Former
FBI Director James Comey Faces Indictment
Justice and accountability have
finally moved forward with the indictment of former FBI Director James
Comey on charges of making a false statement and obstruction of justice.
Comey (in conspiracy with Hillary and Obama, helped launch smear campaigns
and spy operations against the innocent Donald J. Trump) has been protected
for far too long by a corrupt U.S. Department of Justice and FBI. Comey’s
crimes are legion, but this indictment is one small step toward holding
accountable those who engaged in the worst political abuse in the history
of the country. More justice must come.
In August, we sued
the Justice Department for all records regarding the FBI, under
then-Director James Comey, initiating an investigation of then-2016
presidential candidate Donald Trump.
In July 2019, we uncovered FBI
records, showing that in June 2017, a month after Comey
was fired by President Donald Trump, FBI agents visited his home and
collected “as evidence” four memos that allegedly detail conversations
he had with President Trump.
In August 2018, a federal court ordered
the Justice Department to preserve federal records located in Comey’s
personal email accounts.
In May 2018, emails
we uncovered showed Comey was advised by FBI officials in May 2017 to
consult with Special Counsel Robert Mueller prior to testifying before any
congressional committees regarding Russian meddling in the 2016
presidential election and his firing as FBI director.
In February
2018, in response to our lawsuit,
the FBI agreed to review 16,750
pages of Comey’s records that were archived after he was
dismissed.
In January 2018, a lawsuit
we filed forced the FBI to turn over to the court for in camera,
non-public review former Comey’s memos allegedly detailing conversations
he had with President Donald Trump.
In November 2017, the Justice
Department compared
Comey to Wikileaks. After Comey was fired by President Trump on May 9,
2017, he gave The New York Times a February 14, 2017, memorandum
written about a one-on-one conversation he had with President Trump
regarding former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
In June
2016, we sent Acting FBI Director Andrew G. McCabe a
warning letter concerning the FBI’s legal responsibility under the
Federal Records Act (FRA) to recover records, including memos Comey
subsequently leaked to the media, unlawfully removed from the Bureau by
Comey.
Getting Answers on Biden Administration’s
Denial of Military Funeral for Ashli Babbitt
We recently announced
that the U.S. Air Force will finally provide full military funeral honors
to Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was unlawfully ambushed, shot
and killed inside the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Ashli was the only
official January 6 homicide victim that day.
Now, we have begun court
action to get to the bottom of the Biden administration’s despicable
denial of a military funeral for her (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Defense
(No. 1:25-cv-03249)).
We filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuit after the Air Force failed to comply with a May 15, 2024, request
for:
All records concerning the request for military
funeral honors for the funeral of SrA Ashli McEntee (Babbitt), the denial
of that request by Lieutenant General Brian T. Kelly, USAF, and the
circumstances reported to the Department of the Air Force concerning SrA
Ashli McEntee’s (Babbitt) death, including but not limited to
correspondence via emails, texts, and
letters; phone calls; memoranda; notes; reports; audio recordings;
voicemails; videos; entries in books or logs; directives; policies and
procedures; guidance documents; and legal opinions.
On
February 9, 2021, Lt. Gen. Kelly, who at the time was the Air Force’s
Deputy Chief of Staff for Manpower, Personnel and Services (A1), signed a letter addressed to Aaron Babbitt denying military
funeral honors for his wife, SrA Ashli McEntee (Babbitt), USAF.
On
July 23, 2025, Judicial Watch Senior Counsel Robert Sticht wrote a
letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asking him to reverse the
Biden administration’s “grave national injustice” of denying Babbitt
and her family military funeral honors:
I am writing to
urge you to make a new determination granting military funeral honors for
SrA Ashli Elizabeth Pamatian, aka Ashli Elizabeth McEntee, and Ashli
Elizabeth Babbitt, a War on Terror veteran of the U.S. Air Force and Air
National Guard.
***
I
respectfully encourage the
Department of Defense to favorably consider two major recent developments
and also Ashli’s lengthy and meritorious military
service.
First, on January 20, 2025,
President Trump granted clemency for certain offenses relating to the
events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. The
Presidential proclamation states, “This proclamation ends a grave
national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over
the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”
President Trump (a) commuted the sentences of certain individuals convicted
of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the U.S. Capitol on
January 6, 2021; (b) granted a full, complete and unconditional pardon to
all other individuals convicted of [similar]
offenses….
Second … on July 2, 2025, the
United States of America paid a damage award of nearly five million
dollars to settle a wrongful death lawsuit that Judicial Watch and I
brought forward on behalf of the Estate of Ashli Babbitt and her husband
Aaron Babbitt to ensure justice and accountability for the fatal shooting
of Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021. Once again, Gen. Kelly’s denial of
military funeral honors for Ashli’s funeral cannot be reconciled with
this landmark legal settlement. Many well-documented facts now clearly show
that the fatal shooting was not justified.
