Free Republic

A senior communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder seemingly called House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa's staff by accident and asked for their help spinning new revelations about the IRS scandal, Issa said in a September 8 letter to Holder. The aide, Brian Fallon, is a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a well-known personality on Capitol Hill. The letter describes Fallon as “audibly shaken” when he realizes his request to leak documents to help get ahead of news stories about them was mistakenly made to the very office he was seeking to undermine. Issa believes...

From the former North Catholic High School in Pittsburgh's Troy Hill to Australia, 157 victims have accused 31 members of the Marianist order of sexual abuse, records show. Watchdog groups, victims and their attorneys say officials with the religious order failed to stop the abuse or to adequately supervise those accused. Experts say such abuse went on for decades in part because of a culture that granted members of religious groups more credibility than children. A spokeswoman for the St. Louis-based Marianist Province of the United States did not respond to questions about how many members have been accused of...

The recent bribery convictions of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and his wife are only the latest in a seemingly never-ending series of convictions of government officials. A little item on the Internet featured government officials in prison, either currently or in recent times. Among them were a mayor of New Orleans, a mayor of Detroit and a mayor of Washington; a governor of Connecticut, a governor of Louisiana, two governors of Illinois and four members of Congress. However much these and other government officials may have richly deserved being behind bars, the country does not deserve to have its...

Dublin (AFP) - Cardinal Sean Brady, who was criticised over his handling of abuse scandals, stepped down as leader of the Irish Catholic Church on Monday with an emotional plea for forgiveness. "I too need to say sorry and to ask forgiveness and I do so again today," Brady told the faithful at a mass in Armagh in Northern Ireland. Brady, who played a key role in the peace process after being appointed in 1996, had tendered his resignation to the Vatican last month after turning 75, the normal retirement age for senior clergy

Head of Marshals Service in Chicago reassigned AP , Associated Press Sep. 9, 2014 4:02 AM ET CHICAGO (AP) — The U.S. Marshals Service has announced it has replaced the head of its Chicago office for the past four years in a re-organization, appointing an interim chief for its high-profile northern Illinois district. Darryl McPherson, who was named to the top Chicago post by President Barack Obama in 2010, was recently reassigned to the same office's judicial security division, said Drew Wade, an agency spokesman in Washington. Wade, however, declined to discuss why the 17-year Marshals Service veteran was moved...

According to the bureau of labor statistics people who the government consider unemployed are twice as likely to go shopping as they are to look for a job. Keep in mind the government under counts the unemployed by shifting millions out of unemployment by declaring they’ve simply given up looking for work. As it stands today, job growth is barely keeping up with population growth. The country has millions of people who are unemployed, many of whom consider shopping more important than looking for a job. Unemployment and other welfare benefits are making life unemployed too easy. It isn’t just...

A former U.S. ambassador is being investigated for laundering, according to papers found in a garbage container in Vienna. Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, is being investigated for money laundering, and several of his wife's bank accounts have been frozen in connection with the probe. The Justice Department investigation only became public on Sunday, when a blogger found relevant documents in a garbage container used by a state prosecutor's office in Vienna and posted them online. A day later, Austrian magazine Profil reported on the case.

In Odessa activists of the «Right Sector» executed a "lustration" of an official of the Social Insurance Fund for temporary loss of working capacity, who is accused of stealing funds, which were designated for refugee children from the ATO zone, reports publication «Otkat«. The corrupt official was greeted when he was going to his office and after a short exchange of words was thrown in a rubbish bin. According to the Security Services of Ukraine the official demanded "pay-offs" from directors of resorts, where the refugee children were sent. He intended to earn 10 million UAH in such a way....

Video at link: The former mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, shuffled off Monday to serve a 10-year federal prison term on corruption convictions stemming from the city’s years-long recovery of Hurricane Katrina devastations. Mr. Nagin is serving out his sentence in Texarkana, Texas, Reuters reported.

