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Chris Farrell - Challenging the System: Judicial Watch's Role in Combatting Corruption Across Administrations

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Show Notes and Transcript

Welcome to Hearts of Oak, where today we're diving into the intricate world of government oversight with none other than Chris Farrell, the head of investigations at Judicial Watch. Join us as we explore Chris's remarkable 25-year journey at the helm of this influential watchdog organization, and his relentless pursuit of transparency and accountability.
Chris Farrell isn't just a name; he's a force in the quest to keep government operations open and honest. With a background in military intelligence, his transition to Judicial Watch marked the beginning of an era where the Freedom of Information Act became a sword against corruption.
In this episode, Chris will unpack how Judicial Watch has evolved, facing both the consistencies and the ever-changing landscape of political oversight. We'll touch on the legal battles fought, the costs associated with seeking truth, and the organization's unwavering commitment to debunking misleading narratives.
From election integrity to the media's portrayal of Judicial Watch's efforts, Chris will shed light on how these battles are fought on multiple fronts. We'll also delve into his view on the ideological divide concerning election accountability and why issues like economic stability and immigration are at the forefront of the upcoming election.

Judicial Watch is a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law. Through its educational endeavours, Judicial Watch advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial officials do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people. Judicial Watch fulfils its educational mission through litigation, investigations, and public outreach

Connect with Judicial Watch...
WEBSITE judicialwatch.org
𝕏 x.com/JudicialWatch @JudicialWatch

Interview recorded 03.10.24

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Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

Hearts of Oak, thank you so much for joining us once again.

I'm delighted to have Chris Farrell, who I think I met maybe two years ago when I was stateside and I had the privilege of being on his show, on Watch.

Obviously, Chris has been with Judicial Watch as their head of investigations for 99.

So it's your 25th anniversary, Chris.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

(Chris Farrell)

That's right.

25 years.

And thank you for having me on.

I appreciate it.

Folks at No Judicial Watch, we're a government watchdog group.

We try to uncover the operations of government and then inform and educate the public about what their government is or is not doing to them or for them.

We try to uncover corruption and we try to hold public officials accountable. That's our mission.

And so I've been here for 25 years.

Before that, in my misspent youth, I was an army intelligence officer focusing mostly on counter espionage investigations, some double agent operations, and also commanding the Army's surveillance team, which we used to do physical, technical, and aerial surveillance for counter-espionage investigations and also for human intelligence collection work.

And so we won the Cold War.

This is all many, many moons ago.

And I decided to leave the intelligence world.

I was a contractor for a while to defense and intelligence agencies, but then in 99 I came to judicial watch and as the saying goes the rest is history.

Well, I guess and people obviously if they're not following half our audiences UK if you're not watching judicial watch you need to watch them.

The freedom of information or foyer as you call them.

We we know them in both countries well, that seek to hold government to account and seek to get answers to those questions they do not want to answer.

But people can obviously get on judicialwatch.org and at Judicial Watch on Twitter and X.

I mean, what led you to Judicial Watch?

Because I guess someone in the military background, it is staying in the private sector, contracting, maybe being in pundit work, so on the media. What led you to actually become part of Judicial Watch?

Back in 98, 99, I was watching the work they were doing.

So, I was just an ordinary private citizen looking at what was going on.

This was sort of the crest of the Clinton scandals.

And then the Clintons had made an art of monetizing their government service.

So, there was a lot of corruption going on.

I looked at the organization, thought they were doing great work, and I used my intelligence skills, my background as a case officer, to identify and approach and pitch the leadership and say, hey, you need me.

And it worked. And here I am.

Were you politically attuned back then?

I was.

I was really a committed conservative, not so much partisan in the sense of being rabidly a party operative or faithful.

I really, in general, frankly, I kind of loathe political parties.

I find them to be probably half of whatever problem we have is the party structure and the party activities and the party egos.

So, I was more philosophically conservative and small C conservative and decided that, you know, there had to be some kind of reform.

We could not continue doing what was going on in our government.

And I was going to try to fight for some accountability and some transparency.

And as my colleague, Paul Orfanides, who's our director of litigation here, likes to say, you know, let's sue the bastards.

And so that appealed to me, and it made sense.

No, I've kind of followed Paul's work, and we've had Tom Fitton on before, and giving the overview of what Judicial Watch do.

Now, I get the work that Judicial Watch do, it doesn't come for free.

I mean, when you get in the legal sphere, in the UK it's expensive, in America it's horrendously expensive and ruinously expensive.

I mean, tell us about that and actually using the system, the legal system, against the system, the government or politics.

Right.

Well, we're very fortunate that our Freedom of Information Act law allows anyone, and I mean that literally anyone, to file a request with any of the executive, agencies of the government and ask questions about public policy matters, decisions.

The commitment of funds.

And so we've really refined that to a science.

We have it down in a way that allows us to make very aggressive use of those laws to get records and documents. Because as you well know, particularly when it comes to politicians.

People lie and records don't.

So we can get records and documents and create a record, get the history of what has occurred.

And then we can have an argument about policy and you can have your opinion and I can have mine.

But in the end, if I pull out the records and documents and show them to you and say, well, here's where the money went or here's where the approval to do something or to decide something.

Here's the documentation of it. it kind of deflates a lot of the hyperbolic rhetoric and the hysterical claims, because you have the record, you have the document.

And so we do that a lot. And we sue the government a lot to compel them to answer our requests.

We also file constitutional claims where there's been some grievous wrong or where some government official has been just out of control with their behavior and actions.

They've abused their office. And then we'll sue those officials as well.

There's a crazy example. Just the other day, we had an argument in the Supreme Court of the state of Minnesota, where all of the teachers, the teachers union and the state had entered into a contract.

And for whatever crazy reason, they had agreed to make the contract racist.

I mean that literally.

So under their definition, if you were a person of color and you were a teacher, you couldn't be fired.

If there were layoffs, you could not be laid off.

If you were, I guess, a person not of color, whatever that means, according to their lexicon, well, then you were the first to be fired or the first to be laid off.

And this to me is just blatant racism.

You're making hiring and firing decisions based on skin pigmentation.

It's insanity.

We fought a civil war over this.

Anyway, so that's an example of lunacy that we feel compelled to challenge and we have in Minnesota.

Again, just an argument in the Supreme Court of Minnesota just this past Tuesday.

Wow.

I want to get on to the current political climate in the US.

But I mean, how have you seen your work change over 25 years with all different administrations, all different government officials, some better than others?

How have you seen your work?

Is it you're focused on actually highlighting injustice and exposing corruption and showing wrongdoing?

Or does it change with different administrations?

Well, there's sort of a core set of things that we always look at.

So, we're always looking for reckless expenditures of money and abuse of power or authority or position.

Those things sort of never change. It doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or Democrat.

You sometimes compare it to, you know, a couple of eight-year-olds fighting over the controls of the Xbox.

You know, they each want to play the game and who's ever in charge.

So there's a certain level of bad behavior, regardless of what your party affiliation is.

But there are some things that are really just crazed, right?

Just really abuses. I think the big lesson, though, over time is that the government has become more and more ingenious on how to obfuscate, hide, lie, mislead the public.

And then on the other side of that same coin, we now see really radical moves to censor people.

And I know that you have your own very sad experiences in the UK with respect to thought control and psychological conditioning of people and what you can or cannot say, which you, in fact, I know I've seen video where a person standing quietly on a street has been arrested because they were silently praying, which I thought was insane.

Orwell's warning in 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual. And that's what we see, obviously, here in the United States, also you in the UK.

