'Judicial Watch' Weirdo Tom Fitton Starts Dumb Slap Fight With FBI Weirdo Kash Patel, Cries

It's another MAGA CIVIL WAR!!!

Break out your recordings of “Ashokan Farewell,” the poignant theme from that Ken Burns documentary, because there’s a new MAGA Civil War brewing between idiot FBI Director Kash Patel and idiot Trump “legal advisor” Tom Fitton (Archive link; may not work on all browsers). Fitton is no more a lawyer than Patel is a cop, but he’s a longtime rightwing asshole beloved by Donald Trump, and heads the vexatious litigation factory “Judicial Watch.”

The latest MAGA civil war, or feud, or perhaps squirmish, involves something Fitton and his legal trolls thought they’d found in a 48-page cache of heavily redacted Justice Department documents about the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The documents, which are redacted to the point of near-incoherence, don’t contain any smoking guns (especially not any from a second gunman), but since Judicial Watch went to the trouble of filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the group nonetheless trumpeted the few barrel-bottom scrapings they found in a June 5 “Trump Assassination Attempt Update!”

That initial press release claimed that the files “revealed” that Thomas Crooks, the guy who was shot to death after nicking Trump’s ear and killing a fireman in the crowd, had supposedly “exchanged emails” with a deputy in the Butler County Sheriff’s Department at some point prior to the assassination attempt, and wouldn’t that be a huge story if true? Why was Crooks talking to law enforcement before the attempt on Trump’s life, why did the deputy write back to the would-be assassin, what did they talk about, and why has this information been suppressed until Judicial Watch “forced” the DOJ to admit it? WHY???

Simply put, no, Crooks didn’t email anyone in the Butler County Sheriff’s office. Fitton and his legal kleagles just saw some heavily redacted documents, played Mad Libs with what was missing, and guessed wrong. That said, the FBI’s redactions to the documents were so overzealous that it’s not at all surprising that Fitton & his Fool Squad came to the wrong conclusion.

Also, no Libs were actually Mad.

---

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

---

Here’s the confusingly redacted smoking gun leaky water pistol document that Judicial Watch decided was about Crooks exchanging emails with someone in the sheriff’s office. Fact check: The file doesn’t say anything of the sort. It’s an email from an unidentified someone, sent to the FBI during the investigation.

This was the most [redacted] alt-text I’ve ever done for an image.

Not a lot to go on there, but you might notice the mention of the writer’s not recognizing Crooks from media reports, and their expectation that he would probably have completed an engineering program. Gosh, do sheriff’s deputies generally give a lot of thought to suspects’ career prospects?

Immediately following that document in the files, we find the red herring that sent Fitton and his detective droogs down the wrong rabbit hole, mixing metaphors like a Cuisinart in a crossfire hurricane. A cover letter and other documents discuss a digital recording of interviews with “5 Deputies of the Butler County Sheriff's Office,” noting that the disc was attached to the cover materials. The contents of the interviews with the deputies aren’t summarized.

However, the very next page is a summary of an FBI interview with someone — clearly the author of the email above. As far as we can tell, it has fuck-all to do with the recorded interviews of the sheriff’s deputies. The geniuses at Judicial Watch simply assumed that it did, because it was the next document in the file. (Maybe the fact that it’s a summary of one interview, not five separate interviews, should have been a clue!)

In its first press release, Judicial Watch happily and sloppily conflated the two completely different interviews, completely overlooking the detail that the deputies were interviewed on July 16, and the unidentified emailer person was interviewed on July 17. Since no other outlets seem to have noticed that, let’s call it a WONKETTE EXCLUSIVE.

Not pausing to note that discrepancy, the press release simply barges ahead with the assumption that the person who emailed Crooks had to be one of the five deputies. From the article:

Fitton was quick to take to Twitter with the news, on Saturday, although to his partial credit he later deleted it and admitted “our original analysis was incorrect.”

DON’T DO STEROIDS, KIDS

On Sunday, the shitlords running the FBI’s “Rapid Response” account on Twitter laced into Judicial Watch, explaining that the redacted interview summary wasn’t with deputies, but with a college instructor!!! Patel also retweeted the message on his own account, adding the comment “Facts over click bait.”

Also, just to prove that it’s still Kash Patel’s FBI comms office, though, the Rabid Responders got the number of instructors wrong. As far as we can tell, there was just the one.

By the time we grabbed the screenshot, Tom Fitton had deleted his tweet claiming Thomas Crooks had exchanged emails with a deputy.

Hilariously, MAGA chuds added an inaccurate “community note” citing Judicial Watch’s initial, inaccurate report that a “deputy reported two email communications with Thomas Crooks, subject redacted.” That whole “let Twitter users be the moderators” thing is working out just great.

Also, it’s kind of a dick move to redact a document far more than necessary just to protect a witness’s identity, and then to yell at Fitton for failing to spend “more time on Facts instead of clicks.”

Fitton then grumbled that it was super unfair of Kash Patel to have retweeted the “malicious, false and juvenile FBI post,” and whined that Judicial Watch had “fairly interpreted heavily redacted documents” from the FBI and DOJ, which nah, his worker bees jumped to conclusions. He did, as we say, update the press release and delete his earlier tweets, but he was still sore that the FBI called him a liar “based on secret material which you have withheld from us and the court.” He also demanded an apology, because how dare anyone besmirch-smear the high-minded trolls of Judicial Watch.

So in this case, the juvenile malicious shitlords in the FBI comms office appear to have caught Tom Fitton being WRONG on the INTERNET. That doesn’t make either party any more credible, but it’s at least a little amusing to watch supporters of Fitton and of Patel tear into each other in the Twitter replies, the end.

---

Trump Says He Magically Transformed Government Docs Into Personal Records By Stealing Them. So, We're Cool?

---

[Daily Beast (archive link) / Mediaite / Judicial Watch FOIA docs]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time (or recurring) donation, you can click this here button.