The impeachment inquiry now under way by the House Intelligence Committee has generated vast amounts of commentary from all angles, but perhaps no one is tweeting more frenetically than Tom Fitton, head of Judicial Watch.
Fitton has been tweeting nonstop about the impeachment inquiry, calling it a “coup” by the “deep state” against President Donald Trump. Among the many, many messages tweeted by Fitton this week was a self-retweet from October instructing readers, “Whenever you hear the word ‘impeachment,’ I want you to substitute another word – ‘coup’!”
But Fitton has also talked about the inquiry dismissively, labeling it the “Gossip Girl Impeachment” and telling readers that he’s listening in so they don’t have to bother. In one moment, Fitton is telling Sean Hannity that the investigation threatens our republic, in another he’s tweeting “Yawn” in response to testimony.
As Right Wing Watch noted last week, the GOP’s talking points sounded just like Judicial Watch’s. Fitton has also used his Twitter account with his more than 700,000 followers to amplify Republican talking points, asking during Thursday’s hearings, “Where is the whistleblower?”
Fitton has claimed Rep. Adam Schiff is “abusing his office,” and he has demeaned impeachment witnesses as “deep state bureaucrats” whose testimony is “silly” and “dishonest.”
Fitton is fond of putting himself in front of the camera to film short Twitter videos hollering at viewers about the unfairness of the investigation and promoting conspiracy theories about the Obama administration, the deep state, Joe Biden, and Ukraine.
Appearing on "The Sean Hannity Show" this week,Fitton declared that the purpose of the “coup” is “to protect those who were implicated in the criminal conduct against the president.” In this narrative, deep state actors opened the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election to protect themselves from Trump’s promised “swamp” draining.
Fitton made the same charge in a video he retweeted Friday, claiming the impeachment investigation was meant to divert attention from the Justice Department’s investigation of “Spygate,” the right’s term for the origins of the investigation of Russian intervention in the Trump campaign.
“This is why there’s a coup," Fitton said. "Because they’re worried, the Democrats in the House are, that their leadership will be subject to criminal investigation and prosecution.”
During his Hannity interview, Fitton suggested that Rep. Adam Schiff and the whistleblower at the heart of the current investigation face legal jeopardy because, he said, “laundering this classified information doesn’t make it legal just because you call it a whistleblower complaint.”
Fitton also told Hannity that whether Trump is ultimately impeached, “it damages the republic because what the new standard is, that if you’re a president who is elected, that if the opposite party runs the House, they can impeach you for jaywalking, or doing nothing inappropriate at all in the case of President Trump here.”
Judicial Watch has tried to shift the public focus to the alleged wrongdoings in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the right-wing theory that the deep state engaged in criminal conduct.
Fitton told Fox News contributor Sara Carter this week, “The left is the enemy of history, the enemy of facts, the enemy of truth.”