But the government going around dictating what can and cannot be said or posted or put on social media.

There's a guy who put up a funny meme, a joke about Hillary Clinton and the election in In 2016, he's sitting in prison.

Wow.

Well, it's crazy. And we have our online safety bill.

Europe have the same legislation and it will come to the US because this seems to be a worldwide desire to control any speech that doesn't fit into whatever current government of the day.

So, and I know on with you, Chris, discussing that in the UK and yeah, it's the free speech restrictions are not just a UK issue.

And I mean, because when you look at your first and second amendments, when you look at the protection that gives you the right to defend yourself, I guess those only work if you have the political will, but even more the judicial will.

Actually, if the courts actually back you up, because if the courts don't back you up, then you're left holding a bit of paper, which is the Constitution, which gives you the right, but if it's not backed up.

And America's walking a very fine line on this issue.

Indeed, yeah. Yeah, the presumption was that the persons in authority or in power would act and behave honestly, and that judges would uphold the rule of law, even if they didn't like it, even if their personal opinion was one way or the other.

They would look at what the law said, or they would look at what the founders intended in the Constitution.

And we could have a discussion about how that isn't what they really meant, or, you know, when it comes to the Second Amendment, they were talking about muskets.

They weren't talking about AR-15s or I've heard all the arguments, right?

But there is a remedy, a lawful remedy to that, which is rather than running to the courts and having a government attorney in a black robe issue an edict, the real solution is go into the legislature and craft a law, get it passed from a bill into a law, and then have the executive sign off on it and exercise the legislative process in order to create a law and not just get frustrated, because you don't like it and then dream up some lawsuit and drop it in front of a friendly judge and get them to sign off on it and issue an edict that affects the entire country.

Well, more and more and more, or we've seen that sort of judicial activism in the United States where, again, lawyers in black robes, government attorneys in black robes, they all draw their paycheck from the U.S. Treasury.

They're not some, you know, they're not up on Mount Olympus, up on high, you know, making decisions.

They're right in the middle of the game.

And three quarters of them are government bureaucrats who come out of one government agency or another.

So they're all sort of political operatives.

And this practice is really corrosive.

It is undermining the public's faith in government.

And it's had a very negative net effect, particularly over the last, I'd say, decade.

12 to 16 years it's it's really been it was bad but now it's crazy.

See that from far away from across the pond.

What is it like, I mean your high profile figure judicial watch is a very well-known organization.

I can imagine government officials getting information from judicial watch and thinking, oh no they're just a pain in the ass.

And that doggedness that I think judicial watch have shown in not walking away from a fight, but always up for it.

That I mean that puts you in the crosshairs of a whole range media, judicial, political, I guess you have had to face attacks from all different angles.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So what's interesting is that, you know, I proudly say that we're equal opportunity offenders.

We have upset everyone, left, right, and center, because we're going to be intellectually honest.

If we're going to ask for travel records about what a president is spending flying around the country or around the world, we're going to ask it of Republicans and Democrats alike.

Not everybody likes that.

Well, tough, right?

We have to be even-handed.

We have to be faithful and truthful to what our mission is.

I once was giving a talk to a group of Francophone African delegates who would come here to the United States.

It's all the former French colonies, obviously. I was explaining what we did.

One gentleman burst out in laughter.

And he said, I apologize.

I'm not laughing at you.

I'm just laughing Because if I tried this in my home country, they would throw me in jail And they probably would.

So, yeah, there are challenges.

There are people who don't want to hear what we have to say.

We have social media, like, you know, TikTok, I think, banned us.

Because we say things, here's the irony.

This isn't just our opinion.

We've sued.

We've used the federal court process to get government records and documents.

These aren't our records.

This is what the United States government or some state government has said.

This is their material.

And they try to run away from it and pretend it isn't their work.

Or they're stenographers in the press.

They're not even reporters.

They're just taking dictation.

You know, they say, well, you know, that just simply can't be true.

I mean, we found 113 illegal aliens that voted in the District of Columbia, here in the nation's capital, voted in the last election.

And we have the registrar of the elections telling us this.

So we promote it.

And we have an entire army of fact checkers running around saying, oh, it isn't true. It's not our work.

The election people told us that the 113 illegals voted.

So, I mean, this is just a small example.

I could go on for literally hours.

I love it the way you use government information against them.

That's what's so beautiful about the work the Judicial Watch do.

Right, right.

This is all their own stuff, you know.

It's so good.

Can I, so we are a month out from the election.

We've just had the VP debate with Jerry Vance and Tim Waltz on, was it CNN it was on, I think?

I mean, looking at that and then the wider election, what are your thoughts on this?

And we'll pick up on a couple of the separate issues, I think.

But yeah, what are your general thoughts just days after that debate?

Well, of course, CBS humiliated themselves yet again.

They promised not to fact check.

And right out of the box, what did they do?

Oh, no, Mr. Vance, what you said isn't true. So, I mean, it shows them for what they are, right?

It's a very unpleasant, but I think revelatory example of them exposing their inner bias.

They can't help themselves.

They're so far off the charts in their manic hatred of Trump and all things on the conservative side of the spectrum that they just, they go on and on.

So that just reveals itself.

What I'm most interested in, of course, is the conduct of the election.

Our Constitution says we have an election day, period, not an election week or an election season or an election month.

And we, the country, the United States, when they go to bed on Tuesday night, the 5th of November, or perhaps into the wee hours, maybe by 2 a.m. On Wednesday, the American public needs to know who the president is.

Period.

This routine where we all are going to count votes for the next week because they may have been postmarked and then somebody else, they didn't sign the mail-in ballot and all this double talk and rigmarole.

Nobody doesn't know when the election is. Nobody doesn't know what they're supposed to do if they're interested in casting their vote.

To play this ridiculous game where there's this never-ending opportunity, I want to be very careful.

So the F word, fraud, has a very specific legal meaning.

It's not just that word.

It's also more euphemistically irregularities, right?

Where all the normal procedures and processes are not followed.

And so you have judges in Pennsylvania saying, well, if the ballot is mailed in and it's not dated and they didn't sign it, well, we can still count it even though it's a week late.

That's craziness.

So we need to have an answer on election night or the wee hours of the next morning.

Judicial Watch has been successful at removing 4 million false and inaccurate registrations from the voting rolls in several different states.

In Los Angeles County, county alone, there were 1.5 million false, inaccurate registrations on the voting rolls.

When you have that level of voting rolls being essentially dirty, It's an invitation for mischief.

It's an invitation for manipulation and gamesmanship.

We can't have it. And so we've been very successful at forcing people to do their jobs and make sure that the voting rolls are true, accurate, and correct.

And if you've died, if you've moved away, if you're a felon, those are reasons not to be on the voting roll.

And the registrars have an obligation to make sure that that is correct.

Yeah, in the UK we don't usually let dead people vote, but I know in the U.S it is...

We have a special voodoo you know kind of undead voting patterns which is very, very troubling.

I've seen that. Well I'm praying looking forward to Trump winning his third term so that in that phrase you get where I sit on on this issue, but we I mean you look at it.

I've been involved in all different elections in the UK, European, parliamentary, local, and it's a rush to get the votes in.

There are what we call paper.

I could hold up a bit of paper for the US viewers.

You put an X with a pen, with a black pen.

But it's, I mean, at what point has it been a long slide in the U.S. In terms of actually this integrity of elections slipping, slipping, because it just didn't start in 2020. It's been happening before then.

Yeah.

