34 Facts About Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch is an American conservative activist group that files Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to investigate claimed misconduct by government officials.

Judicial Watch was founded in 1994 by attorney and right-wing activist Larry Klayman.

Judicial Watch calls itself a nonpartisan educational foundation as well as a media organization.

Judicial Watch came to public attention after filing eighteen lawsuits against the administration of Democratic US President Bill Clinton and other figures in the Clinton administration.

Judicial Watch filed over twenty FOIA lawsuits involving the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails.

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In 2020 Judicial Watch pursued emails related to the Steele Dossier, obtaining copies through a FOIA lawsuit.

In 1995, Judicial Watch, Inc filed an action in the District Court under the FOIA, seeking information from the Department of Commerce regarding DOC's selection of participants for foreign trade missions.

Disputes arose between the parties over the adequacy of DOC's search, and Judicial Watch charged that some DOC officials had destroyed or removed responsive documents.

Judicial Watch helped promote the conspiracy theory that Vince Foster was murdered by the Clintons, and still has yet to provide convincing proof.

August 10,2009 Judicial Watch sent a FOIA request to the US Secret Service asking that official White House visitor logs be made public.

In 2010, Judicial Watch made inaccurate claims about air travel spending by Nancy Pelosi's congressional delegation; Judicial Watch's claims were picked up by the conservative conspiracy site WorldNetDaily.

Judicial Watch made false claims about Pelosi's air travel in 2008.

On May 2,2011, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request with the Department of Defense and the CIA for photographs and videos of bin Laden taken during or after the operation.

In 2012, Judicial Watch sued the National Archives and Records Administration in an attempt to force NARA to declare audio tapes held at the William J Clinton Presidential Library and Museum of Bill Clinton to be presidential records, seize them, and release them to Judicial Watch.

Judicial Watch filed a FOIA lawsuit against the National Archives and Records Administration to obtain the records from Robert F Kennedy's time as the Attorney General.

Judicial Watch has currently filed twenty FOIA lawsuits involving the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails.

FOIA lawsuit by Judicial Watch led to the release of 2,800 e-mails from Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were found on the laptop computer of Anthony Weiner, Abedin's estranged husband.

In 2014 and 2015, Judicial Watch falsely claimed that ISIS had set up camp in Mexico; Judicial Watch's claims were picked up by several right-wing news outlets.

In 2013, Judicial Watch collaborated with Steve Bannon, executive chairman of the alt-right website Breitbart News, on the film "District of Corruption", which critiqued the Obama administration.

Judicial Watch paid Bannon's group Victory Film Project $382,143 for the film.

In 2017, Judicial Watch requested documents related to the death of DNC staffer Seth Rich; Seth Rich's death led to debunked rightwing conspiracy theories alleging that Hillary Clinton or the Democratic Party had him killed.

Judicial Watch counted "inactive voters" in its tally, which is a list of people that California maintains of people who have been removed from active rolls after a mail ballot, voter guide or other official document was returned as undeliverable; California keeps such a list as a fail-safe in case eligible voters have been erroneously categorized as "inactive".

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said Judicial Watch's claims were "baseless", and "bad math and dubious methodology".

In 2017, Judicial Watch claimed that taxpayer money went into a billboard which depicted President Donald Trump as a Nazi.

Judicial Watch, which has claimed that climate science is "fraud science", has filed lawsuits seeking to force the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to release the correspondence of climate scientists who published a 2015 study in the journal Science.

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The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, American Meteorological Society and Union of Concerned Scientists condemned Judicial Watch, saying that the disclosure of private communications between scientists "would harm 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".

In 2017, Judicial Watch helped to stoke Republican attacks against Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In October 2018, Chris Farrell of Judicial Watch stirred controversy when he appeared on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business show and used what many described as an anti-Semitic trope to suggest that the State Department was "Soros-occupied" territory.

Judicial Watch had been engaged in what NPR described as a "full-throated campaign against Soros".

The Judicial Watch claim was amplified by several conservative media outlets.

Judicial Watch has sought to remove a statue of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa from downtown Tucson.

Judicial Watch asserted several claims against Klayman as well; in 2019, Judicial Watch obtained a $2.

In 2007 former donor Peter F Paul sued Judicial Watch, accusing it of using his name to raise more than $15 million to support his lawsuit against Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton while doing little to advance his case.

Between 1997 and 2002 Judicial Watch received $7,069,500 in 19 grants from a handful of foundations.