressive heavy lifting on FOIA, others now know about it as a way to get access to information. But it's relatively unique here in the United States to just have a group focused on uncovering and battling government corruption. And to me, it's a great testament. I know there there are a lot of issues here in America, but it's a great testament to the American way and our rule of law that allows a little Judicial Watch
to go into court and the IRS or the State Department or the Treasury, FBI, DOJ, they need to go into court and answer to the court as to why they're not giving us documents and what they're withholding and justify it.
And so that's a rarity here in the United States and I know worldwide, we just don't have that sort of accountability in a regular way. First of all, if you're doing it in most other countries, you face financial ruin, imprisonment, injury, death to you and your family potentially. And that's just in France.
Yeah. So true.
You know, the point is, even in Western Europe, they don't like civic society. That's the term I use. They call it the non-governmental sector, which to me is just so communist in approach.
It's the government, everything else, the government has to justify its role as a sector.
The NGOs don't need their own little sector.
We should be running the show, non-government entities. But as you, and I don't need to tell you in the United Kingdom, there are just few independent civic groups.
Usually they're either creatures of the government or of the parties.
And so it's hard for them to get the traction we're able to get here in the United States.
And you see when a few of them do get traction or when there's more of a populist movement, how vociferous the reaction is by the state there in Europe and frankly in Canada and elsewhere. So thank God for America but you know this is this is a more than just a third world problem government corruption it's a first world problem.
Yeah no completely and what you're doing shines a light on that and expose the things the government obviously don't want people to see.
But maybe I could just go through some of the freedom of information that you have done that gives people an idea of your work and an idea what's possible and shows the failures of government and institutions. I think one of the most recent ones just a few days ago was Biden's targeting of Christians and Judicial Watch have just filed a Freedom of Information Act along with Catholic vote civil action against the FBI and the Department of Justice. Why on earth are the government spying on Christians.
Well, if you're a leftist, it makes sense, right? The church is an enemy of the state, unnecessarily.
Certainly the left's cultural agenda here in the United States, whether it be abortion or radical transgender extremism.
And so the FBI, they know who butters their bread, and they follow or they come up with things that they think will appeal, to their political masters, who are the left.
And one thing this agency did in Richmond, Virginia, so the FBI, for those of you not here in the United States, and those of you here in the United States may not know this, you've got the FBI headquarters, but the offices of the FBI, the Richmond office and the New York office, they're kind of their own fiefdoms as well.
And so they're substantial in terms of their power and influence.
And Richmond's and the Richmond office decided that, you know, traditionalist Catholics could, be attractive to the terrorists they want to monitor domestically.
And I mean, it's really laughable, Peter. It's worth reading.
Everyone should read it.
It just shows you how out of control the government is and how stupid it is.
They do an analysis under the guise of this intelligence threat assessment of Vatican II and the debates in the church about Vatican II.
So do you want the FBI analysing those who support the Latin mass versus those who think we should have a mass in the everyday tongue of the country?
It's just incredible.
But what's frightening is the document also makes it clear that they want to get sources in the Church.
So what they were planning was spying onto the Catholic Church, using them as, using these sources as tripwires, right, to get the bad guys who are too pro-life or too extreme in terms of defending children from mutilation and such. So, you know, you shouldn't have to go to your, go to mass or go to church. In this case, obviously, the Catholic Church was being specifically targeted, but every Christian should worry and wonder if your pastor or or your priest is spying on you and watching what you're saying, or whether your fellow parishioner that you shared a sign of the peace with is, is it informant for the FBI?
And now, of course, the FBI and the Justice Department run from that document once it became disclosed as a result of a whistle-blower disclosure to a former FBI agent.
But I'm not confident that they've stopped this type of approach and, indeed the fact that they haven't given us documents about this scandal suggests there's more to, hide. That's why we're in court.
Well, how does that spying on its own citizens and the understanding that being a conservative is somehow dangerous to society?
Does that just happen as the FBI under a Democrat regime, or is it so ingrained, that hatred of conservatism, that actually that prevails whoever is in the White House?
