Free Republic

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon canceled a scheduled Aug. 25 hearing and ordered a sealed hearing on a request for a protective order under the Classified Information Protection Act (CIPA) in a case the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) brought in Florida against former President Donald Trump, his aide Waltine Nauta, and his Mar-a-Lago property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, for allegedly mishandling classified documents. All three have pleaded not guilty. [snip] Mr. Smith’s team argued against the motion, calling it “extraordinary” and claiming that President Trump was seeking “special treatment that no other criminal defendant would receive and that is...

Conservatives whose reaction to the banana republic shenanigans of a leftist DA in a leftist city using a ridiculous perversion of the law to take out an enemy of the leftists is anything less than a desire to deal the pain right back are worse than useless. They are a menace. Their channeling of Kevin Bacon in “Animal House” empowers our enemies to ruin our country – and us. If you love the rule of law, if you want to bring back our precious norms and hold to our precious principles, then it’s time to go Full Truman and nuke...

SANTA FE – A state judge in Clovis rejected a motion Tuesday that would have tossed out New Mexico’s new congressional map just days before the first ballots are due in the mail. But District Judge Fred Van Soelen also refused to dismiss the case, leaving it alive with the potential to affect future elections after the June 7 primary. In a pair of rulings Tuesday, the judge said the Republican Party of New Mexico and other plaintiffs had made a “strong, well-developed case that (the new map) is a partisan gerrymander created in an attempt to dilute Republican votes...

Several years ago, I was the sponsor for a guy going through conversion from what he was (in a religious sense) to Catholic. He wasn’t just any guy; he was a very senior CIA officer who has frequently appeared on television since he transitioned to think-tank denizen. The Rite of Christian Initiation as an Adult (RCIA) experience builds a bond between sponsor and candidate/catechumen that often goes beyond religious conversations. On one occasion, we talked politics and foreign policy.What separates us from the Third World in our politics, he opined, are the twin concepts of peaceful transfer of power via...

The Dems will stop at nothing to get Biden elected (more like: get Trump out of office). If we are aware of their tactics, perhaps we can do something to prevent them or lessen their effects. Let's make a list of their shenanigans, along with methods of exposing them and fighting back, so that we can be prepared to deal with Dem cheating when it arises. 1. Voter fraud, including voting by dead people, felons and non-citizens, voting multiple times, numerous illegal vote by mail schemes. What else? 2. Ballot harvesting, including collecting "unused" ballots and filling them out for...

.......Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents – many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles – conflict with Biden’s narrative. And they raise the troubling prospect that U.S. officials may have painted a false picture in Ukraine that helped ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election........

Obama Scandal: Former President Obama and his political supporters have repeatedly stated that his administration was scandal-free, unlike administrations before and after. "We're probably the first administration in modern history that hasn't had a major scandal in the White House," Obama himself said. A new book puts the lie to that statement. Never mind that the left-leaning big media basically ignored major scandals during the Obama years, ranging from the IRS targeting scandal and the VA's deadly waiting lists for veterans to Hillary Clinton's illegal use of an unsecured, hackable home-brew server for her official duties as secretary of state...

The press has made a big deal about the new class of Democrats rolling into Congress and beyond, touting their 'diversity,' their 'socialism,' their 'sisterhood.' Most of us look at that group and see 'extremism,' particularly with the kinds of views they've presented, and the obnoxious gaffes they've blundered into, apologized for or not. They're new, after all. But there's something different about this batch of Democrats we haven't seen much in the past: The corruption accusations and investigations surrounding virtually all of them, most pretty solid-looking. Here's a short list, starting with a Daily Mail report, via GatewayPundit ....

Conservative Twitter users erupted on Friday after the social media platform torpedoed #DNCLeaks from its trending-news feed after Wikileaks released 20,000 emails by Democratic National Committee staff members. Embarrassing emails sent and received by DNC members had enough momentum to propel the story to Twitter’s top “trending” news feed on Friday afternoon. The #DNCLeaks entry vanished in the evening, but returned 20 minutes later after users cried foul. The story had 250,000 tweets at the time it was pulled. The Washington Examiner then aggregated the stream of angry feedback by conservatives.

EVELETH, Minn. – Workers in a call center on Minnesota’s Iron Range don headsets each day knowing their employer’s core business: Get Democrats elected. For years, prominent Democratic candidates and political groups have used the obscure center tucked among hills and pines to canvass and raise money from small donors. DFL organizations, state and national, have paid the phone bank’s current and former owners about $80 million over the last decade, campaign records show. The call center relocated to Eveleth in 2006 thanks in part to a $625,000 loan from a unique state agency called the Iron Range Resources and...

