Tom Fitton | |
---|---|
Born | West Nyack, New York, U.S. |
Education | George Washington University (BA) |
Occupation | Activist |
Title | President of Judicial Watch |
Movement | American conservatism |
Thomas J. Fitton is an American conservative activist and the president of Judicial Watch.
Fitton is a long-term senior member of the Council for National Policy, a right wing umbrella organization for groups such as Judicial Watch. [1] Fitton is the current President of the Council for National Policy, taking up the role in February 2022. [2]
Fitton is known for pro-Trump commentary. [3] Fitton is prominent for criticizing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election; he has said that the investigation was a "coup" against U.S. President Donald Trump and called for it to be shut down. [4] [5] In 2022, researchers found that Fitton was the third-most prolific purveyor of election misinformation on Twitter during the late months of 2020. [6]
Fitton rejects the scientific consensus on climate change; under his tenure, Judicial Watch has filed lawsuits against climate scientists. [7] [8]
Fitton was born in West Nyack, New York, in 1968. [9] He graduated from Clarkstown High School South in 1986. [10] Fitton has a bachelor's degree in English from George Washington University. [11] His father was a manager at a supermarket and his mother was a nurse. [12]
Fitton, though not a lawyer, has been the president of Judicial Watch since August 1998. The group primarily seeks access to government records by filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public records act lawsuits and engaging in other forms of civil litigation.
In 2006, Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch's former chairman, attempted to reclaim control of Judicial Watch by suing Fitton, the organization, and its other officers and directors. Most of Klayman's claims, including all of the claims against Fitton and Judicial Watch's other officers and directors, were dismissed in 2009. [13]
On October 2, 2020, it was announced that Trump intended to appoint Fitton to the D.C. Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure. [14] He was officially appointed on November 10, 2020, and his term ends on July 29, 2025. [15]
In July 2013, Fitton falsely claimed that the Obama administration's Department of Justice had sent representatives to Sanford, Florida, following Trayvon Martin's death "to help organize and manage rallies and protests against George Zimmerman." [5]
Fitton rejects the scientific consensus on climate change (global warming). [7] He said, "There has been scandal after scandal involving climate data and we are skeptical of government agencies that won't tell people what they are up to.... I’m sure scientists are concerned that funding for dubious research will be cut, but the truth will win out in the end." [7] Judicial Watch, which has claimed that climate science is "fraud science," has filed lawsuits seeking to force the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to release the correspondence of climate scientists who published a 2015 study in the journal Science . [8] [16] The study had debunked one of the common claims made by climate change deniers: that there had been global warming "hiatus" from 1998 to 2012. [8] The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF), American Meteorological Society, and Union of Concerned Scientists condemned Judicial Watch by saying that the disclosure of private communications between scientists "would harm (or halt altogether) government scientists' ability to collaborate with colleagues, damage the government's ability to recruit or retain top scientists, and deter critically important research into politically charged fields like climate change." [8] The Judicial Watch lawsuit was inspired by US Representative Lamar Smith, who accused the authors of the study of "alter[ing] data" to "get the politically correct results they want." [8]
Judicial Watch has advertised for years on Breitbart News, the far-right website formerly run by Steve Bannon. [17] The site was defended by Fitton against calls for advertisers to drop them for advertising. Fitton stated, "Liberal activists want to destroy Breitbart, but we won't be cowed." [17]
Fitton said about voter fraud: "We have all heard about voter fraud and the attempts by liberal media organs like the New York Times and Ivory Tower academics to dismiss it as a nonexistent problem. But it is real, widespread, and substantial to the point that it can decide elections." [18] Fitton has alleged that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants voted in the 2018 midterm elections. [19] There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in California or Texas. [19] [20] [21]
On February 3, 2020, the day of the Iowa caucuses in the Democratic presidential primary, Fitton suggested that voter fraud was afoot in Iowa by falsely claiming that "eight Iowa counties have more voter registrations than citizens old enough to register." Iowa's Secretary of State, Paul Pate, a member of the Republican Party, debunked Fitton's claim by linking to official voter registration data. [22] [23]
In a video recording released in October 2020, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Fitton called on fellow conservative activists at a conference to come up with ways to prevent mail-in-ballots from being distributed to voters. [24]
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2021, Fitton falsely claimed that on the day of the 2020 United States presidential election, "President Trump had the votes to win the presidency. These vote totals were changed because of unprecedented and extraordinary counting after election day". [25]
Fitton has been identified as unindicted co-conspirator #1 in the Georgia state indictment of Donald Trump and 18 other defendants for their attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. [26] [27] [28] He is described in the indictment as having written a speech for Trump prior to the election in which Trump would falsely attribute his loss to voter fraud. [28]
