A dark cloud hangs over the nation

By Larry Klayman

Twice in the last two weeks I have traveled to Washington, D.C., an increasingly dark place where I lived continuously for over 25 years beginning in 1979. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that during these recent trips, gray storm clouds hung over the city.

During my multi-decade history in this ever-increasing capital of corruption, I first was a Justice Department trial attorney and prosecutor who was on the trial team that broke up the AT&T telephone monopoly and enforced food and drug, agricultural, banking, aviation and consumer protection laws.

In a few years , growing disillusioned with so-called government service, which I came to view a politically compromised, I left to join a boutique international trade law firm and later opened my own law firm. Fighting against government deceit on behalf of my private clients and experiencing a myriad of hack judges, especially on the federal bench, I conceived of and founded Judicial Watch on July 29, 1994, out of desperation. If I had not taken up the mantle as the “anti-lawyer” at Judicial Watch, I would have quit the profession; that is how disillusioned I had become over the lack of intellectual integrity and honesty in not just the government but the legal profession in general.

As I write about in my autobiography, “Whores: Why and How I Came to Fight the Establishment,” I used Judicial Watch not just to watch over judges and try to hold them accountable to the Constitution and the rule of law in general, but also petition judges to rule over and serve as a check to the other two branches of government – the executive and legislative branches. In effect, I had created a private Justice Department for the People, not the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., and our state capitals.

Over the course of the next 10 years while I was at the helm of Judicial Watch, we experienced a number of successes, in particular holding Bill and Hillary Clinton to account for their over 40 major scandals while in office. In this regard, I am the only lawyer in American history to actually have a court rule that a sitting president of the United States committed a crime. This came with a decision by one of the few non-politicized federal judges worthy of having been put on the bench, the Honorable Royce C. Lamberth, who found that President Clinton had committed a crime when he released the White House file of a woman, Kathleen Willey, whom he had harassed in the Oval Office. This was a violation of the Privacy Act.

But growing weary over time with the government’s inaction in meting out justice for the corrupt likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, I left Judicial Watch on Sept. 19, 2003, to run for the U.S. Senate in my home state of Florida. My idea was to take the concept of Judicial Watch inside the Senate chamber – with a staff of nearly 100, as Florida had grown to the third-largest state in population by then – in effect, to create a law firm, much like a Trojan Horse, to mete out justice from within the belly of the government beast.

I did not win election to the Senate, largely because it was not the right time for me to run. I had just gone through a divorce and was not mentally or financially prepared to take on President George W. Bush’s election machine that greased the path of the eventual winner, Mel Martinez, who had been W’s secretary of housing and urban development. In addition, an individual I had left behind at Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, who then seized control of the public interest group I had founded, did all he could to harm me and my family. In my opinion, Fitton, a non-lawyer, feared that I would overshadow him as U.S. senator. The scar tissue this “feud” engendered continues to this day, 16 years later.

After the Senate campaign, I moved briefly to Cleveland, Ohio, and joined a conventional Republican law firm to be closer to my two young children who had moved there with my ex-wife. But in just about nine months, realizing that I could not morph into and be a conventional lawyer, I moved back to Miami, Florida, and reopened my private practice. Later, I founded Freedom Watch, a name I borrowed from the television drama “West Wing.” Its executive producer, Aaron Sorkin, had created a character fashioned after me named Harry Klaypool of Freedom Watch.

This remains my calling today. At Freedom Watch I have scored some major victories in the last years: enjoining the Obama Deep State National Security Agency from unconstitutional mass surveillance, participating in a case that legally killed Obama’s executive order granting amnesty to over 5 million illegal aliens, playing a major role in having the indictment of Cliven Bundy and his sons dismissed and successfully defending Dr. Jerome Corsi during the recent witch hunt of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to name just a few successes.

But despite this, my visits back to the capital of corruption these last two weeks, marred by gray skies and a continuing witch hunt against the 45th president of the United States and his family, all to subvert the Constitution, heightened within me my metastasized concern over the deep decline in not just our body politic, but the cancerous state of the nation as a whole.

And, that is why, like Wyatt Earp, a lawman and U.S. marshal who was forced to justifiably break the law to enforce the law in the old west, We the People are at a crossroads, with the nation’s survival at stake. While my modus operandi is to peacefully and legally take out the outlaws before they take us out, the time has come for very strong action.

Yes, we are headed for a “legal shoot out” at the “Not OK Corral,” to eliminate the criminals who are running our nation into the ground. Washington, D.C., a dark place, is today more akin to Tombstone, Arizona, in the days of Wyatt Earp than the shining city on a hill envisioned by our Founding Fathers and later aspired to by President Ronald Reagan.

Go to www.freedomwatchusa.org to join and support our Justice League to do just that!

Larry Klayman

Larry Klayman is a former Justice Department prosecutor and the founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch. His latest book is "It Takes A Revolution: Forget the Scandal Industry!" Read more of Larry Klayman's articles here.


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