Sen. John McCain launched a fierce counterattack on Barack Obama yesterday after Obama arrogantly called McCain’s criticism of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice “outrageous” and said critics of Rice should “go after me.”

NY Senator Says She Expects to be ArrestedState Sen. Shirley Huntley from Queens is facing New York City Councilman James Sanders Jr. in a tough Sept. 13 Democratic primary. By Michael Gormley | Saturday, Aug 25, 2012 | Updated 6:46 PM EDT A veteran New York state senator said Saturday that she expects to be arrested Monday in the state's continuing investigation into the use of pork-barrel grants by legislators. Sen. Shirley Huntley, a Queens Democrat, didn't indicate what the charge against her might be. Huntley founded a nonprofit social service and education group that Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is...

Hilary Rosen is a frequent visitor to the White House. According to White House visitor logs, she has visited the president's home 35 times since he took office, but on Thursday, Press Secretary Jay Carney did his best to distance President Obama from Rosen because of her remarks about Mitt Romney's wife, Ann. Carney's claim that he knows three Hilary Rosens was a feeble attempt to defuse a ticking time bomb. Rosslyn Smith had an interesting blog in Thursday's American Thinker in which she said: Let us count the Hilary Rosens in Jay Carney's world. There is Hilary Rosen spokesperson...

Hilary Rosen is a frequent visitor to the White House. According to White House visitor logs, she has visited the president's home 35 times since he took office, but on Thursday, Press Secretary Jay Carney did his best to distance President Obama from Rosen because of her remarks about Mitt Romney's wife, Ann. Carney's claim that he knows three Hilary Rosens was a feeble attempt to defuse a ticking time bomb. Rosslyn Smith had an interesting blog in Thursday's American Thinker in which she said: Let us count the Hilary Rosens in Jay Carney's world. There is Hilary Rosen spokesperson...

Rep. Charlie Rangel has agreed to pay a $23,000 civil fine for effectively taking campaign contributions in the form of a rent-regulated apartment turned campaign office, according to Federal Election Commission documents. An FEC letter dated Friday says that Rangel, a 21-term New York Democrat, accepted “excessive in-kind contributions” in the form of leasing a rent-stabilized Harlem apartment at a price below market rate from the property owner. Four years ago, Rangel faced scrutiny over living in three neighboring rent-stabilized apartments on the 16th floor of a luxury building in Harlem. But the new FEC findings were instead related to...

Six of the House Ethics Committee's 10 members removed themselves from the case and were replaced Friday, saying they wanted to erase any questions of bias. Waters, a Democrat, is accused of trying to get federal aid for a minority-owned bank that lists her husband as an investor. She denies any wrongdoing. In addition to five Republicans, democratic Congresswoman Linda Sanchez also dropped out of the investigation, which has been going on for more than two years

Some Democratic members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, tasked with identifying $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, have become the subject of criticism, but their appointments were only finalized Thursday. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, and Reps. James Clyburn of South Carolina and Xavier Becerra of California are already being targeted for circumstances that could compromise their abilities to negotiate. Becerra, for example, wasted no time before using his appointment as a fundraising tool for his own campaign.

It is a shocking and emblematic photograph that could be of New York City's Boss Tweed, 140 years later: Jimmy Dimora, the most powerful man in Cuyahoga County politics, led away in manacles to FBI headquarters, to federal court, and into infamy. But the picture painted by the 177 pages in indictments made public Wednesday against eight suspects -- including Cuyahoga County commissioner Dimora and two county judges -- is even more shocking, alleging what could be one of the biggest local political-machine corruption cases in recent U.S. history.It also, for the first time, implicates a second commissioner, Peter Lawson...

Dozens in Congress under ethics inquiry AN ACCIDENTAL DISCLOSURE Document was found on file-sharing network By Ellen Nakashima and Paul Kane Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 30, 2009 House ethics investigators have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July. The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, and it was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations. The committee...

WASHINGTON — The House ethics committee announced Thursday that it would begin full investigations into two House members, Maxine Waters and Laura Richardson, but a security breach threatened to make public the names of many other members facing possible ethics charges. The separate investigations into private financial matters of Ms. Waters and Ms. Richardson suggest a stepped up effort by the ethics committee at a time when it has faced criticisms for the slow pace of its work. The security breach related to a document that contained the names of two dozen members of Congress whose conduct has come into...