Standing behind former Infowars Washington bureau chief Jerome Corsi at the middle of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into suspected Russian election meddling is attorney Larry Klayman.
Klayman describes himself to be a “modern-day Batman,” or on one occasion the “Hamburger Helper.” But the Southern Poverty Law Center lists Klayman as an extremist aligned with the antigovernment movement.
During the Reagan administration, Klayman got his start as a prosecutor at the Department of Justice, which he left to join a private law firm where he sought to influence government officials and judges with threats of legal action. SPLC describes his legal career filing tedious lawsuits to have “irritated many and produced few results.” In the late 90s, Klayman sued his own mother for funds that he had spent on private healthcare for her mother, his grandmother.
In 1994, Klayman opened up the right-wing law shop Judicial Watch, which is currently under the direction of Tom Fitton but continues to provide conspiracy theory fodder to right-wing media. There, Klayman gained notoriety for filing lawsuit after lawsuit against Bill Clinton and Clinton associates. After he left Judicial Watch for a failed U.S. Senate run from Florida, bad blood between him and his successors at the group led him to sue Judicial Watch for defamation and win—one of his rare wins in court. Klayman went on to found the group Freedom Watch, which is based on the original model for Judicial Watch—a pro-bono legal organization devoted to bringing nuisance suits against political enemies.
RWW’s Kyle Mantyla reported earlier today that Klayman had likened Corsi to both Jesus Christ and America’s Founding Fathers. Klayman’s praise is less surprising when considering his active role in the fever-swamps of right-wing conspiracy theorists and his history of promoting and defending absurd claims with litigation.
His latest stint at Freedom Watch includes running campaigns urging Trump to remove Mueller—whom he calls a “legal terrorist”—as special counsel and appoint Klayman himself to Mueller’s position so that he can pursue legal action against the Clintons. Speaking on the podcast, “Crowdsource the Truth,” Klayman told host Jason Goodman— who has featured content supportive of the “Pizzagate” hoax—that he believed the Clintons ordered people to be killed.
Throughout the years we’ve been keeping up with Klayman at Right Wing Watch, Klayman has claimed that the “Jewish left” will destroy America, accused Barack Obama of organizing a coup, asserted that Hillary Clinton would carry out a modern-day Holocaust if she was elected president, and demanded that Trump critics be taken to “legal guillotines.”
Klayman once announced he was suing Obama for supposedly endangering his life as a white man by existing. During the Obama years Klayman paired baseless allegations with legal motions to advance his narrative that Obama was a communist dictator working to rip apart the country, a despot, Klayman said, who even cooked up a secret Ebola-ISIS plot to kill Americans. (Yes, really.) Like Corsi, Klayman was a key figure in the birther movement that coalesced around efforts to prove that Obama’s birth certificate was a fake and that he was ineligible for the presidency.
Klayman is also a weekly contributor to WorldNetDaily.
In addition to taking on the role of Corsi’s defense attorney, Klayman has filed a class action legal complaint with far-right activist Laura Loomer against social media tech giants, alleging that the companies are “acting as a monopoly to restrain trade and discriminate against conservatives.” He’s also representing “Sheriff Joe” Arpaio, a failed Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona, in a lawsuit against The New York Times seeking $147.5 million in damages for “widespread ridicule and humiliation” Arpaio faced after the paper published factual information about his tenure as sheriff of Maricopa County.
