Few groups have done as much to fight dirty voter rolls as Judicial Watch.
The Washington, DC-based nonprofit group has worked to remove more than four million non-citizens from voter registration rolls across the country in the past four years. Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, joins Peter Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The Drill Down.
GAI just released a new report detailing fifty different ways elections can be compromised by lax enforcement of rules; deliberate attempts to inflate voter rolls; and bad actors who try to cheat, game the system, or rig the counting of ballots. So, it’s natural to invite onto the show Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch and author of a new book called Rights and Freedoms in Peril. The book discusses many ways the progressive movement threatens America’s most venerable institutions — declaring war on the rule of law, colorblind merit, border security, and government accountability.
Eggers asks Fitton if the lawfare being conducted against former president and current candidate Donald Trump is the revenge of the Swamp.
“There was pushback on the investigators of Hillary Clinton,” Fitton says, and her partisans in the Democratic Party and in the press went after Ken Starr (the independent counsel who investigated the Clintons while Bill was president).
“But I think now it has metastasized. They are willing to tear down institutions to protect themselves,” Fitton tells the hosts. “They’re willing to destroy the Supreme Court and ruin innocent Americans now… They would tear down the temple to protect themselves.”
He recalls that this kind of corruption extended to Obama himself, who “sicced the IRS on the Tea Party,” and “abused his power in 2016 with his intervention into the election, weaponizing agencies like the Department of Justice against Trump… That should have been investigated, but it never stopped.”
Peter Schweizer asks about the inspiration for these lawfare issues, wondering whether this might be a mutation of the national security apparatus’s war on terror or just copying a tactic that has been going on in Latin American politics for decades.
“I don’t like to throw the word ‘communist’ around, but there has been a communist rising within the Democratic Party. This doesn’t mean they’re all communists, but their political approach has become communist and totalitarian in nature,” Fitton says. “The deep state doesn’t really care about terrorists abroad; they want power here… They act as though the really terrible people are in the U.S. and they’re our citizens.”
Last week, Judicial Watch sued (under the Freedom of Information Act) the U.S. Army to get details on why its training materials designate pro-life organizations or individuals as “terrorists.”
Like GAI, Judicial Watch has concluded that it cannot rely on the mainstream press to report on these kinds of abuses. Their tactic, he says, is to “controversialize your material,” to avoid reporting on it. But “we’re not a 98-pound weakling. We can get our material out independently,” Fitton replies.
Eggers asks about the threat of open borders and how that threatens election security. That became a hot topic earlier this month when the Commonwealth of Virginia was sued by Joe Biden’s Justice Department for removing known non-citizens from the state’s voter rolls, which has been state law since 2006 and was signed into law by then-governor Tim Kaine, now a Democratic senator.
“The Justice Department is trying to argue ‘you need to leave them on’ the rolls,” Fitton explains. “That tells you all you need to know.”
“The [federal] law allows you to maintain your electoral rolls. That means things like waiting two election cycles before marking someone ineligible. And states can’t be engaged in that process 90 days out from an election.”
“But that’s different from finding out about illegal voters on your rolls and not doing anything about it. It suggests to me they want non-citizens on the rolls and for them to vote and not get caught,” he adds.
How confident is Fitton about the upcoming election’s result?
“The real question is, will American citizens be confident?” he responds. If either Harris or Trump win comfortably, they will be confident. But the scenario where it is a close race, and officials say it will take days or weeks to arrive at a final result, is where the danger lies.
“If we don’t know, my guess is that Trump is going to lose,” Fitton says.
Eggers, author of a 2018 book about elections called FRAUD, agrees. “We are starting to normalize the idea that election results can’t be known right away,” Eggers says. But if we don’t, the most likely reason is there is an attempt at fraud,” he adds.
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