Free Republic

Vox and ProPublica take aim at President Trump’s heightened concern for gangs in the United States in a recently published video, claiming his harsh characterizations of MS-13 are unfair. The gang, also known as Mara Salvatrucha, numbers in the tens of thousands and is composed primarily of outlaws from El Salvador, Honduras, and other Central American countries. Trump’s hardline stance on crime and border security has made MS-13 a more widely recognized public menace. But instead of acknowledging the rising violent threat that MS-13 poses to the American people, progressive media outlets like Vox and ProPublica are casting the Trump...

--SNIP-- Since Trump took office, deportation officers have been unshackled, as the White House describes it, from an Obama-era mandate to focus limited enforcement resources on deporting immigrants with serious criminal convictions. Across the country, they have been rounding up people like Franco who have sunk roots in this country, living for years, if not decades, with little fear of apprehension. Nowhere, however, have federal agents more aggressively embraced their newfound freedom than in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Delaware, an investigation by ProPublica and the Inquirer and Daily News foun

ProPublica has issued a correction for mistakenly saying in an article that Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to head the CIA, was involved with the treatment a terror suspect and falsely stated she mocked the suspect. Although Haspel, who has been with the CIA since 1985, was in charge of a covert CIA prison in Thailand where detainees were subject to waterboarding and other interrogation methods in 2002, the ProPublica story falsely stated she was directly involved with the torture of a prisoner by the name of Abu Zubaydah. Zubaydah was waterboarded at the CIA prison on 83 occasions. “It...

A new bill under consideration by Florida lawmakers would stop insurance companies from dodging workers compensation payouts by aiding in the arrest and deportation of unauthorized immigrants who are injured on the job. Legislators and advocates have been pushing for the measure since last summer, when ProPublica and NPR documented more than 130 cases in which immigrants who had suffered legitimate workplace injuries were flagged to law enforcement agencies by their employers' insurers. The workers faced felony fraud charges for using a fake ID when they sought medical care. Meanwhile, the insurers often avoided paying the workers' compensation benefits legally...

Radical feminist website RH Reality Check published a hit piece on Thursday against Holly O’Donnell, a whistleblower featured in several of the undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s harvesting of unborn babies’ organs and tissue. Sharona Coutts – a former reporter at ProPublica and the site’s vice president for “investigations and research” – revealed O’Donnell’s alleged sexual preferences, after finding her profile on the OKCupid dating website, as well as posts on other sites. Coutts’s hatchet job actually sparked a backlash among many liberals on Twitter and other online outlets, who accused the author of “slut shaming” the former StemExpress employee....

One of the reporters who exposed what appears to have been former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s clandestine and rogue intelligence service said that there are more questions than answers regarding the operation, which was exposed in the hacked emails of Clinton’s longtime confidante Sidney Blumenthal. Appearing on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125, Jeff Gerth, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, told host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon that he still wanted to know “who authorized or tasked this network to do what they did” and “who was paying for this?” Gerth, the former...

In covering the hearing of the nine bank chief executives on Capitol Hill, it didn’t take long for me to see that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was having a hard time of it, valiant effort though he did make to defend his bank’s lending practices. Because to look inside Wells Fargo, you will find the worst of the mortgage lenders housed in this bank, Wachovia, which Wells Fargo bought last fall for $15.4 bn, and housed within Wachovia is Golden West Financial, which Wachovia bought for a stupefying $25 bn, Golden West, the purveyor of some of the worst...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has called for congressional hearings regarding conduct at the Federal Reserve following the ProPublica and This American Life report from last week, told NPR in an interview on Wednesday that the report, “tells us exactly what we already knew.” Warren told NPR’s Steve Inskeep that the report, “ultimately this report tells us exactly what we already knew—that the relationship between regulators and the financial institutions they oversee is too cozy to provide the kind of tough oversight that's really needed.” […] Listening to the tapes, Warren said two things jumped out: the lack of truthful...