So way back in 2000, I'd been at Judicial Watch for about a year, there was a 2000 election that was hotly contested between Al Gore, you'll remember, and Bush the Younger.

Was that the Florida votes they were counting or something?

Right.

And you know the people that caused all that castronation in Florida?

Listen, watch.

We're the ones who did it.

We knew that it was hotly debated.

Yeah.

My colleague, Paul Orfanides, and I, we filed 67 Florida Sunshine Act requests.

So Florida has a state-level open records law that they call the Sunshine Act.

And Paul Orfanides did some research and realized that a ballot in the state of Florida is counted as a public record.

And so we, there's 67 counties in Florida.

So we filed 67 requests since really counties administer the election.

And we asked for access to all the ballots.

And you may remember people were looking at hanging chads and dimpled ballots.

There was much controversy over the actual ballots themselves and whether they were accurate and truthful or whether it was a shenanigans.

So we hired an auditing firm, accountants, and we audited the entire election.

We did sample auditing and we got access to all those ballots.

Now, when all the big news media companies saw what we were doing, I think they were a little jealous.

They jumped in behind us.

And so when the New York Times and ABC and CBS and CNN all show up and suddenly say, me too, we want to see the ballots, we kind of got pushed out of the way just by the weight of the media interests.

But that entire thing was actually created by Judicial Watch because we wanted to know what was going on with those ballots and were they being accurately counted and what is a hanging chad and what is a dimpled ballot and how could that happen? And so our audit said that Bush won by about 800 popular votes. And sure enough, when everything was said and done, the official government tally

Confirmed what we had concluded that bush had won by a very very narrow margin maybe eight or nine hundred votes that's it.

I mean and it is the issues that are important but the issues mean nothing if you're doing the election integrity to back that up.

Right

Look at it and in the UK as in the vast majority of European countries and I know you've done a lot of work in in Hungary so you'll have a an idea of some of the election issues and political issues across Europe, but it is a single country decides and you will have some variations but by and large single country in America it's not just at the federal level.

It's not just the state level, it's the county level, and it means there's so many moving parts to it.

Yeah.

Which actually is a beautiful thing.

It makes stealing an election more difficult, unless you have activist judges and crazed governors like Gavin Newsom, who mailed out ballots to every street address in California.

Talk about asking for irregularities and manipulations of the voting process.

But if people are honest and they stick by the written law and they don't do weird things like like in Wisconsin, where the people administering the election had a meeting.

They're all wearing their little COVID masks sitting there. And they say, we know that we're violating the law, but this is an emergency.

We have to do it anyway.

They flaunted it.

They bragged how they were, they knew that everything that they were doing was not within the scope of the law, and they just didn't give a damn.

They're going to do it anyway.

And was any of that overturned or reject it? No. It was accepted as, oh, well, you know, it's COVID.

So, you know, we don't have to pay attention to the laws and the constitution anymore.

We have to have an exception to everything and we're going to keep counting ballots until we get a number that beats Trump.

I mean, that's really the unspoken part of the irregularities that were going on.

I mean, is it Trump Contrangement syndrome that's just turbocharged this left lunacy, really.

Yeah, just yesterday, the prosecutor, and he's a disgraced prosecutor, I want to be clear. Jack Smith is a clown.

He went after the governor of Virginia.

A few years back, maybe it's 10 or 12 years ago, he went after the governor of Virginia on sort of his own political jihad and ended up removing the sitting governor of Virginia.

And then when the case was appealed, Jack Smith was reversed nine to nothing.

A unanimous Supreme Court said that his entire case was a fraud.

It was a lie.

And he had already removed the Governor of Virginia.

Where does he go to get his reputation back?

Where does he go to get his life back?

But Jack Smith, I mean, you would think that an attorney who had a nine to nothing Supreme Court reject everything he was doing, you would think he'd go move on to do something else in life.

But he's a hatchet man. He's a political operative who's called in to do this kind of dirty work.

And now he's doing it against Trump.

So 30 days before an election, what does he do?

He releases another set of pleadings with all kinds of wild, reckless claims.

And of course, look, just because he puts it in a pleading doesn't mean it's true.

This is not evidence, right?

It's just a claim before a court with with no foundation, with no proof. It's simply, we did interviews and we think this is true.

And he dumps this into the public record a month before the election. If that's that election interference, if that isn't the Department of Justice putting its thumb on the scale and trying to unduly, unlawfully influence an election, I don't know what is.

I mean, how did this become a left-right issue?

Because you would think that you sit and talk to a citizen whatever political persuasion they are and they want to know their vote counts and yet we have this crazy situation in the States where election integrity is called into question.

And it's the left that seem to want to have as many dead people or immigrants vote where it's those in the.

Right that seem to want a fair election.

So only those who are able to vote can vote.

How has this become a left-right issue?

So the left, the people on the left, they are, this is my view, sort of a political philosophy here, but they are, the left are creatures of the state.

They love big government, big programs, big tax dollar, you know, supplements, entitlement payments.

They never saw a program or a project or a government initiative or a government agency that they didn't love.

That's their ecosystem.

They swim around in this environment where they love to use and manipulate the levers of state.

Right.

All the organs of the state, a good Soviet term, they love utilizing that to maximum effect.

That's where they're coming from. On the right, you find a lot of people who are small government people.

They're strict constitutionalists.

They don't believe in never-ending government programs and subsidies and all those sorts of things.

A lot of people on the right will show up to do their government service, whether they're members of Congress or they serve on some county commission, and they do their bit, and then they go home.

They go back to running their business or being part of their community in some way. They don't stay in the statist ecosystem.

And so they're just not oriented.

They don't think and believe and act in the way that folks on the left do.

So of course, The left knows how to use all the different levers of the state, all the agencies, all the tactics and techniques of big government to achieve their ends.

And folks on the right, they're not thinking about it that way.

I've gone out and talked to people who are interested in voting.

And I've said, look, I've got about 24 years of voting, you know, verification and certification experience.

You guys, speaking to people on the right, you guys are great at having your rally a day or two after the election's been lost and protesting.

Right.

All your equal opposite numbers on the left, they've gone and studied all the rules and regulations, all the laws.

They know every single official in the voting chain.

They've met with them.

They've lobbied them. If there's something that goes wrong with the election, they know exactly what paragraph to cite to file their claim, to challenge a vote.

That's their ecosystem.

That's where they live.

And the folks on the right just kind of show up to complain.

It's a very different mentality, and it needs to be addressed directly.

I mean, is it naivety?

Because I guess if you go back a generation, you had a strong church that was vocal, that actually believed what the Bible taught, which is very different today.

You had a legal system that did understand right and wrong. You had individuals engaged maybe at the at the local level, at the community level.

You had an education system that that worked a heck of a lot better than it does the moment, so maybe conservatives just sat back and it's that false sense of security on the left have been realizing they need to burn this down or maybe conservatives have thought actually it's fairly good, and I think it will just continue.

I mean, is that just naivety that's meant conservatives have been asleep on watch?

They have.

And the other thing that's very disturbing is that there's been various polling done that shows the number of committed Christians, self-identifying believers, who do not vote.

They just don't show up.

It's something like 40%. So if 40% of the committed Christians in the country bothered to show up and just vote, what a difference that would make.

There's also, this is unpleasant to say, but it's truthful, so you kind of have to, you got to admit it, is that there's a lot of cowardly pastors as well.

They're afraid, oh, I'm going to lose my nonprofit status as a church if I express a political opinion.

That's a lot of garbage. That isn't true.

You can comment on things that objectively, that morally are objectively right or wrong and let people draw their own conclusion.

