Pre-Trump
Fitton received some attention in 2013 for his straightforwardly false claim that the Obama DOJ had sent representatives to Sanford, Florida, following Trayvon Martin’s death “to help organize and manage rallies and protests against George Zimmerman” and indeed “actively worked to foment unrest, spending thousands of taxpayer dollars on travel and hotel rooms to train protesters throughout Florida.” It was all part of Obama’s “totalitarian leftist” agenda, just ike his totalitarian and fascists efforts to combat domesticterrorism.
Also during Obama’s presidency, Judicial Watch was of course eager to join the fray of delusional wingnut conspiracy mongering about Benghazi; according to Fitton, the Obama administration actually wanted Ambassador Chris Stevens to get kidnapped so they could release Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian Islamist convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, in return for Stevens. Fitton freely admitted that he had “no evidence” whatsoever for his allegations, but the point here was of course never to be correct but to muddy the waters.
In 2015, Judicial Watch also made a splash with their nonsense claim that ISIS had established a “base” in Mexico “around eight miles from the U.S. border”. Fitton refused to specify his sources or, really, what on Earth they based the claim on. When the FBI, Texas Department of Public Safety and Customs and Border Protection pointed out that none of them had any information to corroborate Fitton’s claim, Judicial Watch promptly accused them all of lying, publishing instead an article claiming that the FBI was meeting Mexican authorities to create a strategy to hide the ISIS camps from the media – again, Judicial Watch revealed no sources or information to back up the claim, of course, since it is not the kind of organization that uses sources or evidence or facts to ground their claims and potentially hamper their efforts. It is worth noting that Fitton received the American Conservative Union's ‘Defender of the Constitution Award’ at the 2015 CPAC.
Pro-Trump
Fitton received some attention also for his attempts to argue that the Mueller investigation into alleged Russian interference in the election was “unconstitutional” and a “coup” against Trump. Trump himself, who tends to listen to Fitton, retweeted the claim. Fitton also called for shutting down the FBI on the delusional grounds that “it was turned into a KGB-type operation by the Obama administration”. In general, Fitton has spent a lot of effort, and received much media coverage, to claim that Trump is being persecuted and “victimized”, in particular by the vaguely defined “deep state”.
When Trump wandered off with a cache of government documents after leaving office and refused to return them even in the face of subpoenas from the DOJ, he was acting on the advice of Tom Fitton, who is not a lawyer but nevertheless claimed – contrary to the advice of everyone with genuine backgrounds in law – that Trump had the legal right to keep the documents. After the FBI subsequently had to raid Mar-a-Lago to get the documents, Fitton predictably whined that “the Biden FBI staged a dishonest photo with purportedly classified material” and called government agencies “irredeemably corrupt” (without even attempting to detail in what way).
Election-related misinformation and conspiracy theories
Fitton falsely thinks – or at least claims to think – that voter fraud “is real, widespread, and substantial to the point that it can decide elections”. Prior to the 2018 midterm elections, Judicial Watch and the Public Interest Legal Foundation sent hundreds of letters to election officials across the country, threatening lawsuits if they didn’t conduct massive purges of their voter rolls (Judicial Watch repeated the threats in 2020). Afterwards, Fitton did, without a shred of evidence, claim that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants voted in the 2018 elections.
As for the 2020 elections, Fitton started early: already in February 2020, with the Iowa caucuses in the Democratic presidential primary, Fitton wailed that voter fraud was afoot by utterly falsely claiming that “eight Iowa counties have more voter registrations than citizens old enough to register.” And in a video recording from October the same year, Fitton implored fellow wingnut activists to come up with ways to prevent mail-in-ballots from being distributed to voters, i.e. to undermine the election by any, including illegal, means.
In October 2020, Fitton sent a memo to Trump encouraging him to declare victory before a single vote was counted, and sketched a plan to only recognize votes counted by the “Election Day deadline”, something that doesn’t exist. Counting votes after Election Day is, according to Fitton, “last gasp” efforts to “subvert” a Trump victory and “strong evidence of malintent” since it would include mail-in ballots and ballots cast in large urban districts that tend not to agree with Fitton on politics and accepting votes that don’t yield the results Fitton wish for, which is undemocratic, fraudulent and evil. When the memo was looked at by the Jan. 6 committee, Fitton claimed that Judicial Watch was a target of “full-blown assault on the First Amendment” and that Nancy Pelosi was really to blame for the January 6 attacks. Fitton was also a signatory to Cleta Mitchell’s December 2020 letter urging GOP representatives to contest swing state electors.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2021, Fitton asserted, falsely, that on the day of the 2020 United States presidential election “Trump had the votes to win the presidency. These vote totals were changed because of unprecedented and extraordinary counting after election day.” He was subsequently identified as unindicted co-conspirator #1 in the Georgia indictment of Trump and other defendants for their attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, where it was noted that he wrote a speech for Trump prior to the election in which Trump would falsely attribute his loss to voter fraud.
As you probably were able to predict, Fitton was a major purveyor of conspiracy theories and misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, including various wingnut conspiracy theories about Anthony Fauci. In an attempt to merge his COVID-related and his election-fraud-related conspiracy theories together, Fitton groundlessly speculated, at an August 2020 meeting of the Council for National Policy, that commie leftists were planning to use COVID to delay the 2020 election tally until January 20, 2021, to allow House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to become acting president, which, he asserted, “could cause civil war”.
Climate change denialism
Judicial Watch’s official position is that climate science is “fraud science” given that climate-related scientific inquiries tend to yield results the group doesn’t like. They have accordingly filed lawsuits seeking to harrass climate scientists and, in particular, force the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to release the correspondence of climate scientists who published a 2015 study in Science debunking the common climate change denialist myth of a global warming ‘hiatus’ from 1998 to 2012. Although Judicial Watch was rightly condemned by organizations like The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) and the American Meteorological Society because the disclosure of private communications between scientists “would harm (or halt altogether) 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”, that was, of course, precisely the point. Fitton, inspired by Climategate and by US Representative (and professional gohmert) Lamar Smith baselessly accusing the authors of the study of “alter[ing] data” to “get the politically correct results they want”, said that “there has been scandal after scandal involving climate data and we are skeptical of government agencies that won’t tell people what they are up to … I’m sure scientists are concerned that funding for dubious research will be cut, but the truth will win out in the end.” Well, the truth did get out – in the aforementioned 2016 study. Fitton obviously didn’t like it.
Diagnosis: Yet another angry, paranoid and generally deranged conspiracy theorist, and Fitton, too, has immense authority and influence (Trump demonstrably listens to his nonsense). One of the most obvious threats to civilization, freedom and decency in the US at present.
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