Oh, well, you know, the history of the FBI is one of an agency that is often used to either protect or target the enemies of the sitting president, and they don't need to be told to do it.
They kind of, as I said, they instinctively know who butters their bread.
But I think things changed a bit with Donald Trump.
He came in, was seemingly hostile to virtually every institution in the country, the drain the swamp approach.
And so they decided that he needed to be taken out. And so you had these mandarins in the FBI decide that they were going to be, and I think actually, I forget who mentioned it, referenced the Praetorian Guard of old.
They started off as quote, defenders of the Republic, right?
And instead they became their own power centre. And I think we're seeing that with the FBI and the Justice Department.
I was looking at their budget documents the other day, 30, I think it's 35, 37,000 staff, 13,000, which includes 13,000 FBI special agents, you know, $10-11 billion budget, and, I suspect that's about the size of most countries' militaries.
And they're not just checking out, you know, and when you've got a bureaucracy that big, they're not just looking for bank robbers.
No, I can bet. One of the other recent, people can go up on the website, obviously, and see all the press releases and the many regular FOIs, but universities being controlled from abroad, and this was a document showing the Texas A&M, which is a university there, it appeared to to receive $500 million, that's half a billion dollars, in grants from Qatar regime.
And that's something massively concerning. We've had concerns here in the UK about Chinese influence on our universities especially, but also there is money and influence coming from the Middle East that probably is opposed to anything you would want freedom-wise in your country.
So tell us about that.
Well, when you give someone $500 million, you usually want something.
You either want recognition or something in the least, the most charitable interpretation is, you know, at the university level, major donors usually seek recognition or to advance a specific academic goal.
And so the question is, what was the goal here? I think, again, what, you know, it's one thing to say, oh, look at this money, it's terrible.
You know, you just can't draw a conclusion. Well, someone gave money a gift, therefore it's terrible.
You have to see what the circumstances are.
And here the circumstances are, it looks like there was underreporting of the amount that was given.
And it also is only being disclosed after hard-fought litigation in state courts that went up and down the Texas courts against the Qatar Foundation, which is a front for the terrorist-linked regime there.
And so, if everything was on the up and up, this would have been a straightforward request for information. Indeed, Texas A&M I don't think had any initial objection.
We had to fight the government, the Qatar government in lawfare here in the United States.
It was really quite incredible.
And, to me, it's like an easy, it's easy pickings if you're a foreign government seeking the influence, you just give money to universities and such.
And in the case of China, there's a kind of almost an inherent, there's a special interest group because forget about giving money directly through Confucius Institutes or whatever the latest version of their academic fronts are, but you have a half, let's say a half a million Chinese residents here in the United States going to school, most of whom are paying full tuition.
So the universities all of a sudden become advocates for this, just potentially dangerous relationships that we develop with these foreign countries through our higher education system.
Another story that broke and I didn't realize that you had been involved in putting the FOI.
We're involved in everything.
Yeah, I get it. So we talked about the power of the CCP but actually the story broke I think a month ago and the headline was the Federal Bureau investigation misled and stonewalled Judicial Watch on legitimate public record requests involving illegal Chinese police station opening in New York. And then your FOI, actually the people who you had put that in about, they suddenly get arrested. That is really concerning that a foreign government would have a police presence in the US and it makes you wonder kind of what else else is happening. But that was, again, your FOI that you'd put in.
Yeah, I mean, we, you know, the idea that there are police fronts operating in the United States is not a new issue. You know, the folks have noted it and it took forever and a day, it looks like, for the FBI to get on it. And, you know, we asked for the documents and we got the run-around or they pretended there was no issue and didn't have anything to give to us. But sometimes even a non-answer is, indicates government scandal and corruption, but think about having the goal to run a police agency, practically speaking, that not only targets Chinese residents who are foreign nationals here in the United States, but American Chinese citizens, American citizens of Chinese origin.
What chutzpah? And but on the other hand, you have a regime that thinks low enough of the United States and has Biden evidently deep enough in its back pocket that they can send in a spy craft to attack our sovereignty and do figure eights with no repercussions, practically speaking, above our secure military installations in the heartland of our country.
