Free Republic

President Trump said on Tuesday that his choice for drug czar is dropping out of consideration after reports that the nominee pushed legislation that undermined efforts to combat the opioid epidemic in the United States. In a Twitter post on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump said that Representative Tom Marino “is withdrawing his name” for the White House job of director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He said Mr. Marino, a Republican from Pennsylvania, was a “fine man and a great Congressman!” Mr. Trump was asked about the future of Mr. Marino’s post on Monday after a joint...

Chuck Rosenberg, the acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, emailed staffers Tuesday announcing he is resigning from the post. Rosenberg’s reason for leaving the agency was not reported, but it comes two months after he emailed DEA employees to reject comments President Donald Trump made about police use of force on suspects. Unnamed law enforcement officials told The New York Times on Tuesday that Rosenberg felt Trump had little respect for the law. Before becoming acting administrator of the DEA in May 2015 during the Obama administration, Rosenberg served as chief of staff for FBI Director James Comey.

A former US secret service agent has pleaded guilty to stealing over $800,000 worth of bitcoin during an investigation into online drug marketplace Silk Road. Shaun Bridges, 33, appeared in federal court in San Francisco and admitted to money laundering and obstruction of justice. Silk Road operated for more than two years until it was shut down in October 2013 having generated more than $214m in sales of drugs and other illicit goods using bitcoin, prosecutors said. Ross Ulbricht, Silk Road’s creator, who authorities say used the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, was sentenced to life in prison after a federal...

The History Channel is running a four-part series tracing the history (duh!) of the so-called War on Drugs. Since I seldom watch TV any more, I learned about this after the third episode had already aired. Rats! However, as luck would have it those of us who missed out didn't really miss anything. We can watch at our own pace, a few minutes at a time if that's all we can digest in one sitting (or or are otherwise distracted by barking dogs, phone calls, kids, meals). The site will remember where you left off so you can resume at...

While the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) spent Wednesday focusing on a Senate hearing they were hoping would implicate President Trump in obstruction of justice, they ignored a House Oversight Committee report that showed President Obama’s administration did just that. “An absolutely blistering report tonight out saying the Obama administration in general and former Attorney General Eric Holder in particular repeatedly lied to the family of a slain Border Patrol officer about the weapons used in his death, and stonewalled efforts to get at the truth,” announced Fox News’ Bret Baier on Special Report. {..snip..}

The House Oversight Committee released a scathing report Wednesday that accuses former Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice of covering up Operation Fast and Furious and misleading Congress’ investigation into the botched gun-running operation. The nearly 300-page report states that the Justice Department under Holder actively tried to hide the facts from the loved ones of slain Border Patrol Brian Terry – seeing his family as more of a “nuisance” than one deserving straight answers — and at times being openly hostile to them. {..snip..}

On Wednesday the House Oversight Committee, chaired by outgoing Congressman Jason Chaffetz, will hold a hearing re-examining Operation Fast and Furious and the Obama administration's handling of the scandal. The goals of the hearing are to "identify what the new officials at the Department of Justice can learn from the mistakes made by their predecessors in responding to Congress's inquiry" and "to understand the effect of the Justice Department's obstruction on these witnesses." As a refresher, Operation Fast and Furious was a program implemented under the Obama Justice Department (headed by Attorney General Eric Holder) and the Bureau of...

The House Oversight Committee released a scathing report Wednesday that accuses former Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice of covering up Operation Fast and Furious and misleading Congress’ investigation into the botched gun-running operation. The nearly 300-page report states that the Justice Department under Holder actively tried to hide the facts from the loved ones of slain Border Patrol Brian Terry — seeing his family as more of a “nuisance” than one deserving straight answers — and at times being openly hostile to them. […] The report also says that Holder’s Justice Department stonewalled inquiries from Sen....

Six years late, we have new insight into the government’s secretive Fast and Furious operation in which federal agents purposely let thousands of assault rifles and other weapons be trafficked from the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels, where they were used in many murders and other crimes.

The efforts were launched after the Secure and Responsible Drug Disposal Act from 2010, giving the DEA the power to form drug disposal programs nationwide...Have a medicine cabinet full of pills and medicines you don’t need anymore and need a safe place to dispose of them? It’s time for another Drug Take Back Day. In Oct. 2016, America turned in 366 tons of unwanted drugs. In its 12 previous Take Back events, the Drug Enforcement Agency has taken in over 7.1 million pounds of the potentially dangerous substances.