The decision
to finally extend military funeral honors was confirmed in a
letter on August 15, 2025, written by Under Secretary of the Air Force
Matthew L. Lohmeier to Aaron Babbitt and Ashli Babbitt’s mother, Michelle
Witthoeft:
On behalf of the Secretary of the Air Force, I
write to extend the offer for Military Funeral Honors for SrA Ashli
Babbitt. I understand that the family’s initial request was denied by Air
Force leadership in a letter dated February 9, 2021. However, after
reviewing the circumstances of Ashli’s death, and considering the
information that has come forward since then, I am persuaded that the
previous determination was incorrect.
For four years,
the Biden administration stuck with the false narrative that Ashli Babbitt,
who served her country honorably, was a violent insurrectionist. Your
Judicial Watch has fought for Ashli and her family, and won on several
fronts.
Now we are suing for a full account of the Biden Pentagon’s denial of a
military funeral for Ashli.
We obtained
a $4.975
million settlement in the wrongful death lawsuit
against the U.S. Government on behalf of Babbitt’s family (Estate
of Ashli Babbitt and Aaron Babbitt, et al. v. United States of
America (No. 1:24-cv-01701 (formerly 3:24-cv-00033))).
We
have been pursuing several lawsuits to secure transparency regarding
Babbitt’s killing and other government activities on January 6.
In
January 2023, documents
from the Department of the Air Force, Joint Base Andrews, MD, showed Byrd
was housed at taxpayer expense at Joint Base Andrews after he shot and
killed Babbitt inside the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
In
November 2021, we released
multiple audio, visual
and photo
records from the DC Metropolitan Police Department about the shooting
death of Babbitt in the U.S. Capitol Building. The records included a cell
phone video of the shooting and an audio of a brief police interview of
the shooter, Byrd.
In October 2021, your Judicial Watch uncovered records from
the DC Metropolitan Police about the shooting death of Babbitt. The new
records included the January 6, 2021, Metro
PD Death Report for Babbitt (identified as Ashli Elizabeth
McEntee-Babbitt Pamatian). The investigators noted that the possible Manner
of Death was “Homicide [Police Involved Shooting].”
Judicial Watch and Allied
Educational Foundation Clarify
Supreme Court Arguments for Elimination of Race-Based Congressional
Districts
We, along with Allied Educational Foundation
(AEF), filed an amici curiae (friends of the court) brief to
the Supreme Court of the United States, asking the court to eliminate woke,
race-based congressional districting and ban the use racial preferences in
drawing up “majority-minority” congressional districts. It is past time
the court took this important step to return the U.S. Constitution and
federal law to its previous color-blind principles.
The filing comes
in the case Louisiana v. Phillip Callais et al. (No.
24-109), which is up on appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Western
District of Louisiana. The lower court ruled 2-1 against Louisiana after it
adopted a racially drawn congressional map for future elections.
In
January 2025, your Judicial Watch and AEF filed an initial amicus
brief in this case, asking the court to affirm a lower court ruling that
Louisiana violated the constitution when it crowded minority voters into
congressional districts.
Rather than ruling on the appeal last term,
the Supreme Court postponed ruling and ordered the case be reargued in
October 2025. Your Judicial Watch and AEF submitted today’s supplemental
brief in response to the court’s August 1, 2025, order directing the parties and amici to
address “whether the state’s intentional creation of a second
majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th [equal protection] or 15th [the right of citizens to vote] Amendments to the U.S.
Constitution.”
In our brief we argue that there is a conflict between the
Voting Rights Act and prior court precedent, and that “dividing of
citizens by race … is now doing more harm than
good:”
The longstanding conflict between this Court’s
interpretation of § 2 of the VRA [Voting Rights Act] and its Equal
Protection Clause jurisprudence has run its course.…The former mandates
racial districting while the latter prohibits intentional racial
classifications. For almost 30 years, courts and states have struggled to
balance the conflicting mandates under [Supreme Court precedent]
Gingles and the Equal Protection Clause. The dividing of citizens
by race, as required by Gingles, is now doing more harm than
good.
We argue that the proposed drawing of racial
districts violates the 14th and
15th Amendments, that states “lack any interest, much
less a compelling one, to create racial gerrymanders, even if done in a
good faith effort,” and that Louisiana “impermissibly used race to
create a second majority-minority district.”
In our
amici brief, we recount:
This Court has compared
race-based districting to segregation of “public parks, … buses, …
and schools,” and warned that we “should not be carving electorates
into racial blocs.” … That is because “[c]lassifications of citizens
solely on the basis of race ‘are by their very nature odious to a free
people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.’”
… Racial gerrymandering, like all “[r]acial classifications of any
sort” cause “lasting harm to our society” because “[t]hey reinforce
the belief, held by too many for too much of our history, that individuals
should be judged by the color of their skin.”
…
There should be no question that
race-based division of citizens for purposes of compliance with § 2 and
Gingles is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, the
“central purpose” of which “is to prevent the States from
purposefully discriminating between individuals on the basis of race.”…
The same may be said of the Voting Rights Act.