In the heartland of our country. You have to wonder, obviously, what the Chinese are concluding from our lack of seeming outrage, I wonder what all of our friends must think, too.They won't defend themselves. Well, how can we rely on them to defend us or to help us, if push comes to shove?
Completely, and that one you'd put in, again in the UK, we put in FOI and they come back and say the information is too difficult to obtain and then you can put another FOI, but you then go down the legal route. That's intriguing. You're not without teeth that you're using the legal system, you're not simply requesting according to what your statutory allowed to receive, you're actually then going to the court. So you have that threat and it's often that threat or actually you in the courtroom forces the government to release the information.
Yeah that's true, it's actually going to court that often gets a response and you can imagine it's the United States government, it spends more money than mine is, so and the bureaucracy is huge so that their resting state is incompetence or refusal to comply with the law since, there's little accountability on that and the only way to get their attention is through a federal court case often. But that also has, you know, thankfully thanks to Judicial Watch's well-known record for going to court, other FOIAs sometimes do get responded to that otherwise wouldn't. For instance, we've done a ton of FOIAs on and lawsuits on on COVID, its origins, the vaccine, et cetera.
And it was just a separate FOIA that wasn't a lawsuit, but they knew we were sniffing around and had similar lawsuits on the same issue, that just disclosed recently that the Fauci Agency was funding in China through EcoHealth Alliance, which is a third party, a front or a pass-through for grants, the creation of literal mutant coronaviruses, And that's a quote. Mutants.
To see how or if they could infect humanized mice.
I never thought to call gain of function viruses mutants, but it's a rather obvious point.
And of course, our government's figured out that's what they are too.
And they've been lying to us about what they've been doing for years.
And the conclusion from that, which to me is, to me, this is some of the biggest, the most important material, Peter, at least on this issue we've uncovered, it helps explain why there was this fanatic desperation to discount the lab leak theory.
Because if it was, quote, a leak from a lab, and I don't know why we presume it was a leak if it came from a lab, it was either a natural virus in the lab that got out somehow, or it was an engineered virus.
And what was the technique for engineering it, And what was the set of viruses that were engineered?
Well, the answers to those two latter questions are it was the United States.
And the gain-of-function technique was a US biological approach that we shared and exported to China.
So, this COVID origin story isn't just about what the Chinese were doing, in my view.
And that shows, because many conservatives have had big concerns at the government's role, institutions' role within that.
But it's one thing to have concerns and suspicions, it's another thing to have the documentary evidence.
Going through your FOI seems time and time again that you're providing the evidence to back up what the suspicions that have been there over time, but most other people are not doing that. It's you that are going in and actually delivering on the hard facts for the issues.
Yeah, I know a lot of folks who have conspiracy theories, what is derided as, what are derided as conspiracy theories, and my view is actually the truth is usually worse than the conspiracy theory. It's worse once you know what they actually did, and it's usually folks with the conspiracy theories, they're usually in the right ballpark, but they've got the specifics and the mechanisms and the people involved wrong, and sometimes the motivation's wrong, but their suspicions generally are correct. Something went wrong with the way the vaccines were manufactured. That process was politicized and is untrustworthy, and how it was pushed out and information about the issues related to the vaccine were handled. Something went wrong about the vaccine, excuse me, the coronavirus and its origins. There was reason to suspect that what we were being told wasn't true. Or we should at least examine all sorts of possibilities, as opposed to just pretending some questions are you're not allowed to ask. I mean, this is the craziness of these days, Peter. It's not even saying this happened, or I believe this happened. You're not even allowed to ask the question.
And I tell you, the wonderful thing about FOIA is we get to ask those questions.
Well, we find, yeah, that's an area you don't touch on. And another area you don't touch on, which you've talked about, another, we're told, is a conspiracy, is election integrity.
And that's also because we've seen some lawsuits going in favour of actually cleaning up the system within states.