In 2017, Judicial Watch helped to stoke Republican attacks against Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. [29] [4] He has referred to the Mueller probe as a "coup" against Trump. [30] [31] Trump retweeted Fitton's remarks about a coup; PolitiFact rated the assertion that the Mueller probe was a coup as "pants-on-fire" false. [30] Trump frequently listens to Fitton and had mentioned Fitton at least five times in his tweets by August 2018, including a promotion of an upcoming Fitton appearance on Fox. [4] According to Politico, "Fitton's rhetoric is often indistinguishable from Trump's." [4] Fitton called for the Special Counsel investigation to be shut down and argued that prosecutors in the probe were too biased against Trump to conduct a credible investigation. [32] Fitton furthermore called for shutting down the Federal Bureau of Investigation "because it was turned into a KGB-type operation by the Obama administration." [33] [34] Newsweek rated the claim "false", stating that "there is no comparison between the FBI and KGB." [35]
When Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney, pleaded guilty to crimes brought to light by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe in December 2018, Fitton dismissed the importance of the crimes. Fitton said it was "weak tea" and intended "to make President Trump look bad." [36]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Fitton called on Trump to "reopen" the United States amid social distancing and lockdowns to prevent spread of the virus. [37] Fitton criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House's leading epidemiology expert, and amplified right-wing conspiracy theories about Fauci. [38] [39] [40]
At an August 2020 meeting of the Council for National Policy, Fitton claimed that people on the American left are planning to delay the 2020 election tally until January 20, 2021, to allow House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to become acting president. [41] He later added that "it could cause civil war". [41]
Upon leaving office in January 2021, Trump took numerous boxes of government documents to his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. Some of the documents were classified top secret. Trump declined requests from the National Archives and the Justice Department (DOJ) to return the documents, leading the DOJ to subpoena them. Trump attorney Chris Kise advised Trump to quietly negotiate a settlement to return the documents to avoid being indicted. Trump instead took the advice of Fitton, who told the former president he was legally entitled to keep the documents. Fitton and Trump cited the so-called "Clinton socks case" in which Judicial Watch sued the Archives in 2012 to gain access to audio recordings former president Bill Clinton had made with an historian during his presidency, arguing they were presidential records subject to the Presidential Records Act (PRA); federal judge Amy Berman Jackson dismissed the suit, finding the recordings were not subject to the PRA. The FBI enforced the DOJ subpoena by retrieving the documents from Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. Despite incorrectly insisting the PRA allowed him to keep the documents, in June 2023 Trump was federally indicted on multiple counts of mishandling government documents, including violations of the Espionage Act. [42] [43] [44]
Fitton received the American Conservative Union's 'Defender of the Constitution Award' during its annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2015. [45]
Bernard Bailey Kerik is an American consultant and former police officer who was the 40th Commissioner of the New York Police Department from 2000 to 2001. As a convicted felon, he obtained a presidential pardon from President Donald Trump in 2020 for his numerous federal convictions for tax fraud, ethics violations, and criminal false statements.
Judicial Watch (JW) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit American conservative activist group that files Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits to investigate claimed misconduct by government officials. Founded in 1994, JW has primarily targeted Democrats, in particular the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton's role in them. It was founded by attorney Larry Klayman, and has been led by Tom Fitton since 2003.
American Thinker is a daily online magazine dealing with American politics from a politically conservative viewpoint. It was founded in 2003 by attorney Ed Lasky, health-care consultant Richard Baehr, and sociologist Thomas Lifson, and initially became prominent in the lead-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election for its attacks on then-candidate Barack Obama. The magazine has been described as a conservative blog. The Southern Poverty Law Center has called the site "a not so thoughtful far-right online publication".
Larry Elliot Klayman is an American attorney, right-wing activist, and former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor. He founded both Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch.
True the Vote (TTV) is a conservative vote-monitoring organization based in Houston, Texas, whose stated objective is stopping voter fraud. The organization supports voter ID laws and trains volunteers to be election monitors and to spot and bring attention to suspicious voter registrations that its volunteers believe delegitimize voter eligibility. The organization's founder is Catherine Engelbrecht.
Jack Burkman is an American conspiracy theorist, fraudster, convicted felon and conservative lobbyist. Burkman and far-right conspiracy theorist Jacob Wohl have allegedly been responsible for multiple unsuccessful plots to frame public figures for fictitious sexual assaults, including in October 2018 against U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in April 2019 against 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, and in April 2020 against White House Coronavirus Task Force member Anthony Fauci.
