As the outset, I want to say how much I respect The Hill and its Editor in Chief, Bob Cusack. Unlike many in the media, this print and internet publication generally makes a conscious effort to report fairly and accurately. Unfortunately, even unbiased professional news organizations sometimes get their facts wrong, and during this period of heavy political and legal activity with the new Trump administration, and attempts by the Democrats on Capitol Hill and elsewhere to delegitimize and obstruct it, it is understandable that in the press of business “mistakes” in reporting would be made.
What I am talking about concerns me in a personal way. On Jan. 31, 2017, a young reporter of The Hill, who was assigned to write a profile about me, published a piece that in my view was in many instances factually incorrect and showed a palpable bias. This reporter generally covers national security issues and apparently depends on intelligence agency sources for her stories. In this regard, it is widely known that my group Freedom Watch and I have had a proverbial legal knife to the throats of the National Security Agency (“NSA”) and Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) over what whistleblowers Edward Snowden and my client Dennis Montgomery alleged and disclosed was the massive illegal surveillance of hundreds of millions of American citizens, including Supreme Court justices, judges, prominent businessmen including President Donald Trump and other prominent public figures such as yours truly.
{mosads}In this regard, we were the first to sue these agencies for a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as spying without probable cause that a crime is being committed or communications with terrorists are occurring, is patently illegal. Yet, this is what our intelligence agencies were doing. Incredibly, then Director of National Intelligence (“DNI”), James Clapper, when asked whether this was occurring during a congressional oversight hearing, lied under oath and denied it.
As a result, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia entered two preliminary injunctions barring this illegal conduct. The judge called it “almost-Orwellian,” that is reminiscent of George Orwell’s famous book “1984.” He added that this type of unconstitutional misconduct could not be permitted in a democracy.
In her profile, the Hill national security reporter downplayed the judge’s courageous and historic ruling, which led to the enactment of the USA FREEDOM Act, which now provides some protections against this unconstitutional spying. I believe that she did this because of her relationship with sources in the intelligence agencies, who have also tried to destroy the reputation of my client Dennis Montgomery, who is cooperating with a high level FBI investigation of alleged criminal conduct by former DNI chief Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, among others. Having obtained immunity for Montgomery, a former NSA/CIA contractor to come forward with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of material allegedly showing these crimes, Montgomery and I represent a major threat to the previously unbridled discretion of these lawless agencies to spy on anyone they please.
While I may be wrong, I do firmly believe that this is why the young Hill reporter wrote was in effect a hit piece profile of me; to try to curry favor with her sources at the NSA, CIA in particular.
In this regard, the profile gives the reader the impression that I have never won a lawsuit and only partially won the case before Judge Leon – which is going forward to a jury trial – over my 40 year career. This false impression is one that I would have expected to be written by a publication such as the very leftist Washington Post, although ironically the one that was penned by Post reporter David Montgomery a few years ago as a cover story to the Washington Post Weekend Magazine, was much fairer and positive than The Hill piece.
To set the record straight, over my long legal career, I served as a trial lawyer and prosecutor in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice during the Reagan administration and I was on the trial team that succeeded in breaking up the AT&T monopoly in the communications industry, creating competition, an array of new innovative products, and lowering prices for consumers. I later, after spending two years with a boutique international trade law firm, opened my own private practice and won virtually every international trade case I defended (I am in favor of free trade generally) before the U.S. International Trade Commission (“ITC”) and the U.S. Department of Commerce (“DOC”). Indeed, it was this prior experience which led me to believe that the DOC, under the corrupt Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, was illegally selling seats on DOC subsidized trade missions to China and elsewhere.
After I founded Judicial Watch, I uncovered through the use of Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests that Brown was selling these seats at the direction of the Clintons, most notably Hillary, to raise campaign money for her husband’s presidential reelection campaign in 1996. In so doing, the Clintons had inserted into the DOC an individual who was believed to be part of Chinese intelligence, named John Huang. Huang had previously worked at the Democratic National Committee with its then chairman, (you guessed it!) Ron Brown. This revelation, which was the result of my legal efforts, sparked one of the biggest scandals in American history and gave rise to a joint congressional investigation, which ultimately led to the enactment of the McCain-Feingold Bill, which while flawed, tried to curtail illegal foreign political fundraising.
During my tenure at Judicial Watch, among many other victories, I also became the only lawyer to obtain a court ruling that a sitting president of the United States had committed a crime; Bill Clinton when he released publicly the confidential White House Privacy Act protected file of a woman he had allegedly sexually harassed in the Oval Office to try to discredit her during the Lewinsky scandal, which ultimately led to the President’s impeachment.
You can read all about this in my autobiography “Whores: Why and How I Came to Fight the Establishment,” which was widely acclaimed and which has a four and one half out of five star rating on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It also placed as runner up in a prestigious international book fair. The young Hill reporter was provided with my book and if she had bothered to read it, rather than parroting hit pieces by leftist rags such as “Right Wing Watch,” and “Wonkette” she perhaps might have been inclined to write about my many successful legal accomplishments over my continuing career. In addition to the major NSA case success, on behalf of our client Sheriff Joe Arpaio Freedom Watch and I were the early driving force in having President Obama’s illegal executive orders granting “amnesty” to over five million illegal aliens ruled illegal, a finding that was later upheld by the Supreme Court. These are no small legal successes!
There were many other omissions and factual errors, including typos, in her profile tilted “Larry Klayman: Why I Am Not Scared!” and when I brought them to the attention of The Hill, some were corrected.
But I have to thank Editor in Chief Bob Cusack for giving me this important opportunity to set the record straight. He is a fine and honest gentlemen and The Hill is an important and informative publication which I will continue to respect.
From Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch founder