The Judicial Watch Foundation has announced a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) related to records of what it alleges was election censorship collusion between state actors and private tech companies, universities, and various organizations.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit’s purpose is to obtain records documenting communications within what’s known as the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).
The Judicial Watch, Inc. v. US Department of Homeland Security has been filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, after the DHS ignored the foundation’s FOIA request from back in late October 2022.
The information sought in the original request – which Judicial Watch now hopes to obtain in court – pertains to all communications (emails, DMs, etc) between the EIP and the DHS, at any level, but also covers communications with any social media company.
On top of that, eight other universities and organizations are included in the filing – the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, the Center for Internet Security, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, the National Association of Secretaries of State, the National Association of State Election Directors, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory.
The way the DHS is believed to have communicated with these entities is via the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (that also receives funding from the US Defense Department), with a tool made by Atlassian – an Australian piece of software designed to let teams collaborate on projects.
And the project they collaborated on in this instance, Judicial Watch is convinced, is “election interference and censorship of Americans,” as the group’s president, Tom Fitton put it.
Judicial Watch has been butting heads with the current US administration for a while, notably with another lawsuit filed in January 2023, this time naming the Department of Justice in order to obtain documents of communications the FBI and social media companies had regarding the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, as well as what these companies and government agencies actually file under “foreign influence on elections.”
