Free Republic

The Obama team’s actions with the FISA Court were not just corrupt – they were criminal! Now his appointed judges are in the news for suspect deep state actions. The FISA Court was put in place in 1978 when Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The Court sits in Washington D.C., and is composed of eleven federal district court judges who are designated by the Chief Justice of the United States. Each judge serves for a maximum of seven years and their terms are staggered to ensure continuity on the Court. In addition, the entire FISA court in...

Newly appointed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci has posted his support for stringent gun-control laws – a position that would be at odds with President Trump’s views. “I have always been for strong gun control laws,” Scaramucci tweeted after the December 2012 shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 kids were gunned down. In August 2012, he tweeted: “We (the USA) has 5% of the world’s population but 50% of the world’s guns. Enough is enough. It is just common sense it apply more controls.”

An Obama appointee and the CEO of Pacific Investment told a crowd at the National Press Club that Obama’s economic policies have fostered income inequality and that political squabbling is stalling economic recovery. Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of Pacific Investment and chairman of the White House Global Development Council, blamed the administration’s reaction to the Great Recession for increasing income inequality. Rather than launching vast infrastructure projects to put people to work, the government has created a larger supply of money using quantitative easing (QE). The Federal Reserve has flooded America’s largest banks with billions of dollars via this process in...

When Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), spoke at CPAC on February 10th, he predicted that if Barack Obama wins a second term it will usher in an all-out attack on the Second Amendment. In so many words, he said the same people who brought us Fast and Furious, “a criminal enterprise” for which there has yet to be prosecutions, will use four more years to gut constitutional protections on the right to keep and bear arms. And anyone who wonders what this assault on the Second Amendment might look like need look no further...

The most prominent Republican in the Obama administration is accusing GOP House members of blocking efforts to resolve the nation's problems, partly because they don't want the president to be successful. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was asked at a transportation conference Friday why it was so difficult to get big infrastructure projects built right now. He responded that "some people don't want Obama to be successful."

Raymond Jefferson, one of Obama's political appointees to the Department of Labor has resigned after an internal investigation found that he improperly steered federal contracts to friends and former colleagues.

Just what we need — another new Obama appointee with a controversial past and radical inclinations. Several weeks ago, the president announced his intention to make three appointments to the National Council on the Humanities. One of them is Cathy Davidson, an English professor at Duke University. Davidson’s curriculum vitae includes some very impressive-sounding credentials: past president of the American Studies Association (ASA), past editor of the American Literature journal, and vice-provost of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke. But one thing she probably won’t voluntarily mention at her confirmation hearing is that she was a member of Duke University’s “Group of...

As of 10:00 p.m. EDT, hours after Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack fired Shirley Sherrod for racism in her official duties after being exposed by BigGovernment.com there is a near total blackout by the mainstream news media on the scandal.Sherrod was appointed a year ago by Vilsack to be the Georgia director of Rural Development where she doled out millions of dollars in federal funds.Just days before her appointment, the Obama Justice Department settled a lawsuit by Sherrod and her husband claiming discrimination against their farm cooperative for a reported $13 million. A search of Google News and Google Blogs...

Like many of her cohorts in the Obama administration, U.N. Permanent Representative Susan Rice seems to spend more time gallivanting around the Washington, D.C. social scene than doing any actual productive work. A report from Richard Grennel, who served as official spokesman for the U.N. Ambassador during the entire eight years of George Bush's term in the White House, suggests that Dr. Rice spends more time channeling her inner Desiree Rogers than forcing direction at the U.N. Security Council.

Amanda Simpson Says It Was Her Merits, Not Gender Identity, That Got Her Commerce Job For Amanda Simpson, believed to be America's first openly transgender presidential appointee, the job she starts Tuesday in the U.S. Commerce Department is an honor and the culmination of a career dedicated to understanding military technology. But what gnaws at her, she says, is the fear of being labeled a token who was hired because of her sexual identity rather than on her merits.

So much for "empathy." Now, the President is backtracking against his own criteria for selecting the replacement for Justice Souter. In a conversation with Sen. Orrin Hatch, reported by Politico, the President claimed that he did not intend to mean that his primary criterion for selecting a Supreme Court Justice would be a capacity for judicial activism.