Killing children is bad.

It is wrong, objectively, period.

Now, you have a candidate that supports killing children, and then you have one that doesn't.

Pick.

This is not tough stuff, right?

It really isn't.

But there's some pastors who are kind of afraid of their own shadow or they don't want to get out of their comfort zone.

And that's an enormous disservice, really.

And I don't mean that just politically.

I mean that spiritually.

It's a horrible disservice.

They have an obligation to shepherd their flock and to educate and inform and enlighten.

And if they're not doing that, something's very, very wrong.

We see exactly the same in the UK.

I've had numerous conversations with pastors who will agree with you behind closed doors, but publicly it's a fear of man more than the fear of God.

And that puts the church in a dangerous situation.

What has it been like with Judicial Watch?

Camping on these issues and you personally heading up those investigations and campaigns, how does that fit in with the church?

Because in a way, you're highlighting injustices that the church should really be doing.

It should be their job.

And yet you're having to do it as a private organization as opposed to the body of Christ doing it.

Yeah, I mean, so we have a role, and it is a decidedly nonpartisan, nonsectarian, you know, the organization Judicial Watch politically is nonpartisan.

We're philosophically conservative and unapologetic about that.

And likewise, you know, persons of faith or persons who decide no, that they're not, we don't even go there, right?

But we do talk about things that are objectively disordered and things that you can prove to be morally true or false.

And I've done this innumerable times with people.

I don't care what they believe or don't believe, but you can't materially cooperate with evil.

And you can get there in a secular way or you can get there through faith.

Personally, for me, it's through faith.

But I'm willing to engage with anyone and discuss the morals of this.

Years ago, I taught a journalism law class at a university here.

And there's a lot of moral relativism and a lot of, well, you know, that's just how they feel or what they think.

So the way I would try to break through and explain that there is objectively right or wrong is, and a couple of students in particular would be very vociferous in their objection to me talking about right and wrong and good and evil.

And I'd say, well, okay, tell me how rape is good.

Go ahead.

You have the floor.

It shuts down.

No one in their right mind is going to defend that or explain that somehow it is good.

And so there are ways to demonstrate to people that we really do have to make a choice and we have to stand on what we believe.

And if you're a person of faith, frankly, it should be very easy.

We have a wonderful instruction book.

It's called the Bible.

I recommend it to people.

But let's say you reject that and you say, no, no, no. I don't believe all that.

That's just mythology, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay. Well, there's still ways to prove things.

The example I gave you about asking a question on rape or the people that are wrapped up in this crazed, radical gender ideology, you know, they can say whatever they want to say.

And if they say that they believe in science, okay, well, there's chromosomes, right?

It's either XX or XY.

That's it.

You can talk about it endlessly.

You can discuss your dysphoria or whatever other psychological condition you may or may not have.

But the science says the chromosomes show up as XX or XY. And that is it.

So we are able to give examples.

We are able to prove things.

We are able to, and I don't mean that in a demeaning way.

What I'm trying to do is give people encouragement, right?

I want your viewers and listeners to say, wait a minute, maybe there is something I can do.

Maybe I can share my faith or my beliefs with people.

Maybe I can engage with my neighbor, or I can do something with a family member.

I don't know.

Each of us has a way to go forward positively.

What I'm saying and what we've been talking about, my goal and objective is to provide, encouragement and courage to people to go make a difference you don't have to go off and lead you know some big movement you can do it in your very own community.

Everyone can play their part and it's interesting what some of the issues the pro-life issue you can say we're all made in the image of God therefore every life has value or you can look at some of the the scientific background ground of the repercussions of abortion or what actually is life. And so there are all different ways of tackling this issue.

But Chris, I 100% agree that if you look at the Gospels, you see how Jesus lived.

You pick up the Bible, look at the Psalms or Proverbs, and you can see guidelines live.

And the Bible is packed full of that from Genesis to Revelation.

You can't get a better manual in the current chaos than picking up a Bible.

Can I just finish with the issues in this election? It seems that, well, it's the economy, stupid, but that's always been a bread and butter, what people are feeling in their pocket with the paycheck, with the cost.

And And that's had a dramatic change in terms of inflation and chipping away. And the other side is an open border.

I mean, a government's one of their primary duties has to be to protect the citizens.

And you can't protect if you don't control who comes in.

Are those issues still immigration and the economy?

Are those still the two main issues that you think will decide this election?

Absolutely.

Undoubtedly.

They are dominant above all else, I think.

There's also, I think, a third issue that people are sensitive to.

They may not be sort of dissecting it down to specific policies, but there's, generally speaking, there is great unease with wars around the world.

And so obviously Israel is under attack.

Israel is under attack from every angle and is in a precarious position. They're fighting back, and I applaud them for fighting back.

They should.

I have no criticism whatsoever of how Israel has defended itself since October 7th.

I know there's all sorts of people lined up ready to call them names.

You know, don't start wars you can't win, right?

You're going to start a war, you're going to get a reaction from it.

And so just because you're losing doesn't mean you can now, you know, scream, oh, you're being mean to me.

Well, you know, they didn't need to come across that fence on October 7th.

So, now Now they're going to get the reaction from that and all that comes from that. And the other thing is Ukraine.

So we have a wide open southern border with, who knows, 16, 18, 20 million people come in in the last three and a half, almost four years.

So, we're going to spend $180 billion to support Ukraine's border, and we're not going to do a damn thing about our own southern border?

People have a hard time trying to balance that out.

They don't get that.

And I think, you know, without being too controversial, Ukraine is an incredibly corrupt environment.

And Mr. Zelensky is not Churchill, right?

So, again, unpleasant things to talk about, but that's what we have to wrestle with. These are the big questions in front of the American public.

And do you think that.

I mean, the voters seem looking at even polling over the last couple of days and obviously Kamala Hyena Harris had her bounce whenever she got stuck in.

That seems to be dropping away.

I just, I mean, well, she was the border czar, so everything that's happened is on her.

People will see through that inability to understand.

Was it Trump that said about it? He said, oh, Biden has become this way. Harris was born this way, looking this way.

You get those one-liners, you think, oh, genius.

But I think the public will see through them.

And I've even seen quite a lot of clips on CNN and MSNBC see and commentators beginning to call Harris out for what she is, which is just completely out of her depth.

She has not held an actual real press conference since she was anointed by the general secretariat of the central committee.

Since the party decided, without a single vote being cast, the leadership of the party decided that she's the new candidate, right?

So that goes back to the summer.

Now we're getting into the fall now and a month out. And she has not sat in a room with 50 or 100 reporters and said, OK, what do you got?

Let's go. Let me answer some questions for you.

Trump does it every day. And she's hiding and people know that people know, or they have reason to believe that she's not, well-equipped.

That's a good word to use. And even Putin finds her laugh fascinating.

That was so good.

But Chris, she does have to practice her accent.

So come on, she's busy doing that.

She has every, every couple of days, depending upon who she's talking to, she develops a a new dialect, a new accent for the listening audience.

It's quite remarkable.

It really is.

Chris, we find ourselves in strange times, one month out from not only one of the most important elections in the US, but I think for Europe, for the UK, and worldwide, because since the Second World War, we've relied on America being a strong country that speaks truth and has military might to actually back that up.

And at the moment, maybe the US military have got more rainbow laces than actually weapons to fight back.

So it is a key election.

I think it is so important even for the U.K audience to hear what is happening.

So, thank you for giving us your overview of that and touching upon some areas that Judicial Watch is involved.

