Free Republic

Legal experts have slammed the Clinton-appointed New York judge who tossed Sarah Palin's libel lawsuit against The New York Times while jurors are still deliberating the case and say he's effectively hobbled the jury. 'I would have expected the judge to wait for the jury to return its verdict before ruling on the motion for judgment as a matter of law, because there was no urgency to issuing that ruling,' attorney Mitchell Epner, of Rottenberg Lipman Rich PC, told Law & Crime on Monday. 'Nothing would have changed if he had waited for the verdict to have been announced, or...

A federal judge on Tuesday approved a plan to restructure Puerto Rico's bond debt, which had plunged the U.S. territory into the country's largest municipal bankruptcy in history. Judge Laura Taylor Swain ruled in favor of the Plan of Adjustment that was years in the making, through arduous negotiations between the island's Fiscal Oversight Board, debtors and the government. According to Board officials, the plan will reduce Puerto Rico's debt by 80 percent and save the island more than $50 billion in debt payments. Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said the approval of the plan "represents a great step for...

A former White House education adviser during the Obama administration has been arrested and charged with stealing $218,005 from a charter school network he founded, prosecutors said. Seth Andrew, 42, who served as a senior adviser in the Office of Educational Technology, was arrested April 27 on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements to a financial institution. Federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York allege that he used more than half of the money to maintain his bank account above a threshold that enabled him to get better interest...

Click here to view the full articleOn the same day a jury convicted disgraced socialite Ghislaine Maxwell on five of six counts of sex trafficking related to her former lover Jeffrey Epstein, another Epstein associate received ominous legal news. According to Reuters, two New York judges ordered Wednesday that the 2009 settlement between Epstein and Virginia Giuffre, one of the financier’s numerous accusers, be made public. Giuffre, who said she was trafficked by Epstein, has accused Britain’s Prince Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager.

A 2009 settlement agreement between deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Virginia Giuffre, who alleges she was abused by Epstein and forced to have sex with Prince Andrew when she was under 18 years old, will be made public next week, Reuters reported. U.S. District Judges Lewis Kaplan and Loretta Preska on Wednesday ordered that the agreement be released on or around Jan. 3, saying they found no reason to keep it sealed, per the wire service. Giuffre has brought a lawsuit against Andrew, saying that she was forced to have sexual contact with the Duke of York when she...

The Christmas Eve order for the New York Times to return confidential legal material from the conservative publication, Project Veritas, has led many to decry the imposition of a “prior restraint” on the media. I joined in expressing those concerns about courts preventing a news publication and then ordering the return of material sent by a source. That issue will be now be addressed in the courts. One question, however, remains: when will the FBI raid the home of New York Times publisher, A.G. Sulzberger? That is what the Justice Department did when Project Veritas was given the diary of...

A federal judge in Manhattan overturned a roughly $4.5 billion settlement between OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP and members of the Sackler family who own the drugmaker, a surprising decision that raises questions about the future of the company and its owners, who have been accused of fueling the nation’s opioid crisis. Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York ruled late Thursday that legal releases that would shield members of the Sackler family from civil opioid lawsuits are not permitted under the bankruptcy.

Click here to view the full articleThe media has been on a non-stop attack against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell since he expressed doubts about the results of the 2020 presidential election and Mike took action against one outlet.But Lindell was defeated in his court case against the British tabloid The Daily Mail who he accused of defaming him, Newsweek reported.A federal judge sided with the news outlet, saying that the article that Lindell cited as defaming “cannot be reasonably construed as defamatory.”Lindell, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, first sued the Daily Mail tabloid in January after it...

A federal judge is siding with Project Veritas over its request for an independent party to review the cellphones the FBI seized from the group's founder James O'Keefe. On Wednesday, District Court Judge Analisa Torres from the Southern District of New York is ordering a "special master" to be appointed to oversee the review of O'Keefe's devices, citing "potential First Amendment concerns." "The Court recognizes, as other courts in this district have concluded, that ‘the Southern District prosecutors have integrity and decency,' and the filter team alone could conduct the review ‘with utmost integrity,’" Torres wrote. "However, the Court determines...

