Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch president, reveals how FOIA exposes government corruption while criticizing the left’s weaponization of it to hide spending on allies. His book Rights and Freedoms in Peril ties border policies to demographic manipulation, with 10–15M illegal entrants potentially reshaping congressional seats by 20–26 states. He demands pardons for all January 6 cases due to political bias, citing Ashley Babbitt’s death as evidence of systemic failures. Fitton links COVID-19 origins to suppressed "gain of function" research in Wuhan since 2016, funded by Fauci and the intelligence community, and accuses the DOJ of enabling abuses. Unchecked, he warns, such tactics could permanently erode American sovereignty and institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Tom Fitton.
You know, Tom is the president of the government watchdog group Judicial Watch, and he has done a spectacular job hectoring the government to get information out of them.
I don't know anybody else who does it better, really, just kind of prying their secrets out of them by legal means.
It's been quite amazing.
And he's written a new book about some of the stuff he's found, some of the alarming stuff he's found.
It's called Rights and Freedoms in Peril, an investigative report on the left's attack on America.
Tom, it's good to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
Hey, good to be with you.
Thanks for having me.
So, you know, people may think, gee, now we've won this election, this is not an important thing.
But as I'm going through the book, I'm seeing that this is kind of, you know, it's sinister because it's kind of interwoven into secret places where you actually don't see what they're up to.
Let me start first of all, since this is a good week for all of us, I think.
Let's start first of all with your reaction to Trump's reelection and how you think it's going to affect these threats.
Well, I think it's positive news for those of us who support the rule of law generally.
There will continue to be challenges.
And to a degree, the public spoke, they rejected lawfare.
They rejected this kind of, I would say, rising communist movement that's hijacked the Democratic Party, where they've decided all the institutions of America can be thrown out.
Constitution, sovereignty, the Fourth Amendment, the 14th Amendment, yeah, the Fourth Amendment too, the First Amendment.
And so Americans want America to continue.
I mean, that's what the election's about, in my view.
And now, does it mean the left is going to give up and all of a sudden start driving within the guardrails of traditional American discourse?
I don't think so.
But certainly a lot of the tools they've used to abuse Americans will no longer be in their direct control.
Yeah, that is definitely good news.
I have to say that, you know, they not only go after the Constitution, they go after the Constitution in the name of the Constitution, which is incredibly sinister, I think.
It's just, but it is their kind of method of operation.
Before we get into the kind of nitty-gritty of the book, could you talk a little bit two of the two things I've always felt the right lacks?
One thing, I think we lack cultural weight, entertainment, the entertainment industry, and novels and things like that, ways of reaching people through their hearts instead of just their brains.
But the other thing has always seemed to me that we do not have a lot of investigative power.
We don't have the kind of incredible teams the New York Times can dispatch to any part of the world to get information.
Can you talk a little bit?
I've always admired you for doing this.
Can you talk about a little bit about the methods that you use to pry information out of the government?
When you're doing investigation, what are you doing?
Well, the big law that covers or gives us the ability to investigate, at least the government, is the Freedom of Information Act.
And it was passed over the objections of Lyndon Johnson, you can be sure.
And the left had traditionally used it to target anti-anti-communism.
They were to push anti-anti-communism, and they used it to try to curtail what then was the deep state from their point of view, efforts to curtail the communist menace and national security threats.
And the left traditionally used FOIA to figure out why the government wasn't spending as much money as it should have and could have to help their allies.
And so Judicial Watch started using FOIA 30 years ago to advance, I like to think, conservative values.
We recognize when there's big government, there's big corruption.
And FOIA is a remarkable statute because it allows you, I'm not a lawyer, but I've learned a lot about it since I've been here at Judicial Watch.
You ask the agency for records, the federal agency.
And if they don't respond within a certain amount of time in a way that you like, and there's a good reason to sue over, you can go into court.
And so we're in court, little old Judicial Watch, and I, you know, we're a little bit bigger than just little at this point, but the IRS has to show up in court.
The Justice Department always has to show up in court.
All these agencies have to show up in court and explain to the court and to Judicial Watch and indirectly to the American people why they don't want to turn over documents or when they will or why are they withholding specific pieces of information.
And that's just something that's not widely available in the rest of the world, if at all.
So it's really a remarkable tool for those of us who want to exercise our First Amendment rights, because it is a core First Amendment right, petitioning the government, right?
Find out what the government's up to.
And the left has been furious about it, especially since others started following our lead.
