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| Who is watching the watchdog? |
Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that
bills itself as a nonpartisan, educational organization devoted to holding
officials accountable because ‘no one is above the law,’ was founded in 1994. Although
it claims to be funded by thousands of individual donations, its biggest donor
is the conservative Scaife Foundation, founded by the late conservative
billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Its first director was Larry Klayman, a
right-wing activist and former Justice Department lawyer, is most noted for the
endless filing of lawsuits designed to harass targeted officials and the dozens
of lawsuits against the Clinton Administration in the 1990s. He even filed a
lawsuit against his own mother.
In the early 2000s, Klayman broke with Judicial
Watch and went into private practice, continuing his crusade of law suits and
conspiracy theories.
Judicial Watch, however, continues under new
management, and although it has taken on the occasional Republican, such as
efforts to get Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force meeting minutes,
most of the organization’s efforts are still aimed at leftist and liberal
organizations, causes, and individuals, including the Obama Administration and
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. It has been key to the
continued flow of ‘news’ about the Clinton Foundation’s influence on the State Department
during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, using Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) requests to access documents, and then providing those
documents; or often manipulated versions of them; to the media, which then runs
with the story, with no evidence that any attempt is made to verify them or
check their veracity. As an example, recent newspaper articles and editorials
discussing emails between a Clinton aide and a senior Clinton Foundation
official, seemed to indicate that a visa was issued to a UK soccer player based
on pressure from the foundation official on behalf of a major donor to the
foundation. Left out of some of the news reporting was the fact that the
Clinton aide was reluctant to even pursue the issue, and the visa was not
issued. One article did mention it, but it was buried deep in the article, and
was probably missed by most readers. Judicial Watch is often briefly mentioned
in media coverage, but not identified as the major source of the information.
Judicial Watch has also been the driving force
behind many of the disclosures regarding the 2013 Benghazi attack and Hillary
Clinton’s use of a private server when she was secretary of state.
While it calls itself nonpartisan, a look at its web page would seem to tell a
different story. The vast majority of its court filings and press releases are
anti-Obama, anti-liberal, anti-immigration, and most telling, anti-Clinton. In
June, 2016, Charity
Navigator, a web site that rates non-profits, gives Judicial Watch an
overall rating of 75.28 out of 100, or two stars, and a rating of 74.00 for
accountability and transparency. As bad as this is, it’s a significant increase
from the 48.50 (no star) rating it got in December 2002.
Given all this, one has to wonder why the media
continues to recycle Judicial Watch information with no more fact-checking than
it does. The only answer I can come up with is that these are ‘hot’ news items
that are guaranteed to attract readers. As long as the good dirt keeps flowing,
the stories will continue to run.
If the media is not holding the organization accountable
for its actions—who is?
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