The ACLJ Needed Now More Than Ever: Our Agenda for the Future, Protecting Victories and Battling the Dangers Ahead – Government Accountability
The following is the fourth installment of a six-part series focusing on why the ACLJ is needed now more than ever to protect the victories we’ve achieved and beat back the ominous challenges we now face under the Biden Administration.
Government Accountability:
The ACLJ will continue to build on its successful root-and-branch effort to eliminate government corruption and misconduct. Our efforts include the pursuit of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and lawsuits, as well as other efforts to weaken and eliminate the Deep State and the globalist elites who support nefarious endeavors designed to thwart the will of the American people.
- As part of our ongoing Government Accountability Project, the ACLJ released our 2019-2020 FOIA Report providing updates on our ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and litigation. In response to troubling reports of Deep State activities, the ACLJ has utilized FOIA to request documents and records from federal government agencies with the intent of shedding light on the ongoing corruption and lawlessness.
We’ve also engaged various state governments with state-equivalents to FOIA to uncover information in our fights for life, Israel, and religious freedom. The ACLJ has issued at least 75 FOIA requests to more than 20 different federal or state agencies and their components. As we have said many times, Deep State corruption is extensive, and federal agencies and departments have repeatedly refused to provide the requested information. As a result, the ACLJ has been forced to file federal lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to compel compliance in nearly a dozen cases. To date, we have obtained nearly 20,000 pages of records, and all but approximately 1,000 pages have been obtained through litigation.
- Among the most egregious examples of government misconduct are those involving the deployment of government power for political or other nefarious purposes. In one case, the ACLJ has unmasked former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s secret email alias through litigation. The ACLJ’s FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) into the clandestine meeting between former AG Lynch and former President Bill Clinton uncovered the secret email account used by former Attorney General Lynch to conduct official DOJ business.
We obtained and published more than 400 pages of documents from the DOJ, including redacted talking points on the Clinton-Lynch meeting that the DOJ bureaucracy sought to shelter from review. Now we’ve learned that less than an hour and a half after the first press inquiry into the secret meeting, AG Lynch herself, in an apparent attempt to hide her identity, was actually added into the discussion about the draft talking points under the alias “Elizabeth Carlisle, ecarlisle@jmd.usdoj.gov.” The Daily Caller, investigating the emails we received, confirmed: Lynch, using the Elizabeth Carlisle account, which was hosted on the Justice Department’s system, was also involved in those discussions. This raises the question: What did the former Attorney General of the United States need to hide from the American people? - In another case involving a pair of ACLJ unmasking lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act, a federal district court issued a critical opinion, giving us a partial but significant win. According to the court, the State Department may no longer refuse to admit or deny the existence of records of Obama Administration senior official Samantha Power’s unmasking activity involving Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a list of which the National Security Agency (NSA) declassified in May. While many outlets reported that Power had been involved in an inordinately high number of unmasking requests at the end of the Obama Administration, some on the Left had tried to downplay these actions by saying they were done by low level staffers under Power’s name, and not by Power herself. The decision by the federal district court makes it clear that all unmasking requests made under Power’s name can properly be attributed to Power herself. This is so, in part, because unmasking actions taken by subordinates are indeed actions taken by the principals.
That is bad news for the Deep State, as President Joe Biden and President Obama’s Chief of Staff were also “principals” identified on the list of those for whom subordinates made unmasking requests. Now, a federal court has recognized that principals are responsible for the unmasking actions of their agents – and those unmasking requests carried out by subordinates, as agents, are attributable to the principals themselves. Efforts to distance Biden and other senior Obama officials from the political spying – blaming it on the staffers – just got a lot more difficult.
Our fight against the Deep State may become more challenging, but we stand ready, willing, and able to continue taking those who ignore the law and violate the Constitution to court to achieve the truth.
In the next installment, I’ll discuss major victories and challenges ahead in our fight for sound foreign policy.
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