Congress's investigations have gotten a little bit better because they were jealous and upset, not jealous, but upset that Judicial Watch was getting documents.
Some of my colleagues in the conservative movement started using it more directly.
And the left really got mad when parents started using FOIA at the school board level and demanding information about what the schools and the school districts were doing in terms of teaching their children.
So it's an effective tool.
And it's always going to be a close-run thing because I recognize in no other country could we be able to do what we're doing as Judicial Watch here.
You know, one of the frustrating things about fighting with the media, basically the left-wing media, is you're constantly being accused of being a conspiracy theorist on the right.
And the joke nowadays is the difference between a conspiracy theory and a fact is about six weeks.
And it does seem true that more and more conspiracy theories turn out to be just basically what's happening.
You, in this book, Rights and Freedoms in Peril, you look at the border, for instance.
Now, there are lots of theories about the border.
Why on earth they opened the borders to all of these people?
Are they trying to destroy us?
Are they trying to bring in voters?
You had a wonderful phrase for it, planned chaos, which I thought was a very good description of it.
What are they up to?
Why on earth have they opened our borders?
You know, if you take my theory, my theory of the case, right, that these actions are designed to stabilize the country.
So when we see and get upset about what happened on the border, in terms of the chaos, in terms of the resulting and foreseeable consequences related to crime, public expense, health, safety, welfare, you name it, our political system.
All of those are features.
They're not symptoms.
For the male's perspective, that's exactly right.
I mean, how many times have we complained about the most extreme outcome that the left wants to promote?
Now, the political people will always push back from it and say, well, that's too far.
But the radicals, they don't care about it at all.
They think, yeah, that's exactly what we want.
We don't believe in American exceptionalism.
We don't believe in the idea of American citizenship.
And so the most, when you say conspiracy theory, they agree with us on what their agenda is.
It's the politicians who have to be educated about what the issue is.
So when people are complaining, oh, you know, they're trying to replace us, you're trying to destabilize the country, the far left is like, yeah, exactly.
Well, that's a, yeah.
What are you complaining about?
Of course, you know, and we laugh at some of it.
And it's, and it's a good, it's effective to laugh at your opposition at times.
They're not laughing.
It's not a joke to them.
You know, no Marxists can be, you know, there's no level of absurdity or pettiness that a Marxist won't embrace.
I mean, just look at the so-called replacement theory.
I mean, I always say, you know, the conspiracy theories that are kind of out there, first of all, I believe everything initially and then try to figure out what's actually true.
But often what is true is worse than the conspiracy theory that's out there.
So we have 10 million, 15 million non-citizens who have entered the United States illegally.
And their mere presence, it's like a black hole, right?
And it's going to twist our body politic and distort it.
Because if they're here for the next census in the least, that means that states where there are large numbers of them will get to keep or increase congressional seats that will almost always benefit the left-leaning states.
Maybe Florida and Texas might benefit a little bit because they have large numbers there.
But we're talking 20, 25, 26 states, seats, if you go by the numbers from the last census, that the left will be able to retain or obtain as a result of this presence of these aliens.
So they don't have to be all illegally voting.
They just have to stay here.
Have you found documents that reveal motivation?
No, it's usually the process.
And this is what we want to do.
Sometimes there's an acknowledgement of the consequences of the process, but it's usually someone complaining and who's quickly overridden by their superiors.
And Lord forbid, you're on the wrong side of those discussions in government.
That's why we have whistleblower laws and such.
But the motivations are quite public.
I mean, this is why they hate the internet and want to control it, because the motivation is out there for anyone with three minutes on their hands and a competent understanding of search functions.
When you were talking before about the law fare against President Trump, I was kind of laughing.
I guess it was yesterday.
There was starting to be reports that a lot of these federal cases against him are just going to be dropped because of the, how did they put it, that there's a long-standing Department of Justice policy against prosecuting the president of the United States.
Thank you very much.
And even in New York, they were saying that Juan Merchant, who I thought was the most, I'd never seen a judge be that corrupt in public before.
I've seen it like in movies, but never like quite there on my TV screen, that even he might set aside this verdict against Trump for whatever it was they convicted him of.
What have you found when you look into this lawfare?
I mean, what exactly it seems so it seems so transparent that it's a political maneuver.
And what do you have you found that we aren't seeing right in front of our eyes?
Well, you know, to respond to the first point about all these cases disappearing, I mean, you highlight it's a policy, not a law, it's not a rule.