A conservative 501(c)(4) nonprofit whose application for tax exempt status was among several wrongfully given to ProPublica earlier this year is suing the IRS over the disclosure and demanding big bucks in damages. The Denver-based Citizens Awareness Project filed the suit in federal court Thursday, asking the court to award it $1,000 for every time unauthorized persons saw its confidential returns, as well as other unspecified damages. In addition to the IRS, the suit names the United States of America and Attorney General Eric Holder as defendants. “Defendants’ conduct has caused Plaintiff to incur actual damages in the form of...

Jobs at Walmart don't pay a lot. Someone at The Nation recently noticed this, and decided to make up a new hourly wage for workers at the mega-uber-superstore chain—$12/hour—and declare their desire to see this wage implemented in an open letter to the CEO. The retail company has issued reams of press releases, funded and touted economic studies, taken to the airwaves, and made other serious efforts to address the criticisms about their compensation practices over the years. But it looks like someone in Bentonville finally snapped: Steven Restivo, a Walmart senior director of communications, sent out a email yesterday...

The short answer? The highest-ranking official in the Cincinnati office where, the IRS would have us believe, a few rogue employees initiated a scheme to target conservatives. SNIP When an application for tax exempt status comes into the IRS, agents have 270 days to work through that application. If the application is not processed within those 270 days it automatically triggers flags in the system. When that happens, individual agents are required to input a status update on that individual case once a month, every month until the case is resolved. Keep in mind, at least 300 groups were targeted...

The six Cincinnati workers we have identified, who sent scrutinizing letters to conservative groups with words including "patriot, liberty, tea party or 9-12" in their names are Mitchel Steele, Carly Young, Joseph Herr, Stephen Seok, Liz Hofacre and a woman identified only as Ms. Richards. But was all of this done at the hands of a small group of Cincinnati employees working together? During Friday's congressional hearing, that appeared to be the theme. Now, that explanation just became less likely. Mitchel Steele, Carly Young, Joseph Herr and Liz Hofacre are IRS agents. Stephen Seok is a supervisor IRS agent But...

The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.

The division of the Internal Revenue Service that improperly scrutinized the tax-exempt status of conservative groups sent confidential information on 31 conservative groups to the well-funded liberal nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica, according to a revelation made by ProPublica Monday. “The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year,” according to the ProPublica report. “In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications...

ProPublica on Monday reported that the same IRS division that targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle provided the investigative-reporting organization with confidential applications for tax-exempt status. That revelation contradicts previous statements from the agency and may represent a violation of federal guidelines. Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS sector that reviews tax-exemption applications, told a congressional oversight committee in April 2012 that IRS code prohibited the agency from providing information about groups that had not yet been approved. Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Jim Jordan...

ProPublica, a left-leaning nonprofit organization that does investigative journalism, often sharing it with outlets like the Washington Post, offers its own revelation on the news that the Internal Revenue Service was targeting Tea Party groups. It was the recipient of some of the IRS documents. These were documents that even ProPublica admits the IRS should not have been giving out according to the agency’s own rules: The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of

Hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") is the process used by the energy industry to extract immense deposits of oil and natural gas from deep geologic formations that only a few years ago were unreachable. It involves injecting a solution of water and chemicals far underground, typically thousands of feet below groundwater supplies. Fracking was first used in Oklahoma in the 1940s and in the years since has been employed in more than a million oil and gas wells across the nation. There is not a single independently documented instance of groundwater contamination by fracking anywhere in the country, a fact that was...

NBC-owned television stations in cities across the nation just teamed up with a nonprofit “journalism” group funded by a billionaire husband and wife team who not only spent millions campaigning for President Obama but also topped donor lists to groups like ACORN and MoveOn.org. The nonprofit, ProPublica, will contribute to the news operations of all NBC owned-and-operated stations, including those in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, the network announced Monday. The NBC affiliates will get early access to investigative reports from ProPublica, which describes itself as an “independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public...

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

For George Soros and ProPublica’s other liberal backers, it was again proof that a strategy of funding journalism was a powerful way to influence the American public. It’s a strategy that Soros has been deploying extensively in media both in the United States and abroad. Since 2003, Soros has spent more than $48 million funding media properties, including the infrastructure of news – journalism schools, investigative journalism and even industry organizations. And that number is an understatement. It is gleaned from tax forms, news stories and reporting. But Soros funds foundations that fund other foundations in turn, like the Tides...