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Tom Fitton's Judicial Watch Weekly Update

The Exoneration of General Flynn

Justice for General Flynn – and Our Country
Judicial Watch Filed a Lawsuit for Fauci and WHO Records
Court Allows Newsom to Give Cash to Illegal Aliens, But It’s Likely Illegal
Feds Give $23 Million to ‘Community Organizations’ in Virus Fight
Virus Drug Controversy: Was Trump Right?

 


Justice for General Flynn – and Our Country

We welcome the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss charges against former National Security Adviser, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, an American hero who was victimized by the Obama administration and the Deep State. The targeting of General Flynn was a key part of the Obama/Clinton/Deep State coup against President Trump.

We commend the heroic work of General Flynn’s legal team, led by Sidney Powell, which exposed the criminal conduct by FBI and DOJ officials behind Flynn’s illicit prosecution. This corruption, as we have exposed from the get-go, is the tip of the iceberg. The required next step for justice is the prosecution of the coup cabal who tried to destroy General Flynn and overthrow our president.

To see my interview with Lou Dobbs about this story, click here.


Judicial Watch Filed a Lawsuit for Fauci and WHO Records

In March 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a prominent member of the president’s coronavirus task force, praised the work of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its chairman, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Fauci said: “Tedros is really an outstanding person … I mean, obviously, over the years anyone who says that the WHO has not had problems has not been watching the WHO. But I think under his leadership they’ve done very well.”

In April, however, President Trump announced a halt to U.S. funding of WHO. According to the president, the WHO put “political correctness over lifesaving measures.” Additionally, President Trump said: “The WHO failed in this duty, and must be held accountable,” adding that the WHO ignored “credible information” in December 2019 that the virus could be transmitted from human to human.

We want to have a closer look at the Fauci/WHO connection, so we have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation (DNCF) against the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) for communications and other records of National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and Deputy Director H. Clifford Lane with and about WHO concerning the novel coronavirus (Daily Caller News Foundation v. U.S. Department Justice (No. 1:20-cv-01149)).

We sued after HHS failed to respond to our April 1, 2020, FOIA request seeking:

  • Communications between Dr. Fauci and Deputy Director Lane and World Health Organization officials concerning the novel coronavirus.
  • Communications of Dr. Fauci and Deputy Director Lane concerning WHO, WHO official Bruce Aylward, WHO Director General Tedros Anhanom, and China.

We are requesting communications from January 1, 2020, to April 1, 2020. The DCNF was granted expedited processing of its request.

“This virus has killed hundreds of thousands of people and turned the whole world upside down,” Daily Caller News Foundation Co-Founder and President Neil Patel said. “We know that China and WHO could have done a lot more to prevent or reduce this catastrophe. We therefore have a legitimate and urgent news purpose for seeking these documents regarding U.S. officials’ communications with WHO and demand that the agencies in question stop stalling and start following the law that entitles us to this vital information.”

It is urgent that the NIH follow transparency law during the coronavirus crisis. It is of significant public interest to learn what WHO was telling our top medical officials about the coronavirus that originated in China.


Court Allows Newsom to Give Cash to Illegal Aliens, But It’s Likely Illegal

Several of our left-leaning governors have used the coronavirus emergency to test the boundaries of emergency powers. As we might have expected, California’s governor is even trying to hand out cash to people in the state and country illegally. No law allows him to do this.

So we asked the court fora temporary restraining order (TRO) against Governor Gavin Newsom and his Director of the California Department of Social Services, Kim Johnson, to restrain them from spending $79.8 million dollars of taxpayers’ money to provide direct cash benefits to unlawfully present aliens (Crest et al. v. Newsom et al. (No. 20STCV16321)).

The court has now issued a bizarre ruling.

Though it found that we were likely to succeed on the merits (that Newsom had no authority under law to spend the money), the court found that there was a public interest in sending tax money to illegal aliens during the coronavirus crisis.

It is astonishing that a court would allow a public official to ignore the law and spend tax money with no legal authority. Simply put, as the court seems to acknowledge, the governor has no independent legal authority to spend state taxpayer money for cash payments to illegal aliens. We will appeal the court’s manifest error.

