Under a logo proclaiming “Because No One is Above the Law!” a Judicial Watch email sent Wednesday evening promoted an interview in which the group’s president Tom Fitton complained about multiple legal investigations into potential criminal behavior by former President Donald Trump.
Fitton appeared on the American Family Radio show hosted by Jenna Ellis, a former Trump attorney who admitted in a Colorado disciplinary proceeding this month that she had made repeated “misrepresentations” about having evidence to prove that Trump won the 2020 election.
During her interview with Fitton, Ellis decried what she called the “insane persecution” of Trump, describing current investigations as “wholly political” prosecutions intended to drain Trump’s campaign warchest. Fitton agreed, denouncing the grand jury investigation in Georgia a “scam”—a particularly unconvincing claim to make as new evidence has emerged about the extent to which Trump pressured Georgia officials to “find” votes for him or otherwise act to overturn his 2020 loss in that state. Fitton has charged that Democrats want to make Trump a “political prisoner.”
Ellis gave out the phone number for the New York Governor’s office—getting it from a Fitton tweet—urging Trump supporters to demand that the governor take action against the Manhattan District Attorney investigating Trump for potential campaign finance law violations surrounding hush money paid to keep stripper Stormy Daniels quiet before the 2016 election.
In the disciplinary proceeding against her, Ellis admitted that her false comments made after the 2020 election were “reckless” and “undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election, violating her duty of candor to the public.” Among her statements she admitted were false was a claim she made on Fox host Jeannine Pirro’s show claiming that Trump’s legal team had found more than 500,000 votes “that were cast illegally” in Arizona.
Ellis accepted censure and agreed that she violated regulations that say it is “professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.”
Judicial Watch, a massively funded group founded by right-wing activist Larry Klayman, has its own record of spreading false information—and a close relationship with Trump.
Before the 2020 election, Fitton addressed the Council for National Policy, urging members of the secretive right-wing network to find a way to stop mail-in ballots from being sent to voters. It tried to force Pennsylvania to purge hundreds of thousands of “inactive” voters from the rolls. Then, just before the election, Fitton prepared a statement for Trump to declare victory on Election Day before all the ballots were counted. More recently, Fitton, who is not a lawyer, urged Trump to resist returning documents to the National Archives.
Fitton also appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this week, where he dismissed the investigations, saying “Democratic politicians are trying to jail Trump” and claimed that Trump’s civil rights are being violated by the investigations. Trump, he asserted, is being targeted for “who he is,” not what he has done, an assertion that appeared to be unconvincing to many of the C-SPAN callers.
In February, Fitton was reportedly called to testify before the criminal grand jury by special counsel Jack Smith, who is looking into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and his handling of classified documents.
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