But one of the FOIs you'd put in was in Colorado. And it's, the statement was, Judicial Watch announced that Colorado's Secretary of State agreed to settle a lawsuit alleging that Colorado had failed to remove ineligible voters from its rules. As part of a settlement, Colorado, I love this, will report to Judicial Watch on its yearly progress in cleaning up its rules for the next six years.
I love that they have to answer to you, but that's a state-by-state issue that needs to be addressed, and that's one state that you then had a victory on, and I guess that has to happen state-by-state.
Yeah. Well, and we've been successful state by state. And that's not the FOIA. That's not Freedom of Information Act. That's a law that allows, under federal law, aggrieved parties to sue states and localities that aren't taking reasonable steps to clean up the voter rolls.
And I think this translates internationally. If you have a list of people who are eligible to vote, you should make sure that list is as accurate and up-to-date as you reasonably can, because it invites fraud, right, if oh so-and-so moved and died or died I'm still getting their ballot or I know their their name is on the list I'm gonna vote in their name or do something other than something else nefarious which is why the law requires the list to be cleaned up it's not just Tom Fitton being worried that's the reason the laws there otherwise why would you have it, and of course at the federal level the leftist running the Justice Department have little interest in cleaning up voter rolls because I believe certainly here in the United States
and I'm not naïve that both political sides, both sides of the aisle are often tempted to mess with election results.
But they don't want cleaner elections here in the United States.
And I think it's because, because I can't think of any other reason.
They oppose voter ID, they oppose cleaning up the rolls. They want to expand the idea of voting from one day, through entire months.
They want unsupervised voting, which is the way to think about mail-in balloting.
And that's something that no one else does.
And I don't like the point to say, oh, no other country does this, because usually most every other country does things wrong.
But I don't think any sensible person thinks that having millions of ballots be mailed out, and people filling those ballots out And just mailing them back is any way to run an honest election.
No completely, and I know we-
And necessarily undermines confidence in the election system.
Even if people participate in it, they realize, boy, how do they make sure no one is being intimidated when they vote?
How do they make sure no one is, that the actual voter who sends the ballot in is who the person says they are?
Oh, if they collect ballots, how do we know those ballots are collected properly and there's certifications about their origin?
there was no intimidation in the collection process. None of that is, practically speaking, checkable under the new systems that were set up under the pretext of the COVID pandemic.
Completely. Well, I know we often look to the States for hope here in Europe, but we just had an election and maybe one thing the US can learn from the motherland is that we actually do paper ballots. It's all counted on the one day and we don't use any voting dominion systems and it's it's all done and dusted and by 3 a.m. the next day you've got a result.
Yeah I mean and there's no excuse for the United States not to be able to do that. You know people say well the United States a bigger country. Well we don't run elections nationally, it's state by state. So there's no reason any major state in this nation can't figure out who won on election day.
And we've also had another breakthrough where they now require voter ID so the left have realized it's not actually racist to ask someone for ID so we've had another breakthrough.
Well it's funny you know the left used to not like vote by mail because it used to be used by elderly republicans to vote.
And then they decided they liked it. And everyone used to understand vote by mail was a kind of a recipe and invited voter fraud until it became politically, until they realized well we kind of like that so let's do more of it.
One of the other big things has been that the Trump raid records and I know you put down FOI and I think last month you'd said that you'd, they had released, the National Archives had released 1,200 pages of 8,000 records about that unprecedented raid. Tell us about that because it's vital that the American public know what was behind that, the reasons, the conversations, and I guess that will be another case of you then going to court to force those release off the other what six and a half thousand documents.
Well, let's take a step back here, Peter. Back in, it was like 10, 12 years ago, we found out that Bill Clinton had tapes of recordation's of his conversations with foreign leaders and members of Congress that he kept after he left office.
Right? And we thought, well, isn't that a presidential record?
You know, I don't need to explain, practically speaking, what that might mean.
Talking to foreign leaders typically are, you know, those talks are almost always classified inherently.
And we went to court and the Justice Department and the National Archives, which is the federal bureaucracy that handles presidential records, their preservation and such, they came to us and said, no, we can't, you can't force us to get these records.
And the court said, you have to defer to the president.