Newsom announced his executive initiative on April 15, 2020. The initiative plans to spend $75 million to provide direct cash payments to illegal aliens and cost an estimated additional $4.8 million to administer. The Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants Project plans to provide one-time cash benefits of $500 per adult / $1,000 per household to 150,000 unlawfully present aliens in California.

These benefits are not to be provided to U.S. citizens or legal aliens residing in the state, according to an April 17 fact sheet issued by the California Department of Social Services, the “Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants Fact Sheet,” which reiterates that only unlawfully present aliens are eligible for direct assistance.

Our lawsuit argued that the California State Legislature has not enacted any law that affirmatively provides that unlawfully present aliens are eligible for the $75 million of cash public benefits announced by Newsom.

Well, it is California.


Feds Give $23 Million to ‘Community Organizations’ in Virus Fight

The Obama Administration discovered that it could fund its favorite leftist organizations through all manner of community programs, and the swamp creatures embedded in the DC bureaucracies are at it again. Our Corruption Chroniclesblog reports.

Dealing with a devastated economy and the worst unemployment crisis in history, the U.S. government is quietly spending $23 million on “culturally and linguistically diverse” COVID-19 outreach and education in racial and ethnic minority and disadvantaged communities. The goal is to develop a national and statewide network of public and community-based organizations that will help mitigate the virus’s disproportionate impact among that demographic, according to one of the recently published grant announcements. A separate allocation will revive an Obama-era program that gave leftist groups tens of millions of dollars to help poor, minority and indigenous communities attain “environmental justice.” Under that project the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will reopenthe State Environmental Justice Cooperative Agreement Program (SEJCA) to help “underserved communities” and “vulnerable populations” deal with COVID-19.

The biggest chunk of money, $22 million, will come from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which just launched a National Infrastructure for Mitigating the Impact of COVID-19 within Racial and Ethnic Minority Communities. The agency’s Office of Minority Health (OMH) will dole out the cash to “community-based organizations” that are considered “trusted and usual information sources for racial and ethnic minority, rural and disadvantaged communities.” The organizations, most likely leftist groups, will use the taxpayer dollars to “disseminate effective response, recovery and resilience strategies and ensure service linkages for racial and ethnic minority, rural and disadvantaged communities hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.” This includes identifying areas with minority and disadvantaged people at substantially greater risk of contracting the virus and adverse outcomes due to prevalence of underlying health conditions such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, asthma, and COPD/lung disease as well as structural and systemic barriers to physical distancing and challenges to accessing healthcare and social services. The money will flow for up to three years so the community groups can document and distribute “lessons learned” and other findings.

Here is why HHS, whose mission is to enhance and protect the health and well-being of all Americans, is dedicating tens of millions of dollars to this new venture: “Emerging data suggests racial and ethnic minority populations are experiencing disproportionate impact and worse health outcomes from COVID-19,” according to the grant document. “Past public health crises, like the H1N1 pandemic and Zika epidemic, have demonstrated and amplified the vulnerability of these populations. Specifically, when combined with a greater baseline prevalence of underlying health conditions, a public health crisis like COVID-19 further exacerbates the higher morbidity and mortality for racial and ethnic minority communities. Due to lack of resources and limited capacity to provide healthcare and social services, rural communities are also vulnerable to adverse COVID-19 outcomes in the immediate and long term.”

The EPA will dedicate $1 million to the coronavirus minority cause by bringing back Obama’s wasteful environmental justice initiative that filled the coffers of numerous leftist groups, including those that help illegal immigrants. Under the new project, nonprofits will work with underserved communities to understand, promote and integrate approaches to provide meaningful and measurable improvements to public health. The agency identifies underserved community as those with “environmental justice concerns and/or vulnerable populations, including minority, low income, rural, tribal, indigenous, and homeless populations.” In a documentattached to the grant announcement, the EPA goes into tremendous detail about its new initiative to address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban and rural low-income and minority communities.