It's a political decision to drop the cases.
And it shows you that the cases were political from the beginning.
So they just highlight the discretionary nature of the cases they were pursuing.
And now there's another reason not to pursue them.
There were all sorts of other reasons not to pursue them previously.
So, you know, the interesting thing, the thing that got Judicial Watch kind of caught up in this investigation was when we heard about these documents that they were harassing Trump over under this National Archives Federal Records Act law.
And we said, what the heck is going on here?
Because we had this Clinton sock drawer case, and I go into it in the book.
And we had Bill had been interviewed by an author, Taylor Branch.
And he had, Bill kept the tapes of the interviews.
And the interviews were taking place seemingly all over the White House.
They caught Clinton calling foreign leaders, members of Congress, et cetera.
So conducting the business of the presidency.
So we said, aren't these presidential records?
Why aren't they in the archives?
They'd be interesting to see.
So we sued to force the archives to try to go get them.
Well, we went into court.
The Justice Department, the most left-leaning judge here in D.C., said Judicial Watch, Go Pound Sand.
A president has absolute discretion as to what is his personal record versus a presidential record.
Even if they're classified, it doesn't matter that they're in his hands.
They're presumptively personal.
So, and what are we going to do?
And I think I'm paraphrasing exactly what the court said.
What are we going to do?
Am I going to send the FBI into the president's house to get the tapes?
And so imagine, so we were, you know, we lost, right?
We lost big time.
So you're always very, very much aware of cases you lost.
And so when the Justice Department takes the exact opposite position to harass Trump on this, we say, what the heck is going on here?
This is exactly the exact opposite of what you told us.
And we started shouting from the mountaintops about it.
We sued for records about it because that's what we do, you know, and then sure enough, a few months later, I get the knock at the door.
FBI agents want to question me and get documents from Judicial Watch.
And I end up going before the grand jury impaneled by the Smith operation and get harassed for four hours by three prosecutors arguing with me about presidential electors and Clinton's sock drawer case.
Four Hours of Harassment00:02:23
That's amazing.
That is amazing.
So it's a little bit personal, you know?
Yeah, what was the outcome?
Well, I'm supposedly a witness, but I joked.
It was like being on an MSNBC panel for four hours.
But I had to say, this isn't in the book, but one of the funnier aspects of it, there's always, you know, if you're in this grand jury, and it's kind of a small room, it's surprisingly small.
So I'm sitting at the table with the prosecutors.
It's almost like a panel in front of the grand jury, and they're all tight, 28 people sitting on top of each other.
And I'm kind of like going at it.
And, you know, I pause upset.
And I look, and the grand juror sitting front and center is like this, dead asleep.
So it was a circus in all respects.
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Talking to Tom Fittenham for Judicial Watch.
Well, I don't know where that gets us in terms of, but I mean, it just highlights the, I mean, I remember thinking this is a First Amendment.
You know, why am I being harassed on my First Amendment activity?
And, you know, and frankly, Judicial Watch is a big dog when it comes to national groups.
Imagine if the head of the ACLU was brought in because of his advocacy.
FBI Harassment Tactics00:13:49
And that's what they did to me, knocking at my door, you know, scaring my family, scaring me.
You know, every day, you know, once the FBI knocks at your door, every subsequent door knock makes you pause.
Yep.
And this is why this FBI and Justice Department can't survive in their current form under this new Trump administration.
Do you think that, I mean, you know, in every tyranny that's ever existed, the phrase the knock on the door holds a special terror because, you know, it comes in the middle of the night and they take you away and nobody ever sees you again.
And the FBI has really done that to people, people who've just done nothing but protest abortion.
You know, they carry them away.
They raid them like they're, you know, terrorists.
Although these guys were polite, you know, they were always.
I had an Amazon.
They told me I had an Amazon delivery.
So I think I'm the first person in America to have an Amazon delivery announced to them by the FBI.
Now, I've been questioned by the police and they're always incredibly polite.
And there's something very cinnamon.
And I like the police, but still, when they're investigating you, it's not pleasant.
The book is Rights and Freedoms in Peril, an investigative report on the left's attack on America.
So can, you know, Trump made a speech yesterday where he was talking about purifying the FBI and the CIA, stopping them from bugging, you know, and spying on Americans, which the CIA is not supposed to do.
Do you think he can succeed at that?
I think he has to try.
