Larry Klayman’s Untold Triumph
Larry Klayman’s Untold Triumph
How the serial litigator secured criminal convictions against President Biden and members of his family—sort of.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN HAS BEEN TRIED AND CONVICTED on multiple felony charges, along with his son Hunter and brother James. Sentencing was initially slated for August 29, but that has now been pushed back to September 7.
These three members of the “Biden Crime Family,” as it is known, were convicted on August 17 after a bench trial in a Citizens’ Court in Boise, Idaho, presided over by Citizens’ Judge Michael Pendleton, of charges returned by a Citizens’ Grand Jury nearly two years earlier. The prosecutor in the case was Larry Klayman, founder of the groups Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch. The defendants put on no defense, which Klayman took as an admission that their actions—crimes, really—were indefensible.
“Prior to the trial which led to their convictions, Joe, Hunter and James Biden were notified of their right to appear, plead guilty, not guilty or nolo contendere, as well as appear at trial to defend themselves, through counsel or pro se,” Freedom Watch stated in a press release. “Apparently, having no respect for the legal authority and rights of the America [sic] people, neither they nor their legal counsel appeared at any time, and thus they were tried in absentia.”
Joe Biden was convicted of “heinous crimes that include Negligent Homicide that resulted in the deaths of 13 members of our brave military heroes, Afghan allies and even their innocent children,” according to a fundraising email the organization sent announcing the verdict. Along with Hunter and James Biden, Joe was also busted for “endless greed and corruption, including bribery, in the Burisma money laundering scheme.”
After asserting that the U.S. Justice Department and its Federal Bureau of Investigation have been “weaponized as a virtual ‘Gestapo’ against all those who oppose [Biden] . . . including but hardly limited to the peaceful January 6, 2021 protesters,” the press release said it was “incumbent of [sic] the American people themselves . . . to hold the ‘Biden Crime Family’ to account under the rule of law.”
The release included a quote from prosecutor Klayman.
“The executive branch, in particular, of our current government, is corrupt and Republicans simply put on dog and pony shows on Capitol Hill, as ‘Rome burns,’ with President Trump being wrongly indicted four times by rabid corrupt leftist Democrat prosecutors, but the Bidens [are] allowed to roam free,” Klayman said. He indicated that if, “as expected,” the convicted Bidens do not surrender themselves to the proper authorities, “it will be necessary for established law enforcement or the military to take them into custody for them to serve time in prison.”
In their fundraising email, Freedom Watch declared that the conviction of the Bidens was “a historic event.” But it is a story that the mainstream media have for some reason decided to ignore. In fact, even the right-wing media ecosystem seems to be looking the other way, trying not to make eye contact.
News that President Biden and members of his family were convicted on multiple criminal counts apparently did not stir the interest of outlets including Fox News, Breitbart News Network, and the broadcast network One America News, which occasionally has Klayman on as a guest. It also didn’t merit a mention by WND, a far-right website for which Klayman wrote from 1999 to 2021, contributing hundreds of pieces, or by Newsmax, to which he was also a longtime contributor.
Klayman did not respond to an email sent to him and two other contacts listed at Freedom Watch asking for comment on this lack of attention.
JUDGE PENDLETON’S “Memorandum Opinion” finding the Bidens guilty as charged fills 46 pages. It begins by saying the three named defendants “stand accused” of soliciting bribery, wire fraud, money laundering, violating the foreign agents registration act and the racketeer influenced and corrupt organization act (“RICO”), as well as “seditious conspiracy,” among other transgressions.
The opinion says a Citizens’ Grand Jury was convened throughout 2021 to hear evidence presented by Grand Jury Prosecutor Klayman to this Citizens’ Court. Indictments were issued on October 14, 2021, and signed by the jury’s foreperson, Deborah E. Baber. It claims the court’s “inherent authority to hear this case” stems from the Declaration of Independence and a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision, United States v. Williams, in which Justice Antonin Scalia “opined in writing for the majority . . . that the grand jury process belongs to the American people, not the three (3) branches of government.”
The charges against Joe Biden stem largely from his role in following through on President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Joe Biden was also charged, along with Hunter and James, with “soliciting bribes, receiving bribes, kickbacks and influence peddling for their personal gain” during the time when he was vice president. These charges are elucidated, at considerable length and in considerable detail, leading to the judge’s finding that the named defendants are guilty on all counts.
There is no information provided in the Freedom Watch news release or elsewhere on the group’s website as to the background and credentials of Citizens’ Judge Pendleton. The email to Klayman and others at Freedom Watch, which drew no response, also asked for more information about Pendleton, including “Is he a lawyer?”
A 17-minute clip of “video excerpts from the trial” shows a robed Citizens’ Judge Pendleton sitting at a judge’s bench in a large white room that seems empty except for Klayman, who speaks directly into a camera that is recording the proceeding.
“We have the right to indict, to try, and to seek convictions, and to sentence and carry out sentences, pursuant to the laws of nature and nature’s God, as well as man-made law,” Klayman explains. “We will put this before the court of public opinion—before you, the American people—to decide for yourselves whether what we are doing is just or not.” He then gets the judge to pledge an oath to “adjudicate this proceeding fairly,” in accordance with the law. “I do,” says Pendleton, with a nod of his head. The video goes on to present a montage of news clips about subjects such as Hunter Biden’s laptop, the pullout from Afghanistan, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The idea of subjecting President Biden to a citizen’s arrest if he is found guilty of the charges against him was discussed by Klayman on One America News last October, according to a report by Media Matters. “How much more evidence do we need of the Biden family’s corruption before we start charging, before we start having trials against the Bidens?” asked OAN host Addison Smith, clearly exasperated by the long delay. Klayman assured him that this was happening already: “We have indicted Joe Biden for the bribery. We’ve indicted Hunter Biden. He’s being tried. . . . We have the right to do it.”
