Several of Donald Trump’s lawyers tried to get him to avoid prosecution by returning classified documents to the government, The Washington Post reports. It probably would have worked—but Trump was defiant, insisting he could keep the documents and hiding them from his own lawyers, who he was paying to give him legal advice. (While Trump is known for refusing to pay legal bills, at least one of his lawyers, Christopher Kise, got $3 million up front to represent him.) Instead, Trump did what he always does: He listened to the people telling him what he wanted to hear. One of those people was Tom Fitton, the head of the far-right group Judicial Watch and a figure who deserves a little more notoriety.
Fitton was insistent to Trump and to his lawyers that Trump had the right to keep the documents. This was terrible advice, but Trump liked it. Here’s the thing: Fitton, whose legal advice Trump is taking over that of his lawyers, is not a lawyer. He is, in the words of Liz Dye at Above the Law, a “weirdo pitchman in a muscle T-shirt who runs a shop dedicated to filing stunt lawsuits against Democratic politicians.”
That does not stop Fitton from cosplaying as a legal expert.
”I think what is lacking is the lawyers saying, ‘I took this to be obstruction,’” Fitton told the Post. “Where is the conspiracy? I don’t understand any of it. I think this is a trap. They had no business asking for the records … and they’ve manufactured an obstruction charge out of that. There are core constitutional issues that the indictment avoids, and the obstruction charge seems weak to me.”
This is all very clearly laid out in the indictment. It spends pages upon pages detailing obstruction efforts, including a conspiracy to obstruct. Boxes being moved from one room at Mar-a-Lago to another, loaded onto a plane to Bedminster, brought to Trump so that he could pick and choose what he wanted to keep, concealed from his own attorneys. Where is the conspiracy? It’s on the pages of the indictment.
But if this is the kind of fraudulent “I talk lawyer” quote Fitton is giving the Post, we can only try to imagine what he’s been saying to Trump.
Fitton is also one of the key sources of the “Clinton sock drawer” arguments that Trump allies keep making—including in The Wall Street Journal—which completely misrepresent the basic facts of and judgment in the 2012 case Judicial Watch v. NARA. Judicial Watch lost that case, which attempted to force the National Archives and Records Administration to demand that former President Bill Clinton turn over years-old recordings of interviews he did with historian Taylor Branch. NARA agreed with Clinton that those recordings qualified as personal, not presidential records, and a judge threw the case out. It’s a wee bit different from Trump taking classified documents from multiple agencies, but Fitton and Judicial Watch are trying to sell the argument that their loss in that case means the government can never demand the return of actual government records from a former president.
It’s absurd, but it’s the kind of shoddy claim Fitton has built his career on, and it’s quite a career: Judicial Watch’s revenue goes up year after year, with the organization taking in more than $100 million in 2020.
Fitton has also been a regular source of disinformation to Trump in recent years. In 2019, Trump retweeted Fitton’s claim: “Thousands of Aliens Illegally Voting.” At other times Fitton said it was “at least 900,000” fraudulent votes in 2018. In 2020, Fitton also insisted that eight Iowa counties had more registered voters than people eligible to vote. This was completely false, as Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, swiftly proved.
In 2017, Fitton said, on Fox News, “Forget about shutting down Mr. Mueller. Do we need to shut down the FBI because it was turned into a KGB-type operation by the Obama administration?” In 2018, he went on Fox Business and suggested Trump should pardon everyone implicated by the Mueller investigation. At that point, Trump and Fitton had barely met in person, but Trump liked what he heard in Fitton’s media appearances so much that five years later, Fitton was dining with Trump on the eve of his federal arraignment.
Trump wants to be surrounded by people who tell him what he wants to hear—so much so that Fitton became one of his top informal advisers on the basis of having carried his water in regular Fox News appearances. That reliance on suck-ups and yes-men rather than lawyers who tell him what will limit his legal exposure was a factor in the 37 federal criminal charges Trump now faces.
Donald Trump is facing even more legal jeopardy and the sharks in the Republican Party seem to sense there is some blood in the water. Chris Christie has made his campaign all about going directly at Trump, and Ron DeSantis seems to be closer and closer to becoming completely isolated from the field.