And I hope he has people around him that will, rather than playing defense for the deep state, meaning his appointees that who often did that during his first term, that there's a kind of a team approach to policing these agencies.
I'm concerned right now, you know, during the last transition, the FBI used that process to spy on him.
Peter Strz sent an FBI agent to one of the briefings.
James Comey went after a meeting with Obama and Biden in the Oval Office, literally the next day, up to Trump to so-called brief him on the P-tape.
And it was all designed to entrap him.
So, you know, this issue hasn't gone away.
These people are still there.
And so he's walking still, you know, into the lion's den, even though he is going to be the president again.
Yeah, the big difference, though, is I really suspect this is true.
I certainly hope it's true, is he basically let the GOP, which hated him, staff his administration last time.
He spent most of his administration firing people who had been planted there by a Republican Party that despised him.
And I know Sebastian Gorka talks about this.
He was in there saying that he would go into meetings where they would be talking about national security and no one would care what the president wanted.
No one would be instituting his policy.
They'd be basically obstructing it.
And I think he's learned that because I've heard him say so.
And I think he's not going to let that happen again.
Yeah, I called it casual sedition.
It happened all, I saw it in person.
Yeah.
What did you call it?
I'm sorry, I didn't hear that.
Casual sedition Buyers appointees.
What do you think will happen with the January 6th people?
I mean, I think you call that the biggest lie in your book.
What do you think will happen with those people who were sentenced to like 20 years in prison for wandering by the Capitol at some hour of the day?
You know, we represent, in full disclosure, Ashley Babbitt, her fate, her family.
So we've got a wrongful death lawsuit there.
That's a perfect example.
She was a veteran, went into the Capitol, wandering around, ended up in the speaker's lobby, and it became a chaos up there.
And as far as I see, she tried to go to cover and flee, and a cop just popped out and shot her.
And zero investigation, as best we can tell.
They put him up in the general's quarters in the hotel at Joint Base Andrews for six months or so, kept his name out of the public.
Just think of every other police officer involved shooting of controversy.
We've all been educated what the process is.
None of that happened for Babbitt.
And in terms of the January 6th, it's clear they knew there was going to be a big crowd.
They didn't want the security.
They didn't want the National Guard because, in the thinking of the Democrats and the left, their Antifa people were going to show up and beat the heck out of the Trump people.
And they didn't want police to get in the way of that violence.
Instead, they had a crowd that overwhelmed them because of inaction and failures of security, training, and political will by Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.
He had personal responsibility there too.
And we're all told by the left, you know, we got to, we always have to treat these issues with nuance.
And January 6th, there were like six different variations of that disturbance.
On the Far East side, you had a little bit of violence directed at the police.
Then the barricades came down.
And essentially, it was just the police were allowing people to enter.
On the west side, you had that terrible violence, partly initiated by police action, a police riot, it's sometimes called, when they, through ill training, generate violence by their targeted rioters.
And then, of course, there are just people who are in the Capitol acting like citizens should be able to act in the Capitol, going around taking pictures.
But we have this massive investigation, prosecution, never before, laws never before applied in civil disturbances like this.
And if I were advising Trump, I'd tell him to pardon every single January 6th defendant.
Really?
There isn't an honest prosecution.
The whole prosecution was tainted by a political agenda.
So even, you know, when, and so I know there are many people who, quote, are guilty, even under, you know, a charitable interpretation of what went on.
But the prosecutions were tainted by politics and therefore they should be erased and negated through the pardon process.
Interesting.
That's really an interesting take because I mean, I certainly think you should pardon every single one who is, you know, not guilty, but that's interesting.
There's just the whole thing was a problem.
What about, you know, you write about the pandemic in the book.
And one of the things that drives me crazy, you know, after World War I, basically everybody who was involved in causing that disaster was thrown out of office.
They were all disappeared.
Winston Churchill in one of his books writes about going to a party before World War I and after with the leaders of Europe.
And there were two different sets of people, you know, because they'd been utterly replaced.
No one has paid a price for the pandemic, which I think was the worst leadership since World War I, the worst leadership error since World War I. What have your investigations revealed about what was going on there?
Well, there's always a reason for the corruption.
Sometimes it's just petty and obvious.
And there was corruption around the pandemic.
There was this panicked response modeled on the Chinese totalitarian checks on freedom in response to the pandemic.
And they threw out the rule books in responding to the pandemics and just came up with rules on the fly.
And the other is this kind of, you know, what was the money involved here?
And where was it directed?