VIDEOSleepy Joe's nominee for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Dale Ho, was caught blatantly lying under oath before the U.S. Senate. If there is at least one Democrat Senator who thinks lying to the Senate is disqualifying to serve as a judge, then his nomination is toast. Oh, and Sleepy Joe can convincingly claim that he wasn't even aware of Ho's existence since he can say he just signed a piece of paper his handlers put in front of him without him knowing what was even on it.

Alison Julie Nathan has previously served as a special assistant to resident Barack Obama and also as his associate White House counsel.. As the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell begins on November 29, 2021, some questions may finally be answered about the sex scandal involving late Jeffery Epstein. Maxwell was arrested on July 2, 2020, and is one of the few remaining links investigators have to Epstein after he died suspiciously while he was in jail. The trial is likely to finally tell us how far, wide and deeply Epstein's sex trafficking ring had spread, especially in the elite circles he...

Judge Alison Nathan is likely to be nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit The federal judge overseeing British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking case is set to be recommended for higher court – sparking concerns about possible ethical conflicts. New York Senator Chuck Schumer announced on Tuesday he is going to recommend to President Joe Biden that he nominate Alison J. Nathan, 49, to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Project Veritas founder and Journalist James O’Keefe just received good news from the United States District Court of Southern New York.His attorney Harmeet Dhillon tweeted this out:BREAKING! The federal court has just ordered the DOJ to STOP extracting data from our client, journalist James O’Keefe’s phone, and ordered a hearing. Counsel for Project Veritas asked the court to do this yesterday!pic.twitter.com/nBrmf4myuj— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) November 11, 2021District Court Judge Analisa Torres ordered that:By November 12, 2021, the Government must confirm that it has paused its extraction and review of the contents of the O’Keefe’s phones;By November 16, 2021, the...

FBI raids Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe's home in New York over Biden daughter's diaries. Today's raid on journalist O'Keefe's home was conducted by both federal investigators and federal prosecutors in Manhattan. It was ordered by the U.S. Department of Justice (NYT)

"SDNY just sent a team into James O’Keefe’s home in New York" is all there is.

Prince Andrew must be questioned under oath by Virginia Giuffre's lawyers in her civil sexual assault case by mid-July next year, a US judge has ruled. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan set the deadline of 14 July 2022 to complete depositions in a scheduling order agreed to by lawyers for Andrew and Ms Giuffre It means the questioning could clash with the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations, which will take place in June. Andrew has vehemently denied allegations he sexually assaulted Ms Giuffre when she was a teenager. Under something known as "Mutual Legal Assistance" (MLA), both prosecutors and the...

Some months after Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice signaled it would back former President Donald Trump in a lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, a federal judge refused on Wednesday to let that development prevent the litigation from proceeding in his courtroom. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan denied Trump’s request for a stay of all proceedings, without comment. Carroll claims that the former president defamed her by falsely denying that he raped her in the dressing room of the department store Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s, but for roughly a year, proceedings have revolved less around her allegations...

On 11 September 2015, Liberty Activist Michael Picard was protesting a Connecticut speed trap when he was accosted, his property illegally seized, and three Connecticut State Troopers conspired to violate his rights and charge him with disturbing the peace. This correspondent wrote about the situation in 2016. Here is how Picard described the situation back then. Here are the words of Michael Picard:Back on Friday, September 11th, 2015, in West Hartford, CT, I was illegally detained, frisked and searched, and my gun, permit and camera were seized, I was threatened with arrest for interfering (apparently, freedom of speech passes for...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged four Iranian nationals over an alleged plot to kidnap a Brooklyn-based journalist and human rights activist who published material critical of the Iranian government. A superseding indictment from the U.S. District Court from the Southern District of New York was unsealed Tuesday, revealing charges against an Iranian intelligence official, Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, as well as "Iranian intelligence assets" Mahmoud Khazein, Kiya Sadeghi and Omid Noori.