#

Gaining in the latest polls, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign unveiled a new tactic — suing the Department of Justice over former President Donald Trump’s prosecution.

Phillip Gordon and Stephen Roberts, lawyers for Vivek 2024, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia last week, claiming DOJ and FBI officials are ignoring their Freedom of Information Act requests for documents connecting Trump’s Jan. 6 prosecution to President Joe Biden’s reelection plans.

The lawsuit was first reported by Court Watch.

Ramaswamy, 38, is a first-time candidate who transformed himself into an anti-woke crusader and Trump apologist. That message has moved him into third place in the ReallClearPolitics polling average.

During a July speech at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, Ramaswamy laid out his plan to completely eliminate the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in part as a response to what he sees as the agency’s politically motivated targeting of Trump. He has also pledged that, if elected, he will pardon the former president, and he has challenged the rest of the GOP field to make the same commitment. 

“Each of our paths to electoral success would be easier if President Trump were eliminated from competition, but that is the wrong result for our country. The fact that we are running against Trump gives us credibility to denounce this politicized prosecution,” Ramaswamy wrote to the other candidates in June.

Trump is facing more than 90 criminal charges in four cases filed this year, but Ramaswamy’s campaign focuses on the Jan. 6 indictments. On Aug. 1, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith unveiled four indictments about Trump’s alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Those charges are conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights. 

The day after the indictments were made public, Ramaswamy’s campaign filed a FOIA request with the DOJ seeking documents that could link the prosecution to Biden’s own political campaign. Ramaswamy’s campaign asked for things like memos, transcripts of conversations, or any other plans in which the DOJ or any other federal agency employee discuss how the prosecutions will impact Biden’s chances and the chances of Democrats in general as well as any communications with outside political organizations.

Ramaswamy’s FOIA covers January 2021 to August 1, 2023. While there is no direct evidence the documents Ramaswamy’s team is seeking actually exist, it’s based on the presumption that Trump’s prosecution is being directed — or at least being done to benefit — Biden and the White House.

“We’re skating on thin ice, and we cannot set a precedent where the party in power uses police force to indict its political opponents. It is wrong, the weaponization of justice in this country,” Ramaswamy said during last month’s presidential debate. 

The lawsuit claims the DOJ, FBI, and the Office of Inspector General (OIG) are breaking the law because they have not provided the documents within the statutory timeframe.

Earlier this month, the DOJ told Ramaswamy’s camp that due to the “unusual circumstances” surrounding the request, it would take longer than the statutory limits to search for the records and respond to the request. According to the lawsuit, that was the last Ramaswamy heard from the DOJ.

The OIG response letter from Aug. 17 promised to respond “as quickly as possible,” but that must be on government time. According to the lawsuit, OIG has gone silent about the request since.

Only the FBI has given Ramaswamy a definitive answer. It said, “No.”

“On August 17, 2023, FBI sent a letter to the Campaign indicating that the portion of the Campaign’s FOIA Request that had been forwarded to the FBI was being closed for being ‘overly broad’ and ‘not provid[ing] enough detail to enable FBI personnel to locate records with a reasonable amount of effort,’” the lawsuit states.

In another federal case, Trump is facing 40 indictments alleging he took classified documents from the White House when he left office, hid them at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, and lied to FBI agents about the documents.

There are another 34 charges filed against him in New York over the alleged scheme to pay off his mistress, pornstar Stormy Daniels. 

In Georgia, Trump is charged in a RICO case alleging he and others, like former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani, conspired to overturn election results in the Peach State through a campaign of intimidation and overall criminality. 

Despite his legal jeopardy, Trump has a solid lead in the GOP primary race and is favored to win the nomination. Two new polls were released Sunday, one from The Washington Post and ABC News, another from NBC News. In the latter, Trump had the backing of 59 percent of GOP primary voters nationwide. In the former, Trump is at 54 percent with the GOP and beat Biden in a head-to-head match-up of 52 to 42 percent.

Meanwhile, Ramaswamy’s fortunes appeared to be fading. He was at just two percent in the NBC News poll and three percent in the Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Tuesday night Gov. John Kasich was on the set of “Cuomo Primetime” with Chris Cuomo, a show that regularly features liberal commentators like Paul Begala, Sally Kohn and Bill Press. Their topic Tuesday night–and every night–is how horrible Donald Trump is and, by extension, how awful the Republican Party is.  Cuomo linked Trump to the “white nationalist” comments of Iowa Congressman Steve King and called him the most untrustworthy person in politics he’d ever seen. Kasich nodded, sighed and largely agreed.

It was the beginning of John Kasich’s career as a paid political analyst for CNN and the end of his campaign for president as a Republican.

Short of volunteering to testify at President Trump’s impeachment hearings, it’s hard to imagine anything the former Ohio governor could do that would damage his viability in the GOP more than going to work for CNN. He and his team must realize how much the Republican base reviles the network of Anderson Cooper and Jim Acosta.  Even MSNBC would be less damaging to Kasich with the GOP base because they view it as openly partisan and, therefore, accept its biases as fair play.

CNN, on the other hand, continually pushes the blatantly #FakeNew that it’s a nonpartisan news platform.  Given its overt, tireless anti-Trump bias (it was the home of Trump-decapitating comedian Kathy Griffin and anti-Trump obsessive Don Lemon) this claim of objectivity drives many conservatives crazy.

Plus–it’s Trump’s target number one.  And John Kasich, who ran for the GOP nomination just three years ago, chooses to go to work for them?  It’s a great way to give Trump the finger, but a lousy way to win the GOP nomination.

“Stick a fork in him, he’s done,” says GOP consultant and longtime NH player Dave Carney. “He’s a non-starter.”

Several other NHGOP politicos agreed. “I don’t know what he’s thinking,” one told NHJournal. “Even if he spends all his airtime bashing Trump instead of the GOP, Republican primary voters are going to hate him for it.”

They weren’t loving him before. A poll of Republicans last year gave Trump a 62-27 margin over Kasich in a primary. Which wouldn’t be so bad…except these were Ohio Republicans.

“Amongst Republicans in New Hampshire who would like to see a challenge to the president, John Kasich rates the highest,” Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics told WMUR-TV. “The problem is that he only rates at 9 percent, and the president has a solid 70 percent backing right now amongst Republicans.”

Still, John Kasich is slightly more popular than the Cable News Network.  When asked to name their most trusted news source, only 3 percent of Republicans named CNN.

A Republican activist told NHJournal “Being the Republican who hated Trump the most isn’t going to win you points among the base, even if Trump does crash and burn. ‘I told you so’ is rarely a winning message. Kasich will be in their face, every night on a network they hate, reminding them he’s not on their team. It might be good TV but it’s terrible politics.”