Examples of eligible projects related to COVID-19 include the development of outreach programs to educate underserved and vulnerable populations about EPA-approved disinfectants and how to properly use them as well as managing trash removal within communities; “Healthy Homes” campaigns to share information about in-home environmental and health hazards that may increase vulnerability due to extended periods indoors resulting from local stay-at-home orders; other activities that educate, raise public knowledge and awareness toward achieving behavioral changes that improve health or prevent environmental pollution. To encourage participation the government will offer childcare, free disinfectants, translation services and material in “appropriate literacy levels for the impacted communities with environmental justice concerns.”

We will be cleaning up after the Obama Administration for years.


Virus Drug Controversy: Was Trump Right?

The legacy media seems unable to give President Trump any credit whatsoever even if the research done by his team could be of benefit to the public. The president and his team have been studying the coronavirus and looking for solutions. But it is doubtful the press will ever be able to convey this in an evenhanded manner.

Micah Morrison, our chief investigative reporter, looksat one example of this in his Investigative Bulletin.

Controversy continues to rage over President Trump’s advocacy of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HC) to combat the coronavirus. As we reported last month, Trump critics were shocked, shocked that the president would dare to venture a medical opinion, but based on anecdotal evidence from around the globe, it appeared to us that the president had placed a bold winning bet on HC.

The blowback was fierce. The White House for a time fell silent on HC. On Sunday, Trump jumped back into the fray with a defense of the drugand an attack on his critics at a Fox News Town Hall event.

Response to the Judicial Watch article was swift, particularly after Trump retweeted journalist Paul Sperry’s tweetabout the story. We received a lot of email. Many of the comments can’t be repeated in this family-friendly venue. Others were enlightening.

“I’ve been tracking HC treatment and outcomes all over the world,” writes a data analyst. “Long story short, HC-treated patients have a case fatality rate of 0.5% (5 out of 1000) whereas the worldwide rate is 6.9% (69 out of 1000). In other words, current evidence suggests you’re more than 12 times more likely to die if you are diagnosed with COVID 19 and you don’t get HC treatment.”

“I am a Florida physician prescribing HC to patients,” another reader writes. “I do hope it is a winning bet. My take is it helps early and should be used with zinc. Shortened illness. Less lung problems.” Hospitalized patients getting HC should be on heart monitors, this physician warns, a nod to concerns about possible dangerous side effects.

Another reader directed us to an AP storyabout a Veterans Administration study that showed no benefit and increased deaths from HC. The VA quickly pushed back on the story. VA Secretary Robert Wilkie sent a letter to veterans’ organizations saying the VA study had led to “misinformation” about treatments at VA hospitals. Wilkie said HC was only given to patients at “highest risk” and noted that the Food and Drug Administration had approved HC for emergency use. (The FDA also issued a later warningthat HC could lead to dangerous heart rhythm issues.)

In Turkey, the government has thrown HC at everyone with the virus—more than 117,000 cases. 3000 have died, but that’s lower than the global death rate, Turkish officials say. The “relatively low death toll is thanks to treatment protocols in the country, which involve two existing drugs—the controversial anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine touted by President Trump, and Japanese antiviral favipiravir,” CBS News reports.

“Doctors prescribe hydroxychloroquine to everyone who is tested positive for coronavirus,” a Turkish medical official told CBS. “Hospitalized patients may be given favipiravir as well if they encounter breathing problems.” The drug combination seemed to “delay or eliminate the need for intensive care for patients.”

The Turkish effort is not a clinical trial. It’s life in medical wartime. Closer to home, that also appears to be the case at the Yale New Haven Health hospital system, reports the website Medscape. The site is behind a paywall but Yahoo, reporting on the findings, noted that physicians at Yale were prescribing HC “because it had shown potential for success.” Other hospitals also continue to give HC to virus patients, the Yahoo report notes. That’s what Judicial Watch is hearing from front line medical personnel in New York as well.

The bottom line? HC is not without risks, but at hospitals and clinics across the country, it’s life in wartime and increasingly it appears that physicians and medical administrators are deciding that to save lives, HC is a gamble worth taking.

Trump’s bold bet is still looking like a winner.

It’s always a shame when the media seems willing to make health care a political football.

Until next week …

 

 


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