On Oct. 31, 2020, Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, sent a memo to then-President Donald Trump, encouraging the president to declare victory before a single vote was counted.
“We had an election today — and I won,” the prepared draft statement for the president read.
The memo indicates a plan to only recognize the votes counted by the “Election Day deadline” as legitimate—never mind that there’s no such thing as an “Election Day deadline.”
Shortly after 5 p.m. on Election Day, Fitton sent an email, confirming that he had spoken to Trump about the memo.
These findings were presented during the House select committee’s ninth hearing held Thursday and, taken along with comments from Steve Bannon and Roger Stone and testimony from Greg Jacobs, were evidence that Trump had a premeditated plan to declare victory whether or not he had the votes.
It was the first time Fitton’s name had appeared in the hearing, but Fitton has long been spreading noxious conspiracy theories about voter fraud, leading efforts to wipe voter rolls, and rolling back voting rights through his organization Judicial Watch. He spent much of Trump’s tenure in office appearing on right-wing media programs to rail against the “deep state” and demand the exoneration of the president and his allies, and he’s perfected his propaganda pitch.
Decked out in his uniform of a short-sleeve polo shirt, the buff Judicial Watch president often appears in front of the camera to spread his theories in videos to his 1.5 million followers on Twitter. Like Trump, he tweets incessantly. This has found Fitton popularity among conservative media, right-wing conference audiences, and Republican lawmakers who have invited his testimony at congressional hearings and echoed his talking points.
Fitton and his group’s efforts to diminish voting rights began long before the 2020 election. Judicial Watch is part of a network of well-funded conservative nonprofits, including the Heritage Foundation, True the Vote, and the Public Interest Legal Foundation, that work behind the scenes to spread false claims of voter fraud and pressure local election officials to purge voter rolls.
With an annual budget of approximately $35 million, Judicial Watch acts as a right-wing legal and comms shop that almost exclusively targets Democrats with FOIA requests, lawsuits, and media. Its funders include the Bradley Foundation, DonorsTrust, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. According to Source Watch, in 2021, Judicial Watch distributed grants to the American Conservative Union, the Council for National Policy, and Turning Point USA—right-wing groups that have gone all-in for Trump.
In a Right Wing Watch report, journalist Bob Moser exposed Fitton’s efforts to roll back access to the polls. It began with propaganda.
Taking the stage at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference, shortly after Trump won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, Fitton suggested that undocumented immigrants were voting in mass numbers. “The left would have you believe that we have about 43 million aliens in this country, both lawful and unlawfully present,” he said. “And none of them vote!”
“You know, under the Obama administration, they opposed voter ID; they opposed the idea of even asking someone whether they were a citizen before they register to vote,” Fitton continued. “Why would you be opposed to that, other than maybe wanting to steal elections when necessary?”
As if to foreshadow the right’s plan in 2020, Fitton alleged that votes were being “stolen.” “We’re on the side of the civil rights of Americans who potentially are having their votes stolen from them by the thousands, if not millions, by illegal votes,” he said.
Of course, Trump established a commission to find voter fraud in 2017. It folded after a mere eight months having failed to have found any evidence of widespread fraud.
Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Judicial Watch teamed up with the Public Interest Legal Foundation, sending hundreds of letters “to state and local election officials across the country, threatening lawsuits if they didn’t undertake massive, aggressive ‘purges’ of their voter rolls,” Moser reported.
As COVID-19 spread throughout the country and states instituted mail-in voting for the safety of their citizens, Fitton continued to fearmonger about mail-in voting, suggesting, as Trump did, that it was a ploy by Democrats to steal the election.
Fitton’s fearmongering about voter fraud and vigorous defense of Trump did not go unnoticed by the former president, who would regularly retweet Fitton.
Right Wing Watch reported that the day before the election, Fitton had been on Fox Business with host Lou Dobbs, warning of what he called “last gasp” efforts to “subvert” a Trump victory by counting votes after Election Day.
On the morning of Nov. 4, after Trump had prematurely declared victory, Fitton made the same baseless claim he urged Trump to make in his memo. “Needlessly and purposefully delaying the counting of ballots until after Election Day is strong evidence of malintent,” Fitton claimed on Twitter. “Election Day, by federal law, is on Nov. 3,” he said in another tweet. “Not Nov. 4 nor Nov. 6, etc,”
This was bogus. As Rep. Zoe Lofgen noted in her presentation of evidence, everyone knew that it would take days to count millions of legitimate mail-in and absentee votes and declare a winner in numerous states.
This was the “red mirage” at work. Mail-in ballots are often counted after in-person ballots—some state laws forbid election officials from beginning to count early ballots before Election Day—and with Democrats more concerned about safety during the pandemic while Trump spread misinformation about mail-in ballots, mail-in voting was widely understood to be dominated by Democratic voters. Republicans knew this and knew that more of their people would vote in person on Election Day, creating the impression that they had a lead in the polls. As much was said by Bannon in recently unearthed audio recording. Fitton and other Trump allies’ communications show that the plan to declare victory on the night of the election and call for an end to counting was effectively a premeditated plot to disenfranchise millions of voters.
On Nov. 4, 2020—shortly after Trump had falsely declared victory—far-right activist Ali Alexander floated the idea of rebooting the so-called “Stop the Steal” campaign. He called on a few key figures associated with the shadowy right-wing network Council for National Policy, including Tom Fitton. He had good reason to think Fitton would be a key ally: Less than a month earlier, Fitton had tweeted, “Stop the Steal…” in a video alleging Democrats would “steal” the election.
On Friday, Fitton responded to the Jan. 6 committee’s inclusion of his memo by claiming that Judicial Watch was a target of “full-blown assault on the First Amendment” and trying to divert attention to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by suggesting the Capitol attack was her fault.
“Abusive Jan 6 show trial ‘hearings’ sputtered to a conclusion with desperate attack on Trump,” Fitton claimed on Twitter.
Fitton hasn’t relented in waging war on voting. During his 2021 CPAC address, Fitton declared that “Voting by mail should be generally ended.” And in 2022, Fitton became the president of the Council of National Policy, whose members were prominent in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election results.