Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) for allegedly failing to respond to his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump.
Mr. Ramaswamy announced the lawsuit, filed in district court in Columbia on Aug. 1, in a statement on Twitter, now known as X.
The GOP 2024 presidential candidate accused the DOJ of having failed to “substantively respond” to his FOIA request to “uncover what White House officials, including President Joe Biden, communicated to [Attorney General] Merrick Garland and [special counsel] Jack Smith about the unprecedented indictment in the classified documents case of a former U.S. President and one of Biden’s political opponents in the 2024 Presidential election.”
The Epoch Times has contacted the Justice Department for comment. The biotech entrepreneur said he is also filing a new FOIA records request for more details regarding “any similar communications” relating to the recently-issued indictment against Mr. Trump.
On Tuesday, a grand jury convened by special counsel Smith to investigate the former president and his allies’ alleged attempts to dispute the 2020 election charged Mr. Trump in a 45-page indictment (pdf).
According to the indictment, Mr. Trump was charged with both conspiring to impede the Jan. 6 congressional proceeding and of attempting to obstruct and obstructing the certification of the electoral vote. He is also charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy against the rights of citizens.
The indictment also lists six alleged unnamed co-conspirators, four of whom are attorneys and one of whom was a Department of Justice official.
Indictment ‘Pathetic’ Trump Says
The indictment against the former president acknowledges that all Americans, including Mr. Trump, have the right to speak publicly about the election and even claim that he won. Mr. Trump said he was also “entitled to formally challenge” the election results, the indictment states.
However, Mr. Trump, prosecutors wrote in the indictment, knew his claims about winning were false but “repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger and erode public faith in the administration of elections.”
He also allegedly “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results,” prosecutors said.
The Trump campaign has called the new indictment “the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election, in which President Trump is the undisputed frontrunner and leading by substantial margins.”
‘Dangerous Precedent’
Mr. Ramaswamy, in his lengthy post on X, claimed the indictment against Mr. Trump was based on “unprecedented legal theory” citing the U.S. Supreme Court case U.S. v. Alvarez, which held that political candidates even have a First Amendment right to make inaccurate statements knowingly.
“If you’re going to indict a former president and leading presidential candidate, it better not be based on unprecedented legal theory,” he said. “Further, it’s more than a stretch to call something criminal if someone is seeking legal counsel from their own lawyers.”
“Jack Smith has created a dangerous precedent by criminalizing the behavior of Trump’s lawyers who offered him legal advice, labeling them co-conspirators instead,” Mr. Ramaswamy continued. “This jeopardizes the future of our legal system. If we fail to admit the truth, Jan 6 will just be a preview of far worse to come. We must reunite this country, but the path forward will not be easy.”
According to his lawsuit (pdf) Mr. Ramaswamy—who has vowed to pardon the former president if elected—first submitted a FOIA request to the DOJ on June 12, 2023.
The request was for “documents and records in DOJ’s possession related to the decision to bring a federal criminal indictment” against Mr. Trump after he was indicted by a grand jury in Miami on 37 felony charges, including the willful retention of national defense information and conspiring to obstruct justice. That indictment followed a separate DOJ investigation.
Mr. Ramaswamy notes that FOIAs require a federal administrative agency to “promptly make available” the requested documents within 20 working days of them being requested, except for in the case of “unusual circumstances” under which 10 additional days are granted. However, more than 30 days have passed since he first filed the FOIA, the Republican 2024 candidate said.
“The Campaign accordingly brings this suit to compel DOJ to immediately respond to the Campaign’s FOIA request and promptly disclose all responsive, non-exempt records,” the filing reads.
Mr. Ramaswamy’s lawsuit against the DOJ comes after he settled a separate lawsuit with the World Economic Forum (WEF) after accusing the organization of falsely and inaccurately associating him with their “Young Global Leaders” program.
Mr. Ramaswamy settled the lawsuit for an unknown amount and has vowed to donate the settlement money to a conservative nonprofit, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), “because it stands for American interests against the WEF agenda.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times. Image by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.