AEF is a
charitable and educational foundation dedicated to improving the quality of
life through education. In furtherance of that goal, the Foundation has
engaged in a number of projects, which include, but are not limited to,
educational and health conferences domestically and abroad. AEF has
partnered frequently with your Judicial Watch to fight government and
judicial corruption and to promote a return to ethics and morality in the
nation’s public life.
As you know, we are a national leader in
voting integrity and voting rights. As part of our work, we assembled a
team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped
discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in
California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other
achievements.
In August, we filed a brief to the Supreme Court that opposes the
State of Mississippi’s attempt to
overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision,
which struck down a law allowing ballots received after Election Day to be
counted.
Federal courts for Oregon,
California
and Illinois have ruled that our lawsuits may proceed against those
states to force them to clean their voter rolls.
Your Judicial Watch
announced
in May that its work led to the removal of more than five million
ineligible names from voter rolls
nationwide.
Supreme Court Battle Continues in
Historic Illinois Election Integrity Case
The fight for an
Election Day as established in federal law has many fronts, one important
one is in Illinois. We filed a reply
brief to the Supreme Court of the United States in a case on
behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors, who are
before the court to vindicate their standing to challenge an Illinois law
extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal
law (Rep.Michael
J. Bost, Laura Pollastrini, and Susan Sweeney v. The Illinois State Board
of Elections and Bernadette Matthews (No.
1:22-cv-02754, 23-2644, 24-568)).
The Supreme Court has scheduled
oral argument for October 8, 2025. This is an appeal of the decision of
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, finding that Bost and
the electors lacked standing to challenge Illinois’ practice of counting
ballots received up to 14 days after Election Day. The Election Day lawsuit
was initially filed
on May 25, 2022.
Our new Supreme
Court brief states:
Illinois counts
mail-in ballots received up to two weeks after Election Day. Petitioners,
candidates for federal office, claim that under controlling federal law
that is two weeks too long. As a result, Illinois is counting unlawful
ballots and producing inaccurate vote tallies, while simultaneously hurting
petitioners’ prospects at the ballot box and injuring their pocketbooks.
Everyone from the United States to the ACLU and the ACLJ agrees that
petitioners have standing. Illinois disputes that remarkable consensus only
by ignoring common sense (and the dangers produced by the Seventh
Circuit’s rule) and by imagining non-existent waivers that did not deter
the Seventh Circuit from denying standing because Congressman Bost’s
electoral prospects were too bright and his pocketbook injuries too
speculative.
We submit that the Seventh Circuit’s
decision “is wrong and dangerous:”
It is wrong
because candidates have
standing to challenge the rules that govern their elections, especially
when their merits theory (which must be credited for standing purposes) is
that the challenged rule produces an inaccurate final tally. At a minimum,
the candidate has standing when (as here) he plausibly alleges that the
challenged rule will harm his electoral prospects and reduce his bank
balance because he needs to pay campaign staff an extra two weeks. And the
decision is dangerous because it forces judges to play political
prognosticators, skews standing rules to favor certain kinds of candidates,
and funnels election disputes to the worst possible context—namely, after
the election where judges are asked to declare political winners. This
Court should reverse.
We assert that Congressman Bost
has standing to challenge the Illinois law:
At the very
least, Congressman Bost has standing to challenge the Illinois
ballot-receipt
deadline here, as a host of diverse amici confirm. Congressman
Bost plausibly alleged a substantial risk that counting mail-in ballots
received after Election Day will harm his electoral prospects both by
risking electoral defeat and reducing his margin of victory. The
plausibility of those allegations was amply reinforced by the Illinois
Democratic Party’s attempted intervention and voting and litigation
patterns nationwide. And he has also plausibly alleged a classic pocketbook
injury because he expended additional campaign funds as a direct result of
the state’s extended deadline for receiving mail-in ballots. Here too,
the notion that an election artificially extended a fortnight costs more
than one that ends on Election Day hardly strains credulity. The state’s
contrary arguments lack merit.
In our previous Supreme
Court brief,
we stated:
Federal law sets the first Tuesday after the
first Monday in November as the federal Election Day.
***
Candidates have an obvious interest in
the lawfulness and fairness of the rules that govern the elections into
which they pour their time and resources. They also have an obvious
interest “in ensuring that the final vote tally accurately reflects the
legally valid votes cast.”
***
Candidates pour enormous resources
into running for election and have an obvious interest in the rules that
dictate how long their races will last and how the ballots will be counted.
They also have a distinct interest “in ensuring that the final vote tally
accurately reflects the legally valid votes
cast.”
Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting
integrity and voting rights. As part of its work, Judicial Watch assembled
a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped
discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in
California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other
achievements.
Judicial Watch in August 2025 filed a
brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Libertarian Party of
Mississippi, opposing the State of Mississippi’s attempt
to overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision,
which struck down a law allowing ballots received after Election Day to be
counted.
Federal courts for Oregon,
California
and Illinois have ruled that Judicial Watch’s lawsuits may proceed
against those states to force them to clean their voter
rolls.
Judicial Watch announced
in May that its work led to the removal of more than five million
ineligible names from voter rolls nationwide.
Until next
week…