Klayman presciently told Smith he was confident that a guilty verdict against the president would be secured, which has since happened. “We will seek a sentence, and then we will seek to carry it out peacefully and legally, asking the military and the police to do it. And if they don’t do it, we have a right of citizen’s arrest in 48 states.”
In a YouTube video posted on Monday, Klayman says the sentencing has been pushed back to September 7 to allow for the inclusion of new evidence having to do with disclosures made over the weekend by a Ukrainian prosecutor. This new, post-conviction evidence will be put before the judge and become part of a “modified” conviction, “confirming that Joe Biden was bribed, along with Hunter Biden and James Biden, the entire Biden family. Biden is perhaps the most corrupt president, if you want to call him that, ‘cause I believe that he was fraudulently elected and so do you—anybody with any common sense or an IQ over 60 would come to that conclusion.”
ACCORDING TO HIS BIO ON THE FREEDOM WATCH website, Larry Klayman is “known for his strong public interest advocacy in furtherance of ethics in government and individual freedoms and liberties.” This includes becoming “the first lawyer ever” to obtain a ruling that a U.S. president, in this case Bill Clinton, committed a crime. (He may not be the last.)
The bio says Klayman “has been credited as being the inspiration for the Tea Party movement” and was the model for a character on The West Wing named “Harry Klaypool”—an apparent misspelling of the character’s actual name, Harry Claypool. In two episodes, in 2000 and 2002, Claypool appears as the head of something called Freedom Watch. Klayman liked this fictional name so much he used it for his new group, launched in 2004.
In a more than 3,000-word writeup on its website, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, calls Klayman “a pathologically litigious attorney and professional gadfly notorious for suing everyone from Iran’s Supreme Leader to his own mother. He has spent years denouncing Barack Obama as a crypto-Communist Muslim, convening meaningless ‘citizens grand juries,’ and railing against an endless list of enemies.”
The center says that Klayman, “convinced that the Clinton administration was up to its ears in conspiracies and corruption,” sued President Clinton, the first lady and others in the administration at least 18 times between 1992 and 2000. Thereafter, he “continued to file the sort of grandiose, unwinnable lawsuits that had made him famous in the 1990s.”
Klayman represented Gennifer Flowers, one of Bill Clinton's mistresses, in an unsuccessful defamation suit against Hillary Clinton. He’s sued the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, OPEC, the nation of Iran, Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. He sued Judicial Watch after leaving that organization and going on to start Freedom Watch; that case was dismissed by Tanya Chutkan, the judge who will be overseeing Trump’s election interference trial, scheduled for next March. He represented gay-bashing preacher Bradlee Dean in a 2011 defamation suit against Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. Dean sought $50 million in damages; he ended up having to repay the defendants’ roughly $25,000 in legal fees.
And yes, in 1998, Klayman even sued his mom. At issue was the question of who should pay for nursing care for her mother, his grandmother. In a statement, he called the suggestion that this meant he would sue anyone “untrue, unfair, and outrageous! What is true is that Klayman will do what is right, no matter who is involved.”
SETBACKS SEEM TO FIND KLAYMAN like stink on a sheep. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Florida in 2004, garnering 1 percent of the vote in the Republican primary. In 2011, he received a public reprimand for his tardiness in repaying a client, during a time when Klayman was purportedly broke.
In 2020, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals suspended his law license for 90 days, saying he had “flagrantly violated” an ethics rule against changing sides in a legal matter. Last September, the same court suspended his law license for 18 months over his alleged mishandling of a decade-old sexual harassment lawsuit. Contacted by Reuters, he called the disciplinary action a “political hit.”
But Klayman’s journey has not been without its successes. In March 2000, a federal judge ruled in a case brought by Klayman that Clinton had violated privacy laws when he released personal letters between himself and a female White House volunteer. Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed the president had acted with criminal intent to discredit the young woman.
In 2013, Klayman “obtained the first major ruling from a federal judge that the National Security Agency’s surveillance program was constitutionally flawed,” said a report in Politico. The lede stressed what a breakthrough moment it was: “Larry Klayman’s long journey in the legal wilderness appears to be over.” “You got to keep punching. You never give up,” Klayman told the news outlet, which cataloged his long series of defeats.
And in a 2014 article, David Montgomery of the Washington Post gave Klayman credit for what may be his most enduring legacy—his invention of “a new style of Washington warfare.” With a backward look to those “Klayman-fired imbroglios of yesteryear,” Montgemory wrote:
Now, thanks to Klayman, everyone’s got an axe kick and a triangle choke. The edge and tone of partisan investigations—where the stakes are portrayed as maximal, the opponents diabolic, the conspiracies rampant—can be traced to him. Rarely raising his voice, Klayman spoke the stone extremist poetry of bloggers before there were blogs, and his attitude prefigured the tea party long before the kettle whistled.
And now Klayman, at age 72, has succeeded, through his tireless pursuit of his own version of the law and his own vision of justice, in convicting the president of the United States of serious crimes, and hardly anyone is paying attention. How unfair is that?
Maybe Klayman should sue somebody.
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