He gets to decide what's personal and what's not.
And the Justice Department in a court hearing said, you know what, if he has records after he leaves the Oval Office, they're presumptively personal.
So compare and contrast that with their new position, 180 degree difference, with President Trump.
And so the same archives that went out of its way to protect Bill Clinton's right to keep whatever records he wanted, conspired against President Trump to try to nail him on this records dispute criminally.
And, you know, it's basically a civil matter, even if it is a dispute and there's a basis for it.
And now they don't want to tell us that, because to get the records, it's all about transparency, right? We got to know what the president was doing.
Well, now we don't, they won't tell us what they were doing to go after the president.
And to take a step further back, I'm kind of getting a little bit in the weeds there.
But and in America here, the political media class, they like to talk about this as if it's serious and important. No one buys it.
I mean, I tell you.
There isn't a foreign leader who doesn't look at what America is doing and say, okay, the current president, his agencies are trying to jail the former president, and his number one opponent in the presidential campaign. They don't need the details.
They don't need the, oh, oh, but this is why it's important. This is, this is the terrible crime.
They see through it and they see America that's no better than anyone else internationally in the way they are supposed to follow the rule of law. And I think it's a terrible national security and international embarrassment to the United States because now our moral, you know, the moral weight we could throw when we talk about the concerns about having fair elections and accountable government and consent to the government. Well, all that's out the window.
They're trying to jail Trump simply because he opposed the wrong people here in Washington, not because of any personal misconduct. And Putin and Xi and, you know, frankly, Macron and whoever the current office holder is in Downing Street, that changes, I know, every three months.
It does. It's Rishi Sunak today, but who knows who it will be tomorrow.
You know, they see what's happening in the United States, and they also recognize that attitude is there in their home countries. I mean, there isn't a major politician in any Western country that doesn't sit there because of the lack of rule, because of this contempt for consent of the government that doesn't sit there at the the sufferance of the deep state.
Which is, in my view, transnational in nature in terms of their attitude.
It doesn't mean they're conspiring saying we got to put this person on this piece in this place on the chessboard. No, it's an approach and it's a shared approach.
One other area, and we had Miranda Devine on a few weeks ago and the Laptop from Hell and looking at Hunter Biden and you'd filed an FOI for a gun owned by him and I thought someone who had such a drug issue, an alcohol issue, wouldn't be eligible to get a gun but somehow. So tell us about that because obviously Hunter Biden's background, all the the business dealings that leads directly to Joe Biden himself.
Well there are a few things there and so he was dating the widow of his brother and they got into a fight or dispute and she allegedly took his gun and threw it in a dumpster across the street from a school. Law enforcement got involved and the political reporting, the reporting on it was that the Secret Service and the FBI came and went to the store from which he purchased the gun and vacuumed up documents.
So, to me, that shows improper involvement by federal agencies to take care of a political problem for the son of a major political figure.
But when you think about the petty nature of what he kind of had to come in and sweep up for, and of course, we've been suing about those records, right?
It helps explain, well, if they're doing that for little stuff, can you imagine what they're doing for big stuff?
And certainly they've had the so-called Hunter laptop for at least since 19, excuse me, 2019.
It's like a Hamlet-style agony about whether to prosecute Hunter since then, even though they have him dead to rights in a series of crimes.
But there's new information now that just came out here from senior members of Congress that the FBI had evidence that Joe Biden had specifically been involved in a bribery scheme with a foreign nationals vice president, and all the evidence that's out there from the laptop and other witnesses suggest and show that Joe Biden was a beneficiary of Hunter's business dealings.
So he got a cut of the action, you know, the infamous 10% for the big guy approach.
So Hunter, I mean, Biden, Joe was a ran his operation like a Rico operation, a racketeering operation, a mob operation.
And I think the challenge for his Justice Department, which is first and foremost moving to protect him, is they can't get at Hunter without getting and raising issues about Joe.
So that's why you have this stalling and this hemming and hawing about, what you're going to go, if you go after Hunter for failing to disclose money on his tax returns, what about all the money he was giving his father?