So, I appreciate your time Chris, so thank you very much

Peter, Thank you very much, it's a pleasure being on with you.

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Show Notes and Transcript

Welcome to Hearts of Oak, where today we're diving into the intricate world of government oversight with none other than Chris Farrell, the head of investigations at Judicial Watch. Join us as we explore Chris's remarkable 25-year journey at the helm of this influential watchdog organization, and his relentless pursuit of transparency and accountability.
Chris Farrell isn't just a name; he's a force in the quest to keep government operations open and honest. With a background in military intelligence, his transition to Judicial Watch marked the beginning of an era where the Freedom of Information Act became a sword against corruption.
In this episode, Chris will unpack how Judicial Watch has evolved, facing both the consistencies and the ever-changing landscape of political oversight. We'll touch on the legal battles fought, the costs associated with seeking truth, and the organization's unwavering commitment to debunking misleading narratives.
From election integrity to the media's portrayal of Judicial Watch's efforts, Chris will shed light on how these battles are fought on multiple fronts. We'll also delve into his view on the ideological divide concerning election accountability and why issues like economic stability and immigration are at the forefront of the upcoming election.

Judicial Watch is a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law. Through its educational endeavours, Judicial Watch advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial officials do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people. Judicial Watch fulfils its educational mission through litigation, investigations, and public outreach

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WEBSITE judicialwatch.org
𝕏 x.com/JudicialWatch @JudicialWatch

Interview recorded 03.10.24

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Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

Hearts of Oak, thank you so much for joining us once again.

I'm delighted to have Chris Farrell, who I think I met maybe two years ago when I was stateside and I had the privilege of being on his show, on Watch.

Obviously, Chris has been with Judicial Watch as their head of investigations for 99.

So it's your 25th anniversary, Chris.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

(Chris Farrell)

That's right.

25 years.

And thank you for having me on.

I appreciate it.

Folks at No Judicial Watch, we're a government watchdog group.

We try to uncover the operations of government and then inform and educate the public about what their government is or is not doing to them or for them.

We try to uncover corruption and we try to hold public officials accountable. That's our mission.

And so I've been here for 25 years.

Before that, in my misspent youth, I was an army intelligence officer focusing mostly on counter espionage investigations, some double agent operations, and also commanding the Army's surveillance team, which we used to do physical, technical, and aerial surveillance for counter-espionage investigations and also for human intelligence collection work.

And so we won the Cold War.

This is all many, many moons ago.

And I decided to leave the intelligence world.

I was a contractor for a while to defense and intelligence agencies, but then in 99 I came to judicial watch and as the saying goes the rest is history.

Well, I guess and people obviously if they're not following half our audiences UK if you're not watching judicial watch you need to watch them.

The freedom of information or foyer as you call them.

We we know them in both countries well, that seek to hold government to account and seek to get answers to those questions they do not want to answer.

But people can obviously get on judicialwatch.org and at Judicial Watch on Twitter and X.

I mean, what led you to Judicial Watch?

Because I guess someone in the military background, it is staying in the private sector, contracting, maybe being in pundit work, so on the media. What led you to actually become part of Judicial Watch?

Back in 98, 99, I was watching the work they were doing.

So, I was just an ordinary private citizen looking at what was going on.

This was sort of the crest of the Clinton scandals.

And then the Clintons had made an art of monetizing their government service.

So, there was a lot of corruption going on.

I looked at the organization, thought they were doing great work, and I used my intelligence skills, my background as a case officer, to identify and approach and pitch the leadership and say, hey, you need me.

And it worked. And here I am.

Were you politically attuned back then?

I was.

I was really a committed conservative, not so much partisan in the sense of being rabidly a party operative or faithful.

I really, in general, frankly, I kind of loathe political parties.

I find them to be probably half of whatever problem we have is the party structure and the party activities and the party egos.

So, I was more philosophically conservative and small C conservative and decided that, you know, there had to be some kind of reform.

We could not continue doing what was going on in our government.

And I was going to try to fight for some accountability and some transparency.

And as my colleague, Paul Orfanides, who's our director of litigation here, likes to say, you know, let's sue the bastards.

And so that appealed to me, and it made sense.

No, I've kind of followed Paul's work, and we've had Tom Fitton on before, and giving the overview of what Judicial Watch do.

Now, I get the work that Judicial Watch do, it doesn't come for free.

I mean, when you get in the legal sphere, in the UK it's expensive, in America it's horrendously expensive and ruinously expensive.

I mean, tell us about that and actually using the system, the legal system, against the system, the government or politics.

Right.

Well, we're very fortunate that our Freedom of Information Act law allows anyone, and I mean that literally anyone, to file a request with any of the executive, agencies of the government and ask questions about public policy matters, decisions.

The commitment of funds.

And so we've really refined that to a science.

We have it down in a way that allows us to make very aggressive use of those laws to get records and documents. Because as you well know, particularly when it comes to politicians.

People lie and records don't.

So we can get records and documents and create a record, get the history of what has occurred.

And then we can have an argument about policy and you can have your opinion and I can have mine.

But in the end, if I pull out the records and documents and show them to you and say, well, here's where the money went or here's where the approval to do something or to decide something.

Here's the documentation of it. it kind of deflates a lot of the hyperbolic rhetoric and the hysterical claims, because you have the record, you have the document.

And so we do that a lot. And we sue the government a lot to compel them to answer our requests.

We also file constitutional claims where there's been some grievous wrong or where some government official has been just out of control with their behavior and actions.

They've abused their office. And then we'll sue those officials as well.

There's a crazy example. Just the other day, we had an argument in the Supreme Court of the state of Minnesota, where all of the teachers, the teachers union and the state had entered into a contract.

And for whatever crazy reason, they had agreed to make the contract racist.

I mean that literally.

So under their definition, if you were a person of color and you were a teacher, you couldn't be fired.

If there were layoffs, you could not be laid off.

If you were, I guess, a person not of color, whatever that means, according to their lexicon, well, then you were the first to be fired or the first to be laid off.

And this to me is just blatant racism.

You're making hiring and firing decisions based on skin pigmentation.

It's insanity.

We fought a civil war over this.

Anyway, so that's an example of lunacy that we feel compelled to challenge and we have in Minnesota.

Again, just an argument in the Supreme Court of Minnesota just this past Tuesday.

Wow.

I want to get on to the current political climate in the US.

But I mean, how have you seen your work change over 25 years with all different administrations, all different government officials, some better than others?

How have you seen your work?

Is it you're focused on actually highlighting injustice and exposing corruption and showing wrongdoing?

Or does it change with different administrations?

Well, there's sort of a core set of things that we always look at.

So, we're always looking for reckless expenditures of money and abuse of power or authority or position.

Those things sort of never change. It doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or Democrat.

You sometimes compare it to, you know, a couple of eight-year-olds fighting over the controls of the Xbox.

You know, they each want to play the game and who's ever in charge.

So there's a certain level of bad behavior, regardless of what your party affiliation is.

But there are some things that are really just crazed, right?

Just really abuses. I think the big lesson, though, over time is that the government has become more and more ingenious on how to obfuscate, hide, lie, mislead the public.

And then on the other side of that same coin, we now see really radical moves to censor people.

And I know that you have your own very sad experiences in the UK with respect to thought control and psychological conditioning of people and what you can or cannot say, which you, in fact, I know I've seen video where a person standing quietly on a street has been arrested because they were silently praying, which I thought was insane.

Orwell's warning in 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual. And that's what we see, obviously, here in the United States, also you in the UK.

But the government going around dictating what can and cannot be said or posted or put on social media.

