Free Republic

A lawyer for Donald Trump on Tuesday backed off her suggestion that the judge who oversaw E. Jean Carroll's two successful civil defamation trials against the former U.S. president might have had a conflict of interest. In a letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan, Trump's lawyer Alina Habba said she was satisfied that the judge and Carroll's lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who is not related, did not have a "mentor-mentee relationship" when they worked at the same law firm three decades ago.... "The point of my January 29 letter was to verify whether the information contained in the...

A New York state appeals court on Tuesday upheld an order finding Donald Trump in civil contempt for having failed to comply with a subpoena from New York Attorney General Letitia James in her probe of his business practices. In a 5-0 decision, the Appellate Division in Manhattan said James had established by "clear and convincing evidence" that Trump's response to the Dec. 1, 2021, subpoena was inadequate. The court said Trump's claim that a diligent search had failed to uncover relevant documents in his possession, without explaining what steps were taken to ensure nothing would be lost or discarded,...

NEW YORK, July 13 (Reuters) - A former CIA software engineer was convicted on Wednesday of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks from the spy agency, in one of the biggest such thefts in CIA history.

Three men have been criminally charged in Manhattan with possessing about 100 pages stolen from the singer Don Henley of handwritten notes and lyrics for the Eagles' blockbuster 1976 album "Hotel California."

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A New York trial judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the New York Times from publishing some materials concerning the conservative activist group Project Veritas, a rare step that the newspaper said violated decades of First Amendment protections for the process. The order by Justice Charles Wood of the Westchester County Supreme Court covers memos written by a Project Veritas lawyer and obtained by the Times. Wood scheduled a hearing for next Tuesday to consider a longer prohibition against publication, and whether the Times should remove references to privileged attorney-client information in a Nov. 11 article about Project...

A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Wednesday weighed arguments by Republicans seeking to stop a suburban Philadelphia county from counting mail-in and absentee ballots that voters had been permitted to correct. U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage in Philadelphia appeared skeptical of arguments by the plaintiffs’ lawyer, which lawyers for Montgomery County election officials and the Democratic National Committee said could disenfranchise voters. The Pennsylvania lawsuit had been filed by Kathy Barnette, a conservative political commentator projected to lose her race for a House seat in the state’s 4th Congressional district, and Clay Breece, chairman of the Republican Committee in Berks...

(Reuters) - A federal judge rejected the University of California at Berkeley's bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming it discriminated against conservative speakers like Ann Coulter by imposing unreasonable restrictions and fees on their appearances. In a decision late Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney in San Francisco said two conservative groups could pursue claims that the school applied its "high-profile speaker" and "major events" policies in a manner that unfairly suppressed conservative speech. But the judge also said she was "unpersuaded" by claims that the school engaged in intentional viewpoint discrimination, and said the plaintiffs could not seek punitive...

Warren Buffett bemoaned the “negative drumbeat” on the U.S. economy from presidential candidates in his annual Berkshire Hathaway Inc shareholder letter on Saturday, saying they are misleading Americans into believing their children will be worse off than they are. “It’s an election year, and candidates can’t stop speaking about our country’s problems (which, of course, only they can solve),” Buffett wrote, italicizing “they” for emphasis. As a result of their dour outlook on the U.S. economy, many Americans now believe that their children will not live as prosperously as they themselves do, the 85-year-old Buffett said. “That view is dead...