President-elect Donald Trump and the incoming Republican congressional majority “must focus on restoring the rule of law and accountability after eight years of a lawless Obama administration,” according to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“The election results show that corruption matters to the American people. At a minimum, President-elect Trump should commit to a transparency revolution,” Fitton said in a statement about the 2016 president election results.
“Corruption in government is an overwhelming problem. We expect, but won’t rely on, DC politicians to do the right thing. Judicial Watch will continue its independent investigations and lawsuits in order to hold politicians of both political parties accountable to the rule of law,” he said.
Fitton’s group was a pivotal factor driving the campaign narrative from the moment it became known publicly that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and many of her closest advisors had used multiple private email addresses and a home-brew server located in her New York mansion.
Judicial Watch filed 20 separate court actions stemming from Clinton’s email scandal. (RELATED: “Judicial Watch could be Hillary’s biggest problem to win the White House.”)
Two of the perhaps most significant court wins for Judicial Watch, according to Fitton, were the Feb. 23, 2016, decision by U.S. District Court Judge Emmett G. Sullivan awarding the non-profit government watchdog discovery concerning whether Clinton and the State Department during her tenure obstructed the Freedom of Information Act by concealing the existence of the private email system.
Sullivan’s decision gave Fitton’s group the right to ask questions and demand documents from Clinton and the government that would otherwise not have been available. Failing to cooperate with the discovery process put tremendous pressure on Clinton and other State Department officials to produce potentially incriminating materials and answer many uncomfortable questions under oath.
The second, according to Fitton, was filing of the May 15, 2015, FOIA suit seeking to force the State Department to comply with the law by providing copies of all non-exempt Clinton emails and those of her aides that were sent on the private server.
When the court ordered Clinton and the State Department to comply with the law in response to the Judicial Watch suit, the candidate and the government had to do so or face the prospect of being prosecuted for perjury.
From that point forward, the Clinton campaign was continually looking over its shoulder, fighting a rearguard action to delay release of the emails and seeking somehow to contain the damage. They never found a way to stop the bleeding.
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