There's a guy who put up a funny meme, a joke about Hillary Clinton and the election in In 2016, he's sitting in prison.

Wow.

Well, it's crazy. And we have our online safety bill.

Europe have the same legislation and it will come to the US because this seems to be a worldwide desire to control any speech that doesn't fit into whatever current government of the day.

So, and I know on with you, Chris, discussing that in the UK and yeah, it's the free speech restrictions are not just a UK issue.

And I mean, because when you look at your first and second amendments, when you look at the protection that gives you the right to defend yourself, I guess those only work if you have the political will, but even more the judicial will.

Actually, if the courts actually back you up, because if the courts don't back you up, then you're left holding a bit of paper, which is the Constitution, which gives you the right, but if it's not backed up.

And America's walking a very fine line on this issue.

Indeed, yeah. Yeah, the presumption was that the persons in authority or in power would act and behave honestly, and that judges would uphold the rule of law, even if they didn't like it, even if their personal opinion was one way or the other.

They would look at what the law said, or they would look at what the founders intended in the Constitution.

And we could have a discussion about how that isn't what they really meant, or, you know, when it comes to the Second Amendment, they were talking about muskets.

They weren't talking about AR-15s or I've heard all the arguments, right?

But there is a remedy, a lawful remedy to that, which is rather than running to the courts and having a government attorney in a black robe issue an edict, the real solution is go into the legislature and craft a law, get it passed from a bill into a law, and then have the executive sign off on it and exercise the legislative process in order to create a law and not just get frustrated, because you don't like it and then dream up some lawsuit and drop it in front of a friendly judge and get them to sign off on it and issue an edict that affects the entire country.

Well, more and more and more, or we've seen that sort of judicial activism in the United States where, again, lawyers in black robes, government attorneys in black robes, they all draw their paycheck from the U.S. Treasury.

They're not some, you know, they're not up on Mount Olympus, up on high, you know, making decisions.

They're right in the middle of the game.

And three quarters of them are government bureaucrats who come out of one government agency or another.

So they're all sort of political operatives.

And this practice is really corrosive.

It is undermining the public's faith in government.

And it's had a very negative net effect, particularly over the last, I'd say, decade.

12 to 16 years it's it's really been it was bad but now it's crazy.

See that from far away from across the pond.

What is it like, I mean your high profile figure judicial watch is a very well-known organization.

I can imagine government officials getting information from judicial watch and thinking, oh no they're just a pain in the ass.

And that doggedness that I think judicial watch have shown in not walking away from a fight, but always up for it.

That I mean that puts you in the crosshairs of a whole range media, judicial, political, I guess you have had to face attacks from all different angles.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So what's interesting is that, you know, I proudly say that we're equal opportunity offenders.

We have upset everyone, left, right, and center, because we're going to be intellectually honest.

If we're going to ask for travel records about what a president is spending flying around the country or around the world, we're going to ask it of Republicans and Democrats alike.

Not everybody likes that.

Well, tough, right?

We have to be even-handed.

We have to be faithful and truthful to what our mission is.

I once was giving a talk to a group of Francophone African delegates who would come here to the United States.

It's all the former French colonies, obviously. I was explaining what we did.

One gentleman burst out in laughter.

And he said, I apologize.

I'm not laughing at you.

I'm just laughing Because if I tried this in my home country, they would throw me in jail And they probably would.

So, yeah, there are challenges.

There are people who don't want to hear what we have to say.

We have social media, like, you know, TikTok, I think, banned us.

Because we say things, here's the irony.

This isn't just our opinion.

We've sued.

We've used the federal court process to get government records and documents.

These aren't our records.

This is what the United States government or some state government has said.

This is their material.

And they try to run away from it and pretend it isn't their work.

Or they're stenographers in the press.

They're not even reporters.

They're just taking dictation.

You know, they say, well, you know, that just simply can't be true.

I mean, we found 113 illegal aliens that voted in the District of Columbia, here in the nation's capital, voted in the last election.

And we have the registrar of the elections telling us this.

So we promote it.

And we have an entire army of fact checkers running around saying, oh, it isn't true. It's not our work.

The election people told us that the 113 illegals voted.

So, I mean, this is just a small example.

I could go on for literally hours.

I love it the way you use government information against them.

That's what's so beautiful about the work the Judicial Watch do.

Right, right.

This is all their own stuff, you know.

It's so good.

Can I, so we are a month out from the election.

We've just had the VP debate with Jerry Vance and Tim Waltz on, was it CNN it was on, I think?

I mean, looking at that and then the wider election, what are your thoughts on this?

And we'll pick up on a couple of the separate issues, I think.

But yeah, what are your general thoughts just days after that debate?

Well, of course, CBS humiliated themselves yet again.

They promised not to fact check.

And right out of the box, what did they do?

Oh, no, Mr. Vance, what you said isn't true. So, I mean, it shows them for what they are, right?

It's a very unpleasant, but I think revelatory example of them exposing their inner bias.

They can't help themselves.

They're so far off the charts in their manic hatred of Trump and all things on the conservative side of the spectrum that they just, they go on and on.

So that just reveals itself.

What I'm most interested in, of course, is the conduct of the election.

Our Constitution says we have an election day, period, not an election week or an election season or an election month.

And we, the country, the United States, when they go to bed on Tuesday night, the 5th of November, or perhaps into the wee hours, maybe by 2 a.m. On Wednesday, the American public needs to know who the president is.

Period.

This routine where we all are going to count votes for the next week because they may have been postmarked and then somebody else, they didn't sign the mail-in ballot and all this double talk and rigmarole.

Nobody doesn't know when the election is. Nobody doesn't know what they're supposed to do if they're interested in casting their vote.

To play this ridiculous game where there's this never-ending opportunity, I want to be very careful.

So the F word, fraud, has a very specific legal meaning.

It's not just that word.

It's also more euphemistically irregularities, right?

Where all the normal procedures and processes are not followed.

And so you have judges in Pennsylvania saying, well, if the ballot is mailed in and it's not dated and they didn't sign it, well, we can still count it even though it's a week late.

That's craziness.

So we need to have an answer on election night or the wee hours of the next morning.

Judicial Watch has been successful at removing 4 million false and inaccurate registrations from the voting rolls in several different states.

In Los Angeles County, county alone, there were 1.5 million false, inaccurate registrations on the voting rolls.

When you have that level of voting rolls being essentially dirty, It's an invitation for mischief.

It's an invitation for manipulation and gamesmanship.

We can't have it. And so we've been very successful at forcing people to do their jobs and make sure that the voting rolls are true, accurate, and correct.

And if you've died, if you've moved away, if you're a felon, those are reasons not to be on the voting roll.

And the registrars have an obligation to make sure that that is correct.

Yeah, in the UK we don't usually let dead people vote, but I know in the U.S it is...

We have a special voodoo you know kind of undead voting patterns which is very, very troubling.

I've seen that. Well I'm praying looking forward to Trump winning his third term so that in that phrase you get where I sit on on this issue, but we I mean you look at it.

I've been involved in all different elections in the UK, European, parliamentary, local, and it's a rush to get the votes in.

There are what we call paper.

I could hold up a bit of paper for the US viewers.

You put an X with a pen, with a black pen.

But it's, I mean, at what point has it been a long slide in the U.S. In terms of actually this integrity of elections slipping, slipping, because it just didn't start in 2020. It's been happening before then.

Yeah.

So way back in 2000, I'd been at Judicial Watch for about a year, there was a 2000 election that was hotly contested between Al Gore, you'll remember, and Bush the Younger.

