Tom Zawistowski Bio (Last updated 11/2024):
Tom Zawistowski (Zow-is-tow-ski) , is the CEO and Founder, with his wife Nanette, of TRZ Communications, a 42 year old technology company based in Akron, Ohio. He has also started three additional companies and multiple non-profit organizations. He holds a bachelors degree in Communication from Edinboro State College in Pennsylvania, and a masters degree in Sports Management from Kent State University in Ohio. He did doctoral work toward a degee in Education Administration at both Kent State and the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
In 2009 he was one of the founders of the Portage County TEA Party, for which he became the Executive Director in 2010, a position he still holds. Under his leadership, the Portage County TEA Party became one of the most successful liberty groups in Ohio and the Nation with over 2,600 members at it's peak.
In 2011, Tom was nominated by liberty leaders around the state of Ohio to head a group of volunteers that was challenged with the task of putting on the first ever state convention for liberty minded citizens. He and his committee, which included his wife Nanette, pulled together in less than six months the highly acclaimed "We the People" Convention which was held at the Columbus Convention Center during the 4th of July weekend of 2011. The event was attended by over 1,000 Patriots and featured over 40 breakout sessions and top notch speakers such as Presidential Candidate Herman Cain, Dick Morris, John Fund and Jenny Beth Martin and many others. The 2nd We the People Convention was held on June 29-30th, 2012 at the Ohio State Fairgrounds in Columbus and sold 1,100 tickets. The convention was held for 10 straigh years until Covid.
Shortly after the first We the People Convention, Tom was asked to become, and accepted the position of being, the second President in the History of the Ohio Liberty Council, which became the Ohio Liberty Coalition. The OLC was a state-wide organization that coordinated the efforts of Ohio’s 150+ local liberty groups in the pursuit of individual liberty and Constitutionally limited governance. As President, Tom played a role in the passage of State Issue 3 in 2011 which prohibited Ohio from forming an Obamacare State Health Care Exchange.
In the spring of 2013, he became a focal point of the IRS "TEA Party Targeting" scandal after having told the IRS in 2012, as President of the OLC and Executive Director of the Portage County TEA Party, that his organizations would not comply with their demands for information in exchange for getting tax exempt status. Zawistowski appeared on FoxNews numerous times and was interviewed by nearly every major newspaper, TV network and radio network in the country about the inappropriate actions of the IRS. Through his leadership the OLC was granted it’s tax exempt status in December of 2012. Zawistowski was a lead plaintiff in the two class action law suits against the IRS, one of which resulted in a $3.2 million payment by the IRS to TEA Party Groups, both of which were won by the TEA Party. Zawistowski was featured in a documentary movie about these court cases called "Targeting U.S." which was produce by the ACLJ and released in November of 2019.
Zawistowski has been recognized as one of the top liberty group leaders in the nation for his efforts to defend the legal right of Liberty groups to be granted 501(c) 4 tax exempt status by the IRS. He has worked closely with nearly all of the major national conservative organization as well as conservative groups within Ohio.
Zawistowski resigned as OLC President in January of 2013 to focus on running the Portage County TEA Party and the We the People Convention. He launched his own radio show in August of 2013 on WHLO 640 AM in Akron called “TEA Party Talk with TomZ” which has a state wide listening audience. He also started the Ohio Citizen PAC which has successfully helped to elect state central committee members and conservative representatives in Ohio.
Zawistowski led the state wide efforts to elect Donald Trump in 2016 in Ohio. He and his coalition were successful despite the efforts of “Republican” Governor John Kasich and the Ohio Republican Party to sabotage Trumps election in Ohio. He helped convince the RNC and the Trump organization to reject the Ohio Republican Party and instead build it's own 2016 campaign structure - which was the ONLY such Trump state organization in United States in 2016. He then partnered with the NRA-ILA to organize tens of thousands of volunteers who set records for the number of phone calls made and doors knocked in 2016. The result of which was the turning out of tens of thousands of "non-voters", people who had not voted in years, who came out and voted for Trump and won Ohio by a stunning 8% which enabled him to become the 45th US President.
