Free Republic

The USG doesn’t want the Flynn case to be heard in Florida. The government has filed a 22-page motion to change the venue to DC.They start with precedent; in short, the Plaintiff’s choice of venue shouldn’t be disturbed unless the defendant (in this case, the government) can show that it is clearly outweighed by other considerations and that the Plaintiff’s choice of venue is granted less weight when the original venue lacks any significant connection to the claim. (snip) By this logic, the USG wouldn’t fare very well bringing cases ANYWHERE but DC!!

A court has rejected a lawsuit seeking to force the public disclosure of federal records about a 2018 episode in which a gun belonging to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was allegedly thrown in a trash can. In a ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras found that the public interest in the handling of any investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into the episode was “significant,” but that the importance of Hunter Biden’s privacy as a private citizen outweighed the value of releasing any such records to the public. “The privacy interest here is...

Ex-NYPD officer sentenced to record 10 years for Jan. 6 riot Retired New York Police Department officer Thomas Webster leaves the federal courthouse in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022. Webster was sentenced on Thursday to 10 years in prison for attacking the U.S. Capitol and using a metal flagpole to assault one of the police officers trying to hold off a mob of Donald Trump supporters. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) 1 of 7 Retired New York Police Department officer Thomas Webster leaves the federal courthouse in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022. Webster was sentenced on Thursday to 10 years in...

For carrying a “large wooden stick” on January 6 -- and for things the ex-officer said and believed.. Former police officer Thomas Robertson, who according to CBS News, “stormed the U.S. Capitol” on January 6, 2021, will spend more than seven years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Robertson, 49, was charged with interfering with police officers and “entering a restricted area with a dangerous weapon, a large wooden stick.” The seven-year sentence, handed down last Thursday, matches the longest prison term among the Jan. 6 cases to date. Its severity was not entirely the result of...

Trump White House aide’s bid to delay case due to Jan. 6 panel hearings is denied. A federal judge on Monday eviscerated nearly all of Steve Bannon’s defenses against a charge that he criminally defied a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee, leaving the longtime Donald Trump ally with few options to fight the contempt of Congress case against him. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols also denied Bannon’s bid to postpone for three months the jury trial set to open next Monday, rejecting defense arguments that such a delay was warranted due to intense media coverage around the ongoing...

It has been fifty years since that momentous break-in at the Watergate office complex, and it seems a good time to revisit that episode, especially in light of the current abuses of power that seem so ubiquitous. Geoff Shepard's book, The Real Watergate Scandal and the just published book by Garrett Graff, Watergate, a New History, offer different perspectives. Shepard is more interested in the legal process and its abuse, while Graff's book relies more on the infamous White House tapes. It is the more comprehensive of the two. Here are some of observations based on these histories. *** Most...

U.S. judges including those appointed by Republican presidents are increasingly sentencing defendants who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol to three-year terms of court supervision, fearing they could be misled into committing political violence in the 2024 presidential election.

The man who stood behind former Vice President Mike Pence’s Senate dais in a horned, coyote-fur headdress, red, white and blue face paint and a shirtless display of his tattooed torso on Jan. 6 will spend the next 41 months in a federal prison. “He made himself the very image of the riot,” Senior U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in pronouncing the sentence. “What you did was terrible,” Lamberth added later, imposing the lower end of the federal guidelines. “You made yourself the epitome of the riot.”

The U.S. is facing a serious constitutional crisis over the handling of the cases of defendants in the Jan. 6 so-called "insurrection" in Washington, D.C. to protest the presidential election modus operandi and the results. Those being held for many months without a trial are being denied their habeas corpus rights under the U.S. Constitution and even dating back to English law hundreds of years before our Constitution was implemented. Not only are they being incarcerated without having had a trial, but there is some evidence that they are being mistreated or are being held 23 hours a day in...