Was that the Florida votes they were counting or something?

Right.

And you know the people that caused all that castronation in Florida?

Listen, watch.

We're the ones who did it.

We knew that it was hotly debated.

Yeah.

My colleague, Paul Orfanides, and I, we filed 67 Florida Sunshine Act requests.

So Florida has a state-level open records law that they call the Sunshine Act.

And Paul Orfanides did some research and realized that a ballot in the state of Florida is counted as a public record.

And so we, there's 67 counties in Florida.

So we filed 67 requests since really counties administer the election.

And we asked for access to all the ballots.

And you may remember people were looking at hanging chads and dimpled ballots.

There was much controversy over the actual ballots themselves and whether they were accurate and truthful or whether it was a shenanigans.

So we hired an auditing firm, accountants, and we audited the entire election.

We did sample auditing and we got access to all those ballots.

Now, when all the big news media companies saw what we were doing, I think they were a little jealous.

They jumped in behind us.

And so when the New York Times and ABC and CBS and CNN all show up and suddenly say, me too, we want to see the ballots, we kind of got pushed out of the way just by the weight of the media interests.

But that entire thing was actually created by Judicial Watch because we wanted to know what was going on with those ballots and were they being accurately counted and what is a hanging chad and what is a dimpled ballot and how could that happen? And so our audit said that Bush won by about 800 popular votes. And sure enough, when everything was said and done, the official government tally

Confirmed what we had concluded that bush had won by a very very narrow margin maybe eight or nine hundred votes that's it.

I mean and it is the issues that are important but the issues mean nothing if you're doing the election integrity to back that up.

Right

Look at it and in the UK as in the vast majority of European countries and I know you've done a lot of work in in Hungary so you'll have a an idea of some of the election issues and political issues across Europe, but it is a single country decides and you will have some variations but by and large single country in America it's not just at the federal level.

It's not just the state level, it's the county level, and it means there's so many moving parts to it.

Yeah.

Which actually is a beautiful thing.

It makes stealing an election more difficult, unless you have activist judges and crazed governors like Gavin Newsom, who mailed out ballots to every street address in California.

Talk about asking for irregularities and manipulations of the voting process.

But if people are honest and they stick by the written law and they don't do weird things like like in Wisconsin, where the people administering the election had a meeting.

They're all wearing their little COVID masks sitting there. And they say, we know that we're violating the law, but this is an emergency.

We have to do it anyway.

They flaunted it.

They bragged how they were, they knew that everything that they were doing was not within the scope of the law, and they just didn't give a damn.

They're going to do it anyway.

And was any of that overturned or reject it? No. It was accepted as, oh, well, you know, it's COVID.

So, you know, we don't have to pay attention to the laws and the constitution anymore.

We have to have an exception to everything and we're going to keep counting ballots until we get a number that beats Trump.

I mean, that's really the unspoken part of the irregularities that were going on.

I mean, is it Trump Contrangement syndrome that's just turbocharged this left lunacy, really.

Yeah, just yesterday, the prosecutor, and he's a disgraced prosecutor, I want to be clear. Jack Smith is a clown.

He went after the governor of Virginia.

A few years back, maybe it's 10 or 12 years ago, he went after the governor of Virginia on sort of his own political jihad and ended up removing the sitting governor of Virginia.

And then when the case was appealed, Jack Smith was reversed nine to nothing.

A unanimous Supreme Court said that his entire case was a fraud.

It was a lie.

And he had already removed the Governor of Virginia.

Where does he go to get his reputation back?

Where does he go to get his life back?

But Jack Smith, I mean, you would think that an attorney who had a nine to nothing Supreme Court reject everything he was doing, you would think he'd go move on to do something else in life.

But he's a hatchet man. He's a political operative who's called in to do this kind of dirty work.

And now he's doing it against Trump.

So 30 days before an election, what does he do?

He releases another set of pleadings with all kinds of wild, reckless claims.

And of course, look, just because he puts it in a pleading doesn't mean it's true.

This is not evidence, right?

It's just a claim before a court with with no foundation, with no proof. It's simply, we did interviews and we think this is true.

And he dumps this into the public record a month before the election. If that's that election interference, if that isn't the Department of Justice putting its thumb on the scale and trying to unduly, unlawfully influence an election, I don't know what is.

I mean, how did this become a left-right issue?

Because you would think that you sit and talk to a citizen whatever political persuasion they are and they want to know their vote counts and yet we have this crazy situation in the States where election integrity is called into question.

And it's the left that seem to want to have as many dead people or immigrants vote where it's those in the.

Right that seem to want a fair election.

So only those who are able to vote can vote.

How has this become a left-right issue?

So the left, the people on the left, they are, this is my view, sort of a political philosophy here, but they are, the left are creatures of the state.

They love big government, big programs, big tax dollar, you know, supplements, entitlement payments.

They never saw a program or a project or a government initiative or a government agency that they didn't love.

That's their ecosystem.

They swim around in this environment where they love to use and manipulate the levers of state.

Right.

All the organs of the state, a good Soviet term, they love utilizing that to maximum effect.

That's where they're coming from. On the right, you find a lot of people who are small government people.

They're strict constitutionalists.

They don't believe in never-ending government programs and subsidies and all those sorts of things.

A lot of people on the right will show up to do their government service, whether they're members of Congress or they serve on some county commission, and they do their bit, and then they go home.

They go back to running their business or being part of their community in some way. They don't stay in the statist ecosystem.

And so they're just not oriented.

They don't think and believe and act in the way that folks on the left do.

So of course, The left knows how to use all the different levers of the state, all the agencies, all the tactics and techniques of big government to achieve their ends.

And folks on the right, they're not thinking about it that way.

I've gone out and talked to people who are interested in voting.

And I've said, look, I've got about 24 years of voting, you know, verification and certification experience.

You guys, speaking to people on the right, you guys are great at having your rally a day or two after the election's been lost and protesting.

Right.

All your equal opposite numbers on the left, they've gone and studied all the rules and regulations, all the laws.

They know every single official in the voting chain.

They've met with them.

They've lobbied them. If there's something that goes wrong with the election, they know exactly what paragraph to cite to file their claim, to challenge a vote.

That's their ecosystem.

That's where they live.

And the folks on the right just kind of show up to complain.

It's a very different mentality, and it needs to be addressed directly.

I mean, is it naivety?

Because I guess if you go back a generation, you had a strong church that was vocal, that actually believed what the Bible taught, which is very different today.

You had a legal system that did understand right and wrong. You had individuals engaged maybe at the at the local level, at the community level.

You had an education system that that worked a heck of a lot better than it does the moment, so maybe conservatives just sat back and it's that false sense of security on the left have been realizing they need to burn this down or maybe conservatives have thought actually it's fairly good, and I think it will just continue.

I mean, is that just naivety that's meant conservatives have been asleep on watch?

They have.

And the other thing that's very disturbing is that there's been various polling done that shows the number of committed Christians, self-identifying believers, who do not vote.

They just don't show up.

It's something like 40%. So if 40% of the committed Christians in the country bothered to show up and just vote, what a difference that would make.

There's also, this is unpleasant to say, but it's truthful, so you kind of have to, you got to admit it, is that there's a lot of cowardly pastors as well.

They're afraid, oh, I'm going to lose my nonprofit status as a church if I express a political opinion.

That's a lot of garbage. That isn't true.

You can comment on things that objectively, that morally are objectively right or wrong and let people draw their own conclusion.

Killing children is bad.

It is wrong, objectively, period.