Zawistowski then started a new radio show called "Talking Trump with TomZ" which ran during the first year of the Trump Presidency. He fundraised enough money to build and operate a five station, state-wide, weekly radio network/podcasts called "We the People News & Opinion" to help communicate with activists and the Ohio general public during the 2020 election. Zawistowski also re-newed the TEA Party relationship with the NRA-ILA and worked closely with them to win Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Pennsylvania again in 2020. Through his efforts, the Ohio TEA Party used Trump Train Road Rallies, Sign Waves, the Barn Billboard Program, and the Podcast and radio network to win Ohio for Trump again in 2020 by 8%!
After the 2020 Election, Zawistowski led an effort to convince President Trump to declare limited and temporary martial law to have the U.S. Military oversee a revote of the federal elections in all 50 states using paper ballots and photo ID. The We the People Convention paid for a full page ad in the Washington Times Newspaper on December 1, 2020 that made the case for Trump to use his Constitional Powers to Defend the Republic by declaring partial and temporary martial to re-do the 2020 Federal Election to verify the results as true. Our appeal reached Trump and was considered but was not acted upon by Trump. The news of our Ad went viral causing over one million people to come to the We the People Convention website within three days. At the point, the We the People Convention became a national organization. Over 100,000 people signed our petition asking President Trump to re-do the election and those people were from all 50 states and many foreign countries. Many of those people continue to be members of the WTPC to this day and donate to fund our efforts.
Since January 6, 2020, Zawistowski has been working to help expose the voter fraud that stole the 2020 election; to help defeat the federalization of elections by the Left in the form of HB 1; and to help reform election rules in the states working with his long time friend Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, and with the Heritage Foundation's Election Integrity Project. He has also raised money and worked toward getting Justice for the January 6th Political Prisoners being unfairly held in the DC Gulags.
Zawistowski launched the weekly "We the People Convention News & Opinion Podcast" as a news aggregation show that worked to inform Patriots about news and information that affected their individual Freedom, Liberty and Proseperity. The show exposed the Left's, and right's, propaganda and tied stories together to help people see the relationships between news that did not appear to be related. The main feature of the show is to give Patriots a list of action items each week from them to take at the local, state and federal levels in order to protect and defend individual freedom, liberty and prosperity. The show reaches thousands of viewers/listener every week on the WTPC website, on the WTPC Rumble Channel, on the WTPC's Roku and Amazon Fires TV Channel and on many audio streaming channels from Apple Podcasts and IHeart Podcasts to many others.
Through the We the People Convention, and his other state and federal PAC's, Zawistowski has recruit conservative candidates to run for everything from School Board to U.S. Senate in 2022 and 2024. He has also directed the members of the We the People Convention to fight Critical Race Theory; to expose and end censorship by Big Tech and Government; to support the fight against Communist China and to support the defense of Tiawan; to expose the fraud perpetrated upon the American poeple during the Chinese created Wuhan Coronaviris "Pandemic" and stop the unnecessary vaccination of the entire population; to restore equal justice under the law; to promote marriage and the growth of families; and to promote Individual Freedom, Liberty and Prosperity for All.
In 2024, the We the People Convention and the organization's Federal SuperPAC, the Freedom for ALL PAC, committed all of it's efforts to re-electing Donald Trump President of the United States, winning back control of the US Senate by fighting to Elect Republican Bernie Moreno in Ohio and defeating Democrat Sherrod Brown, and making sure that Republicans held control of the US House by working with the NRA-ILA to organize volunteers who impacted trens of millions of voters in 34 states. All of which was accomplished. The organization also pushed hard on conservatives in Deep Red States and Deep Blue States to get out and vote in order to win the Popular Vote, which was thought to be impossible, yet was also accomplished with Trump winning the Popular Vote by approximately 5 Million votes!
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