And who was nervous about what it would expose?
And it was the whole Fauci gang.
And so they were suppressing information about their ties to China, about the support of gain of function research.
And to remind your viewers, gain of function research is taking a biological virus and making it more likely to infect and harm a human being.
You know, kind of an insane process to engage in scientifically.
I'm not convinced there's any really ever a good reason to do it.
But they were doing it with the Chinese six ways to Sunday.
And they knew they were doing it.
And we exposed that through the FOIA process.
And, you know, it was only more recently did we get these documents and it kind of struck me as it never occurred to me to suggest that they were making mutant viruses, right?
We keep on using that nomenclature, gain of function, which of course kind of alienates most sensible people because they have to wonder what is he talking about.
It never occurred to me, why don't we just call them mutant viruses?
Well, it occurred to them to call them mutant viruses because that's what they were said they were doing in China in 2016 with this EcoHealth Alliance grant, which was the vehicle to fund the Wuhan Institute.
And they were worried they were working on mutant viruses as far back as 2016.
That's their language, not mine.
So yes, Virginia, we were funding mutant virus research on coronaviruses in China.
And certainly there's a plausible reason to be concerned that either the technique itself, the gain of function technique, which is specific and scientific, or the actual research resulted in the COVID.
My theory about the Chinese, it was a happy accident.
Oh, it got out.
Well, let's see what happens.
I think that was the Chinese approach.
And I think the intelligence community, rather than kind of monitoring and trying to constrain the biological weapons researchers programs in China, they thought the best way to monitor it was to fund it, which is perfectly in line with everything I've learned about the way the deep state operates.
It's like they're happy to fund terrorists because, well, you know, at least we can find out what they're up to.
Oh, let's send the guns to the cartels and see how that works out.
It's standard operating procedure.
And so Fauci himself, you know, and they weren't supposed to be doing gain of function research.
Forgive me for going on, but to get back to your initial question, Fauci should be subject to criminal investigation over this.
Do you believe that?
You know, there was fraud involved in the spending of government money on research that was prohibited.
What did he know and when?
And it's not that, oh, throw Fauci in jail.
I kind of have a low standard, which is why I'm so outraged because they can't even meet that.
Can't we get a competent criminal inquiry into any of these issues?
We can't even get that from this crowd in DC.
That's got to change.
So what are you hoping to see specifically from a Trump administration that's going to help some of this stuff?
Consequences.
Consequently, really.
Yeah, I mean, someone has to, of a significant personage needs to be held accountable.
The agencies have to be defanged.
If this administration ends with the FBI and the Justice Department largely intact and able to basically with a new leader, new leadership in the White House, get back to doing what they've been specializing and ramping up doing, which is targeting citizens of the United States based on their politics, it's going to be the end of the republic.
I mean, the whole military, the whole DEI program, which we discussed in the book, when you look at what they're doing, our rising military leadership in the academies, Andrew, they're being told America's terrible, and they're trying to alienate our military from the country they're swearing to defend.
And so when I say, I don't like to use the word communist.
I've only started using it in the last two or three years.
But there's a rising communist influence in this country, and we've got to put a squelch on it because this isn't about tax policy.
This isn't about what APA regulations should be.
This is about whether or not we're going to have a constitutional republic or not, or whether we're going to be like Canada.
I say that jokingly because Canada, you know, but it's a transnational hatred for the American way, and they've got their agents of influence here in the United States.
And the communists don't need millions of people to succeed.
We saw that with the Bolsheviks.
All they need are loser politicians who know better, who egg them along, condone it, or when push comes to shove, step aside.
Tom Fitton, the president of the government watchdog group, Judicial Watch.
The book is called Rights and Freedoms in Peril, an investigative report on the left's attack on America.
It is worth reading because even though, like Trump, we've dodged a bullet, they're not going to go away.
And they're in there, they've infiltrated the government pretty deeply.
Tom, thanks so much for coming on.
Really interesting.
I hope we get to talk again.
Thank you, Andrew.
You got me all riled up there at the end.
You've got a country to save.
Well, you're doing good work.
I appreciate it.
Really interesting stuff.
Again, the book, Rights and Freedoms in Peril, an investigative report on the left's attack on America by Tom Fitton, Judicial Wash.
You know, frightening stuff and also kind of a relief to know that maybe for now we've dodged a bullet, but they're not going away.
And I think it is really important that the structural reform gets done.
Even more important is that on Friday you come to the Andrew Clavin show.