The Drug Enforcement Administration seized more than $4 billion in cash from people suspected of drug activity over the last decade, but $3.2 billion of those seizures were never connected to any criminal charges. A report by the Justice Department Inspector General released Wednesday found that the DEA's gargantuan amount of cash seizures often didn't relate to any ongoing criminal investigations, and 82 percent of seizures it reviewed ended up being settled administratively—that is, without any judicial review—raising civil liberties concerns. In total, the Inspector General reports the DEA seized $4.15 billion in cash since 2007, accounting for 80 percent...

El Chapo could compromise hundreds, possibly thousands of federal drug investigations with a well-placed mole on his legal team ... that's the fear of federal officials. We've learned Chapo's legal team will become privy to thousands of sensitive DEA documents that chronicle his activities in the international drug trade. The worry ... that the lawyers Chapo hires will use the info to warn other drug kingpins of the DEA's moves, compromising the investigations. Prosecutors went to court and asked the federal judge in Brooklyn who is presiding over Chapo's drug trafficking case to allow them to screen every potential foreign...

Patrons at the Iron Addicts Gym in Miami said they were disrupted from their morning workouts Wednesday by DEA agents who raided the facility. Ten people were arrested on warrants for selling anabolic steroids, including Richard Rodriguez, a part-owner of the business. Several gym patrons posted about their experiences on Facebook and Instagram, sharing photos of DEA agents in the gym. One man wrote on Facebook that “there is a hormone club for prescription upstairs.” …

Kentucky U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie says his bill that would abolish the federal Department of Education should be taken seriously because the interest it has generated means the measure could ultimately end up on President Donald Trump’s desk. “I think the reason people have to take this bill seriously now, is because, for the first time since Ronald Reagan, we have a president in the White House who would conceivably sign this bill,” he explains in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News. Massie, who introduced his bill to abolish the federal education department on February 7, says he and many...

IT’S NO SECRET that the Drug Enforcement Administration relies heavily on an army of confidential sources — men and women compelled, coerced, or enticed to share information with law enforcement, sometimes to alleviate their own legal troubles, sometimes for cash. Precisely how those relationships play out, however, is often shrouded in secrecy. A recently published audit by the Department of Justice has now offered a startling glimpse behind the scenes of those operations, revealing a world in which hundreds of millions of dollars have been doled out to thousands of informants over the last five years. Those informants include package...

U.S. Gun-Show Customers’ License Plates Come Under Scrutiny Federal agents enlisted local police to scan cars’ plates at shows’ parking lots By Devlin Barrett Oct. 2, 2016 7:35 p.m. ET Federal agents have persuaded police officers to scan license plates to gather information about gun-show customers, government emails show, raising questions about how officials monitor constitutionally protected activity. Emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show agents with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency crafted a plan in 2010 to use license-plate readers—devices that record the plate numbers of all passing cars—at gun shows in Southern California, including one in...

Well-meaning laws designed to nab high-level criminals have been twisted to siphon off money from law-abiding American citizens. The latest abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws involves air and rail travelers being targeted and fleeced by a federal agency. The Drug Enforcement Administration is pulling Americans’ travel data en masse from airline and Amtrak records, profiling individuals with “suspicious” travel habits, and targeting them for searches as part of the nation’s drug interdiction efforts.

Patriotic and resolute until the very end, Sipsey Street Irregulars' Mike Vanderboegh died on Wednesday, August 10, 2016 at the age of 64. He wrote this back in January: I beat the odds of my first cancer diagnosis for five years through the grace of God, who evidently wasn't done with me yet. In those five years, we broke the Fast and Furious scandal story ... and generally became a thorn in the side of the empire[.] In December 2010, the Obama-controlled media complex desperately wanted to ignore an illegal government-sponsored gun-walking operation known as Fast and Furious. And it...

For the first time, a federal judge has suppressed evidence obtained without a warrant by U.S. law enforcement using a stingray, a surveillance device that can trick suspects' cell phones into revealing their locations. U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan on Tuesday ruled that defendant Raymond Lambis' rights were violated when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used such a device without a warrant to find his Washington Heights apartment. The DEA had used a stingray to identify Lambis' apartment as the most likely location of a cell phone identified during a drug-trafficking probe. Pauley said doing so constituted an...

One of the guns used in the November 13, 2015 Paris terrorist attacks came from Phoenix, Arizona where the Obama administration allowed criminals to buy thousands of weapons illegally in a deadly and futile “gun-walking” operation known as “Fast and Furious.”A Report of Investigation (ROI) filed by a case agent in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) tracked the gun used in the Paris attacks to a Phoenix gun owner who sold it illegally, “off book,” Judicial Watch’s law enforcement sources confirm. Federal agents tracing the firearm also found the Phoenix gun owner to be in possession...