The agreement signed last year by the Norway Ministry of Foreign Affairs was explicit: For $5 million, Norway’s partner in Washington would push top officials at the White House, at the Treasury Department and in Congress to double spending on a United States foreign aid program. But the recipient of the cash was not one of the many Beltway lobbying firms that work every year on behalf of foreign governments. It was the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research organization, or think tank, one of many such groups in Washington that lawmakers, government officials and the news media have...

The argument against liberals ever being in charge of our lives can be reduced to a single word: Detroit. Detroit has fallen from its position as one of the greatest cities in America at the beginning of the 1950s to a perfect reminder of what liberal Democrats will do when given enough power and enough time to show who they really are. “The Motor City” had an unbroken succession of liberal Democrat mayors for more than 40 years and each of these men has contributed to the steady decline of their city. Acting in concert with greedy unions these mayors...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status.

Gazprombank GPB (OJSC), a Russian bank targeted with sanctions by President Obama over the Ukraine crisis, has hired two former U.S. senators to lobby against those sanctions, according to a new disclosure filed with the Senate. Gazprombank is controlled by Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom, the country’s largest gas producer; it supplies about a third of Europe’s natural gas. In a filing submitted Friday and effective that day, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and former Senator John Breaux, D-La., are listed as the main lobbyists under the Gazprombank account for the firm Squire Patton Boggs, lobbying on “banking...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a new batch of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) email documents revealing that under former IRS official Lois Lerner, the agency seems to acknowledge having needlessly solicited donor lists from non-profit political groups. According to a May 21, 2012, memo from the IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel: “such information was not needed across-the-board and not used in making the agency’s determination on exempt status.” Later, in her May 10, 2013, remarks in which Lerner first revealed in response to question she planted about the IRS targeting of conservative groups, she conceded that the requests...

A verdict has been reached in the federal corruption trial against former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen.

This contradiction was laid bare recently when the Holy See, acting in secret, threw the protective cloak of diplomatic immunity over Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski — the papal nuncio in the Dominican Republic and an alleged serial abuser of minors. In a show of toughness, church officials defrocked Wesolowski and promised to try him according to the laws of Vatican City. In effect, though, church officials once again shielded a predator priest from civil jurisdiction.

It’s that time of year again – when the little juvenile delinquents, future prison inmates, and functionally illiterate junior members of the free shit army pick up their “free” backpacks and “free" school supplies they will never use and shuffle off to the decaying prison like schools in the City of Philadelphia to eat “free” breakfasts and “free” lunches, while being taught government sanctioned pablum by overpaid mediocre union teachers. It’s a repeat of every year for the Phila school district. As the school year approaches they are shocked to report a massive deficit and beg the State of PA...

In the 1940s and 1950s, when unions were at the height of their extortionist power, it seemed like every year the Brooklyn Dodgers would fall short of a championship and, with the lament of “Wait ‘til next year!” would fill the bars on Flatbush Avenue. While “next year” finally did come in 1955, the Dodgers quickly moved to Los Angeles and “next year” never came to Brooklyn again. This Labor Day stirs memories of “wait ‘til next year,” for the remaining extortionist unions still stealing workers’ pay and giving it to the Democrats. The good news for America is that...

In April of 2013, I introduced a Moocher Hall of Fame to “celebrate” some very odious examples of welfare dependency.Since that time, I keep thinking that it’s time to do something similar for government bureaucrats. This compilation from last December would be a good place to start, though I’d have to figure out whether to have group memberships so that we could include the bureaucrats at the Patent and Trademark Office who get paid to watch TV, as well as the paper pushers at the Department of Veterans Affairs who got big bonuses after creating secret waiting lists that led...

Once again, our Chicago-style Attorney General has proven that corruption is the basic foundation upon which the modern Democrat Party is built. Eric Holder, the nationÂ’s top extortionist officer, has been running around the financial sector suing banks for anything (and everything) he can get away with. Ally Bank paid millions for alleged racist lending practices (an allegation the DOJ made without ever looking at loan portfolios), JP Morgan has shelled out billions for various anti-Obama comments regulatory infractions, and Bank of America just paid a $16.6 billion fine for their government-mandated role in the financial crises of 2008.Aside from...