Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy announced Tuesday night that he has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice following its “failure to substantively respond” to his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking communications between Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Special Counsel Jack Smith.
During an interview on Fox News’s “Ingraham Angle” Tuesday night, Ramaswamy explained that he was trying to “get to the bottom” of what Biden and Garland told Smith regarding the indictment in the classified documents case. The entrepreneur told host Laura Ingraham that he doesn’t think Smith’s investigation is as independent as advertised.
“I do not believe that this special veil of a special prosecutor is really as separate as they’re making it out to be,” he said. “The truth of the matter here is this is a politicized prosecution.”
Ramaswamy said he also just filed a separate FOIA request with the DOJ to uncover similar communications related to the just-issued Jan 6 Trump indictment.
“This sets an awful precedent in this country. They’re going full Banana Republic, full third world on this,” Ramaswamy declared.
He noted that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 2012 U.S. v. Alvarez case that political candidates have a First Amendment right to knowingly make false statements.
Ramaswamy also argued that the indictment also sets a dangerous precedent by criminalizing the behavior of four co-conspirators, widely believed to be lawyers, who were merely “giving good-faith legal advice to Trump.”
“If you’re going to indict a former president and leading presidential candidate, it better not be based on unprecedented legal theory. Further, it’s more than a stretch to call something criminal if someone is seeking legal counsel from their own lawyers,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Ramaswamy also pointed out that the trial’s outcome is a foregone conclusion given its Washington D.C. location.
“This choice of jurisdiction and venue matters deeply and I think Jack Smith knows exactly what he’s doing,” he told Ingraham.
The truth of the matter here is they’re not going to stop going until they get him going or get him coming, and I say this as someone who is running against Trump. I’m polling at third in the Republican primary now. It would be easier for me if Donald Trump were eliminated from competition. That is not how any of us should want to win because that is bad for this country. That’s why I think it’s important for us competing against Trump to take a strong stand against these politicized indictments.
Ramaswamy said the results of the 2024 election needs to be a “1980 style Reagan landslide” to achieve the moral mandate required to drain the swamp.
“That’s why I’m running,” he said. “If I am elected, you have my pledge Laura that we will open this kimono up, roll that log over and see what crawls out. From the Jeffrey Epstein client list to what’s happened in these [Trump] cases, we the public can handle the truth.”
I just filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice following its failure to substantively respond to my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to uncover what White House officials including President Joe Biden communicated to Merrick Garland & Jack Smith about the… pic.twitter.com/7MPaLYrqHB
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) August 2, 2023