Is it he's subject to the same type of scrutiny? And if he hasn't, why not?
We're in a crisis here. And you know, and some of that money came from the mayor of Moscow's wife. So you've got the Putin connection, Burisma. At least that was a company. So.
Burisma was a Russian leading company. And then of course, you have the Chinese who were who had Hunter in their back pocket as well, obviously, because of his name and the influence. And it wasn't like the vice president was involved in all of this as vice president.
So when Putin's making decisions and Xi is making decisions, how is it that they're not calculating Biden's corruption in their decision-making?
You know, they're compromised, right? He's obviously has cognitive difficulties.
He's compromised by the very public figures the public figures or political figures in China and Russia making these dangerous decisions.
And so, you know, maybe, oh, does it mean we invade Ukraine because Biden's in our back pocket?
No, but I would suggest it's a factor. Does it mean we are more aggressive around Taiwan or generally in China because Biden's in our back pocket?
No, it's not the only reason, but certainly it's a factor. Too me it's a national security issue and it would be for any other country worth it's salt.
All the issues you kind of talk about seem to be the Democrat party behind institutions, and I'm wondering will it come to the point where organizations like Judicial Watch and others need to actually go after either those on Capitol Hill or those in the institutions, AGs, I mean will it have to be actually going after those within the party itself?
Well, we don't go after them under law because they are Democrats.
We don't go after someone because they're Republicans. We try to apply the law.
Or, you know, apply our focus without regard to political party.
Though generally speaking, big government usually means big corruption.
So we have all that money being spent. There's usually a lot of money sloshing up over the sides, right? Or it's usually being directed to political supporters as opposed to those in the public interest. And so ideologically, if you support bigger government, you tend to be more involved in corruption. I mean, it's just kind of, to me, it just goes with the just, it's part of the package. Now, Republicans, they abuse government to target us. They refuse to take action against corruption too often because they think politically it's not feasible or won't work for them, which to me is also a form of corruption.
And so this temptation is great among both Republican and Democrats to kind of abuse these powers entrusted to them, especially if they think no one's watching.
And I think the problem's not insurmountable. there's always going to be, you spend $4 trillion, there's going to be corruption, okay?
But let's avoid having a Justice Department that is just thrown out all semblance of being dispassionate.
Let's maybe have an FBI that is significantly curtailed, or if not, radically repurposed, to focus more on traditional law enforcement than political targeting of individuals.
Let's ensure that our elections are as clean as we reasonably can.
You know, the temptation is great. I mean, North Carolina, they had the stay here in the United States.
They had to redo a congressional election because a Republican, essentially was engaged in a massive fraud.
So we just have to be constantly vigilant. That's the price of freedom.
To finish off with, Tom, for 25 years you've been president of Judicial Watch.
And I guess there are many stories that if Judicial Watch hadn't been there, then the truth would never be told.
And I think what you're doing is a model for other countries.
And I know your focus is on the US, but there are other countries across Europe that have a similar freedom of information system, but it hasn't been used as well as you have used what you have there.
Go ahead, I'm sorry.
You obviously raise money from the public, you've got a big team, and tell us about that because ideally what you've built there is something that actually could be rolled out and used in other countries.
Well, we're able to fundraise directly and the fundraising laws here in the United States are very friendly to grassroots groups and the non-governmental organizations, a phrase I hate, to be able to raise public support and that's much harder, my understanding is, in other countries. It's just more difficult to raise money directly from the public, as I said, outside the, you know, they usually rely on the government or the creatures of the party. But there's a growing conservative movement internationally to address this transnational left-wing threat. Our folks are there in Europe this week now for CPAC Hungary, right, and there are conservatives from all over Europe there hanging out, figuring out ways to oppose Lothiathan.
Yeah, and I know I'm watching CPAC Hungary. So, Tom, thank you for your time. It's fascinating. I've followed Judicial Watch for quite a while and it's exciting to see what you're doing. So thank you for coming along and sharing insights on what is happening there with Judicial Watch.
Well, best of luck to you, Peter, thanks for having me on.
Thank you.