Voter impersonation, also sometimes called in-person voter fraud, is a form of electoral fraud in which a person who is eligible to vote in an election votes more than once, or a person who is not eligible to vote does so by voting under the name of an eligible voter. In the United States, voter ID laws have been enacted in a number of states by Republican legislatures and governors since 2010 with the purported aim of preventing voter impersonation. Existing research and evidence shows that voter impersonation is extremely rare. Between 2000 and 2014, there were only 31 documented instances of voter impersonation. There is no evidence that it has changed the result of any election. In April 2020, a voter fraud study covering 20 years by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found the level of mail-in ballot fraud "exceedingly rare" since it occurs only in "0.00006 percent" of individual votes nationally, and, in one state, "0.000004 percent — about five times less likely than getting hit by lightning in the United States."
The Russian government interfered in the 2016 United States elections with the goals of sabotaging the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to the U.S. intelligence community, the operation—code named Project Lakhta—was ordered directly by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The "hacking and disinformation campaign" to damage Clinton and help Trump became the "core of the scandal known as Russiagate". The 448-page Mueller Report, made public in April 2019, examined over 200 contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.
The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.
The Robert Mueller special counsel investigation was an investigation into 45th U.S. president Donald Trump regarding Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and was conducted by special prosecutor Robert Mueller from May 2017 to March 2019. It was also called the Russia investigation, Mueller probe, and Mueller investigation. The investigation focused on three points:
Michael Roman is an American political operative and opposition researcher. Roman was a staffer for President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018. He subsequently worked for the Trump 2020 campaign as director of election day operations. Prior to working for Trump, Roman ran an in-house intelligence unit for the Koch brothers.
During and after his term as President of the United States, Donald Trump made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims. The Washington Post's fact-checkers documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidential term, an average of about 21 per day. The Toronto Star tallied 5,276 false claims from January 2017 to June 2019, an average of 6.1 per day. Commentators and fact-checkers have described the scale of Trump's mendacity as "unprecedented" in American politics, and the consistency of falsehoods a distinctive part of his business and political identities. Scholarly analysis of Trump's tweets found "significant evidence" of an intent to deceive.
Jacob Alexander Wohl is an American far-right conspiracy theorist, fraudster, and convicted felon. Wohl and lobbyist Jack Burkman have been responsible for multiple unsuccessful plots to frame public figures for fictitious sexual assaults. The pair were allegedly behind plots in October 2018 against U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in April 2019 against 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, and in April 2020 against White House Coronavirus Task Force member Anthony Fauci.
The Special Counsel investigation was a United States law enforcement and counterintelligence investigation of the Russian government's efforts to interfere in United States politics and any possible involvement by members of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. It was primarily focused on the 2016 presidential election.
The Russia investigation origins counter-narrative, or Russia counter-narrative, is a conspiracy theory narrative embraced by Donald Trump, Republican Party leaders, and right-wing conservatives attacking the legitimacy and conclusions of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and the links between Russian intelligence and Trump associates. The counter-narrative includes conspiracy theories such as Spygate, accusations of a secretive, all-powerful elite "deep state" network, and other false and debunked claims. Trump in particular has attacked not only the origins but the conclusions of the investigation, and ordered a review of the Mueller report, which was conducted by attorney general William Barr – alleging there was a "deep state plot" to undermine him. He has claimed the investigations were an "illegal hoax", and that the "real collusion" was between Hillary Clinton, Democrats, and Russia – and later, Ukraine.
After Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election, Republican nominee and then-incumbent president Donald Trump pursued an unprecedented effort to overturn the election, with support and assistance from his campaign, proxies, political allies, and many of his supporters. These efforts culminated in the January 6 United States Capitol attack by Trump supporters, which was widely described as an attempted coup d'état. One week later, Trump was impeached for incitement of insurrection but was acquitted by the Senate by a vote of 57–43, 10 votes short of the 67 votes required to convict him.
2000 Mules is a 2022 American conspiracist political film from right-wing political commentator Dinesh D'Souza. The film falsely claims unnamed nonprofit organizations supposedly associated with the Democratic Party paid "mules" to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election. D'Souza has a history of creating and spreading false conspiracy theories.
After the results of the 2020 United States presidential election determined U.S. president Donald Trump had lost, a scheme was devised by him, his associates and Republican Party officials in seven states to subvert the election by creating and submitting fraudulent certificates of ascertainment to falsely claim Trump had won the electoral college vote in those states. The intent of the scheme was to pass the fraudulent certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This scheme was defended by a fringe legal theory developed by Trump attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, detailed in the Eastman memos, which claimed a vice president has the constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. The scheme came to be known as the Pence Card. By April 2024, dozens of Republican state officials and Trump associates had been indicted in four states for their alleged involvement. The federal Smith special counsel investigation is investigating Trump's role in the events. Testimony has revealed that Trump was fully aware of the fake electors scheme, and knew that Eastman's plan for Pence to obstruct the certification of electoral votes was a violation of the Electoral Count Act.
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