Federal agents this morning are searching the Judiciary Square office of Washington, D.C.'s Chief Technology Officer. The search is part of "an ongoing investigation," said a spokeswoman for the FBI's D.C. Field Office, Lindsay Gotwin, said. She declined to comment further. The outgoing Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, was appointed last week Chief Information Officer by the Obama administration. "We know the FBI is over there but that's all we know," said a staffer in the D.C. CTO's office, Mario Field. A White House spokesman had no immediate comment. A spokeswoman for Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Leslie Kershaw, said...

Despite keeping Defense Secretary Robert Gates in the Pentagon, President-elect Obama’s transition team informed 90 Bush appointees their services will not be needed after Inauguration Day. Scott Gration, a senior official on Obama’s transition team, called and emailed several of President Bush’s Pentagon appointees about 10 days ago to inform them they were being dismissed. Those calls and emails were followed up by an email from Jim O'Beirne, the special assistant to the secretary of defense for White House liaisons, who expressed exasperation that Gration informed the employees directly instead of letting O'Beirne's office know first. "With regard to the...

A low-level appointee of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger resigned Thursday after the Democratic leader of the state Senate accused him of posting a picture on his blog that amounted to "hate speech." Sam Wakim, a member of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, had posted a picture of a fake California driver's license designed to depict an illegal-immigrant in a sombrero. The posting was made in 2005 during one of many attempts by legislative Democrats to have Schwarzenegger sign a bill to provide driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants. Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, called the blog posting...

Boise, Idaho (AP) -- A judge on Friday blocked new rules governing how ranchers use 160 million acres of federal land, saying a federal agency had given in to pressure from the livestock industry. The Bureau of Land Management violated the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act in creating the rules, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled. The judge said the BLM's rule revisions would have loosened restrictions on grazing on public land nationwide, limited the amount of public comment the BLM had to consider and diluted the BLM's...

SACRAMENTO — The governor's latest nominee for the board that regulates the multibillion-dollar energy and telecommunications industries has been in bankruptcy for more than four years, and faces questions about his qualifications and his commitment to consumer protection. Timothy A. Simon was one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's top-level aides, screening applicants for positions in the administration, until the governor selected him Feb. 15 for a vacant seat on the powerful Public Utilities Commission. In December, while Simon was still working for Schwarzenegger, a judge ordered the state to deduct $1,795 per month from his monthly salary as part of a...

Detectives last night nabbed a man who has been using the cell phone of Martín Barreto, the former Giuliani administration press aide found strangled in a Greenwich Village apartment last week, police sources said. Police stopped short of calling the unidentified man a suspect in the murder of Barreto, who was found naked on his bed Aug. 21. But they were questioning the man last night at the 6th Precinct and had not ruled him out as the killer. Sources said detectives were eager to check his DNA against evidence from the crime scene. Investigators believe Barreto, 48, a childhood...

Legendary conservative jurist Robert Bork is "borking" Bush Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, trashing her nomination as a complete and total "disaster." Asked by MSNBC's Tucker Carlson Friday night if he was impressed by Ms. Miers, Bork replied: "Not a bit. I think it's a disaster on every level." The Yale-trained judge said he didn't like the Texas attorney because she hadn't developed a "constitutional philosophy." "It's a little late to develop a constitutional philosophy or begin to work it out when you're on the court already," he told Carlson. "I'm afraid she's likely to be influenced by factors,...

WASHINGTON -- Long before John G. Roberts Jr. testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, liberal groups and some Democratic senators were suspicious of the chief justice nominee because of President Bush's high praise for the Supreme Court's two most conservative members, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. After Roberts' hearings, some liberal groups said they still worry that Roberts will follow in the judicial footsteps of Scalia and Thomas. "While Roberts wanted to give the impression he respected the right to privacy and the precedent of Roe v. Wade, his answers look dangerously similar to the responses Clarence...

John G. Roberts pairs a youthful demeanor with a sharp, seasoned legal mind that has impressed Ivy League professors, government lawyers and U.S. presidents. Befitting his age of 50 and limited time on the appellate court, the book on his judicial decisions remains a work in progress. President Bush on Tuesday tapped Roberts to become the nation's 109th Supreme Court justice, introducing the Harvard honors graduate, former clerk to William Rehnquist and successful Washington attorney to the nation in prime time. "He has argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court and earned a reputation as one of the best legal...