Now, you have a candidate that supports killing children, and then you have one that doesn't.

Pick.

This is not tough stuff, right?

It really isn't.

But there's some pastors who are kind of afraid of their own shadow or they don't want to get out of their comfort zone.

And that's an enormous disservice, really.

And I don't mean that just politically.

I mean that spiritually.

It's a horrible disservice.

They have an obligation to shepherd their flock and to educate and inform and enlighten.

And if they're not doing that, something's very, very wrong.

We see exactly the same in the UK.

I've had numerous conversations with pastors who will agree with you behind closed doors, but publicly it's a fear of man more than the fear of God.

And that puts the church in a dangerous situation.

What has it been like with Judicial Watch?

Camping on these issues and you personally heading up those investigations and campaigns, how does that fit in with the church?

Because in a way, you're highlighting injustices that the church should really be doing.

It should be their job.

And yet you're having to do it as a private organization as opposed to the body of Christ doing it.

Yeah, I mean, so we have a role, and it is a decidedly nonpartisan, nonsectarian, you know, the organization Judicial Watch politically is nonpartisan.

We're philosophically conservative and unapologetic about that.

And likewise, you know, persons of faith or persons who decide no, that they're not, we don't even go there, right?

But we do talk about things that are objectively disordered and things that you can prove to be morally true or false.

And I've done this innumerable times with people.

I don't care what they believe or don't believe, but you can't materially cooperate with evil.

And you can get there in a secular way or you can get there through faith.

Personally, for me, it's through faith.

But I'm willing to engage with anyone and discuss the morals of this.

Years ago, I taught a journalism law class at a university here.

And there's a lot of moral relativism and a lot of, well, you know, that's just how they feel or what they think.

So the way I would try to break through and explain that there is objectively right or wrong is, and a couple of students in particular would be very vociferous in their objection to me talking about right and wrong and good and evil.

And I'd say, well, okay, tell me how rape is good.

Go ahead.

You have the floor.

It shuts down.

No one in their right mind is going to defend that or explain that somehow it is good.

And so there are ways to demonstrate to people that we really do have to make a choice and we have to stand on what we believe.

And if you're a person of faith, frankly, it should be very easy.

We have a wonderful instruction book.

It's called the Bible.

I recommend it to people.

But let's say you reject that and you say, no, no, no. I don't believe all that.

That's just mythology, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay. Well, there's still ways to prove things.

The example I gave you about asking a question on rape or the people that are wrapped up in this crazed, radical gender ideology, you know, they can say whatever they want to say.

And if they say that they believe in science, okay, well, there's chromosomes, right?

It's either XX or XY.

That's it.

You can talk about it endlessly.

You can discuss your dysphoria or whatever other psychological condition you may or may not have.

But the science says the chromosomes show up as XX or XY. And that is it.

So we are able to give examples.

We are able to prove things.

We are able to, and I don't mean that in a demeaning way.

What I'm trying to do is give people encouragement, right?

I want your viewers and listeners to say, wait a minute, maybe there is something I can do.

Maybe I can share my faith or my beliefs with people.

Maybe I can engage with my neighbor, or I can do something with a family member.

I don't know.

Each of us has a way to go forward positively.

What I'm saying and what we've been talking about, my goal and objective is to provide, encouragement and courage to people to go make a difference you don't have to go off and lead you know some big movement you can do it in your very own community.

Everyone can play their part and it's interesting what some of the issues the pro-life issue you can say we're all made in the image of God therefore every life has value or you can look at some of the the scientific background ground of the repercussions of abortion or what actually is life. And so there are all different ways of tackling this issue.

But Chris, I 100% agree that if you look at the Gospels, you see how Jesus lived.

You pick up the Bible, look at the Psalms or Proverbs, and you can see guidelines live.

And the Bible is packed full of that from Genesis to Revelation.

You can't get a better manual in the current chaos than picking up a Bible.

Can I just finish with the issues in this election? It seems that, well, it's the economy, stupid, but that's always been a bread and butter, what people are feeling in their pocket with the paycheck, with the cost.

And And that's had a dramatic change in terms of inflation and chipping away. And the other side is an open border.

I mean, a government's one of their primary duties has to be to protect the citizens.

And you can't protect if you don't control who comes in.

Are those issues still immigration and the economy?

Are those still the two main issues that you think will decide this election?

Absolutely.

Undoubtedly.

They are dominant above all else, I think.

There's also, I think, a third issue that people are sensitive to.

They may not be sort of dissecting it down to specific policies, but there's, generally speaking, there is great unease with wars around the world.

And so obviously Israel is under attack.

Israel is under attack from every angle and is in a precarious position. They're fighting back, and I applaud them for fighting back.

They should.

I have no criticism whatsoever of how Israel has defended itself since October 7th.

I know there's all sorts of people lined up ready to call them names.

You know, don't start wars you can't win, right?

You're going to start a war, you're going to get a reaction from it.

And so just because you're losing doesn't mean you can now, you know, scream, oh, you're being mean to me.

Well, you know, they didn't need to come across that fence on October 7th.

So, now Now they're going to get the reaction from that and all that comes from that. And the other thing is Ukraine.

So we have a wide open southern border with, who knows, 16, 18, 20 million people come in in the last three and a half, almost four years.

So, we're going to spend $180 billion to support Ukraine's border, and we're not going to do a damn thing about our own southern border?

People have a hard time trying to balance that out.

They don't get that.

And I think, you know, without being too controversial, Ukraine is an incredibly corrupt environment.

And Mr. Zelensky is not Churchill, right?

So, again, unpleasant things to talk about, but that's what we have to wrestle with. These are the big questions in front of the American public.

And do you think that.

I mean, the voters seem looking at even polling over the last couple of days and obviously Kamala Hyena Harris had her bounce whenever she got stuck in.

That seems to be dropping away.

I just, I mean, well, she was the border czar, so everything that's happened is on her.

People will see through that inability to understand.

Was it Trump that said about it? He said, oh, Biden has become this way. Harris was born this way, looking this way.

You get those one-liners, you think, oh, genius.

But I think the public will see through them.

And I've even seen quite a lot of clips on CNN and MSNBC see and commentators beginning to call Harris out for what she is, which is just completely out of her depth.

She has not held an actual real press conference since she was anointed by the general secretariat of the central committee.

Since the party decided, without a single vote being cast, the leadership of the party decided that she's the new candidate, right?

So that goes back to the summer.

Now we're getting into the fall now and a month out. And she has not sat in a room with 50 or 100 reporters and said, OK, what do you got?

Let's go. Let me answer some questions for you.

Trump does it every day. And she's hiding and people know that people know, or they have reason to believe that she's not, well-equipped.

That's a good word to use. And even Putin finds her laugh fascinating.

That was so good.

But Chris, she does have to practice her accent.

So come on, she's busy doing that.

She has every, every couple of days, depending upon who she's talking to, she develops a a new dialect, a new accent for the listening audience.

It's quite remarkable.

It really is.

Chris, we find ourselves in strange times, one month out from not only one of the most important elections in the US, but I think for Europe, for the UK, and worldwide, because since the Second World War, we've relied on America being a strong country that speaks truth and has military might to actually back that up.

And at the moment, maybe the US military have got more rainbow laces than actually weapons to fight back.

So it is a key election.

I think it is so important even for the U.K audience to hear what is happening.

So, thank you for giving us your overview of that and touching upon some areas that Judicial Watch is involved.

So, I appreciate your time Chris, so thank you very much

Peter, Thank you very much, it's a pleasure being on with you.

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