Free Republic

Prosecutors Ryan Dickey and Brian Richardson are no longer working for the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department confirmed. Both lawyers were relatively junior but frequently spotted members of Mueller's corps. Both have worked on court cases that Mueller opened as part of his investigation into Russian interference and coordination with the Trump campaign in the 2016 presidential election. Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined to explain on Thursday what the departures mean for the state of Mueller's office. Over this summer, as Mueller opened more criminal cases, other Justice Department units including the...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is continuing to use a controversial 35-page dossier financed by the Democratic National Committee and the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign as a "road map” for investigative leads, sources familiar with his investigation say. Mueller’s team has also used information gleaned from surveillance court-approved wiretaps on former Trump adviser Carter Page that were secured by citing material in the dossier, the sources say. And a detail previously reported last fall – that Mueller’s investigators traveled overseas last year to debrief the dossier’s London-based author, Christopher Steele, a former British spy – takes on a new cast with...

Jefferson, a member of the gentry of Old Virginia, was always regarded as one of the best and brightest of his generation, a gentleman of the finest intellect, taste, and manners. Although Jefferson loved and was loyal to the Union, he was a Virginian first and an American second; Virginia, Jefferson avowed, was his “country.” This order of allegiance – State over Union, or “Society” over “the State” – was firmly rooted in the Old South. Accordingly, in the emerging conflict between the North and the South, Jefferson sided with his own country. “It is true that we are completely...