Free Republic

WASHINGTON, DC — After multiple caches of highly classified government documents were found in different locations belonging to President Joe Biden, the United States Department of Justice acted swiftly to indict former President Donald Trump for the alleged crime. "This is a serious violation of federal regulations," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press briefing announcing the indictment. "We will take all measures available to the Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for President Biden being found in possession of these documents." "No one is above the law." Sensitive documents related to Ukraine, Iran, and the UK were...

For most of 2022, Democratic voters have been far more ambivalent about participating in the fall midterms than their Republican counterparts. According to conventional Beltway wisdom, however, that enthusiasm gap has been narrowed by the recent Roe v. Wade ruling and the Jan. 6 hearings. It’s probable, though, that last Monday’s FBI raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate will reestablish the Republican advantage. This unprecedented action will likely energize GOP voters and drown any increase in Democratic enthusiasm beneath a red tsunami. The first poll to measure public response to the raid indicates that it has galvanized Republicans and...

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats called for an investigation on Thursday after The New York Times reported that the Justice Department under President Donald Trump seized the communications data of members of the House Intelligence Committee. “The news about the politicization of the Trump Administration Justice Department is harrowing,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement. “These actions appear to be yet another egregious assault on our democracy waged by the former president.” The Times reported Thursday that the DOJ subpoenaed Apple for data from at least two committee members, as well as aides and...

A key ally of President Trump offered a clue about when U.S. Attorney John Durham could complete his inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation. Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, told colleagues during a House Rules Committee meeting on Tuesday that the review is expected to end sometime starting in June. “His investigation is due to be completed sometime this summer," Jordan said. He mentioned it after Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican from Texas, asked whether "anybody is going to be accountable now," referring to the “significant errors or omissions” the Justice Department inspector general found in the...

Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) are working to kill a House deal to reauthorize expiring intelligence programs and reform the surveillance court, throwing up an eleventh hour roadblock to the agreement. The two libertarian-minded Republicans, who are close allies of President Trump's, are urging Trump to veto the House agreement, which pairs a reauthorization of expiring intelligence programs with broader changes to the court associated with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). "The president I think really would like to see real reform, and I think the open question is whether or not he'll take what [Attorney...

A quick back-and-forth occurred over the last week between President Trump and the nation's federal judges. After lying to Attorney General Barr about seeking a minimum sentence, the prosecutors in the Roger Stone case (including two from the Mueller Crew) entered a harsh sentencing recommendation that he serve a decade behind bars for lying to Congress. President Trump rightly criticized the prosecutors for their double standard in persecuting one of his political allies while leaving Hillary, Huma, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, and countless others free to lie, destroy evidence, and obstruct investigations with impunity. The president lit into Judge Amy...

The poorly written click-bait headline at the Washington Post “Trump declares himself ‘chief law enforcement officer’” complete with the scare quotes, might create the impression among the woefully ignorant who depend on their “fish wrapper” for news. The headline implies President Trump said something wrong, which begs the question: has anybody under the age of sixty ever read the U.S. Constitution? It’s only about four pages long, written back in the day when people still produced clear and concise documents by hand. And more importantly, shouldn’t “journalists” have a basic understanding of their subject matter if they are going to...

Former Deputy Attorney General Donald Ayer called his former colleague, Attorney General William Barr, "un-American" because he thinks the president is above the law. "The reason I say he's un-American...is that the central tenet of our legal system and our justice system is that no person is above the law," Ayer told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Monday. "Bill Barr's vision is that there is one man—one person—who needs to be above the law and that is the president." Having known Barr for 40 years, Ayer told Blitzer that there was never a reason to "test" Barr's "very strong view" that...

Key Points President Donald Trump retweeted a claim that he was “the victim of a seditious conspiracy out of the” Justice Department and the FBI. Attorney General William Barr has warned people close to Trump that he might resign if the president continues commenting on criminal cases. Trump has publicly complained about the case against his friend, political operative Roger Stone, who lied to Congress about his contacts with WikLeaks. ====================================================================== Your move, Mr. Attorney General. President Donald Trump on Wednesday retweeted claims that he is “the victim” of a Justice Department conspiracy, hours after reports that the department’s chief...

“More than 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials called on Attorney General William P. Barr on Sunday to step down after he intervened last week to lower the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone, Jr.,” The New York Times reported on Sunday—if you can call it reporting.Not once in the 800-word article did the Times address the overwhelming evidence that the thousand-plus signatories were politically motivated critics of President Donald Trump. In fact, to the contrary, the Times claimed “the former Justice Department lawyers” “came from across the political spectrum” to...

Attorney General William Barr has told people close to him he’s considering quitting over President Trump's tweets about Justice Department cases, an administration official says.

The Justice Department pushed back Tuesday night at multiple reports claiming Attorney General William Barr told people close to him he’s considering stepping down over President Trump’s tweets, days after Barr admitted that Trump’s tweeting made it “impossible for me to do my job.” “Addressing Beltway rumors: The Attorney General has no plans to resign,” DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec tweeted. Barr “has his limits,” one person familiar with Barr’s thinking told The Washington Post. Its report suggested that Barr wanted Trump to “get the message” to stop weighing in publicly in ongoing criminal cases. An administration official gave a similar...

“Not only is the terror threat diverse, it’s unrelenting," said FBI chief Chris Wray In a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray outlined several concrete steps the agency had taken to combat violent far-right extremists, explaining that the “national threat priority” designation puts those groups or individuals on the same footing as ISIS” in terms of the resources the FBI will devote to it. “We’re particularly focused on domestic terrorism, especially racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” said Wray. “Not only is the terror threat diverse, it’s unrelenting... He also said that he’d created...

A pro-abortion amendment to the U.S. Constitution cannot move forward, despite abortion activists’ attempts to revive it past the deadline, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) technically would ensure equality for women through the U.S. Constitution. However, pro-life leaders long have warned that it would be used to end all abortion restrictions and allow unborn babies to be aborted for any reason up to birth. U.S. Congress set a seven-year deadline for the ratification of the amendment, but it ended in 1982. Some pro-abortion lawmakers have ignored the deadline and passed the amendment anyway,...

Attorney General William Barr provided new details Wednesday of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe and said in an interview on Fox News that the federal prosecutor is looking into the activities of federal agencies outside the FBI, as well as those of “private actors.” “He’s not just looking at the FBI,” Barr said of Durham. “He’s looking at other agencies … and also private actors, so it’s a much broader investigation.” Barr did not elaborate on which “private actors” are part of the Durham probe.

In a Washington Post op-ed Barack Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder call Bill Barr “so nakedly partisan” he is “unfit” to serve as President Trump’s attorney general. As we’d say in New Jersey, “Da Noive!” A quick review of Holder’s record shows him to be the most nakedly partisan attorney general since JFK picked baby brother Bobby for the job a half-century prior. As late as 2013, Holder was boasting about his partisanship. When asked whether he would continue on as Obama’s attorney general after the reelection, Holder famously replied, “I’m still the President’s wingman. So I’m there with my...

“Person of the Year” is high praise indeed. TIME has given the honor to the teenage climate activist, Greta Thunberg, for beginning “a global movement by skipping school.” Perhaps more gallingly, TIME named “the public servants” as their “guardians of the year.” In particular, Marie Yovanovitch, Bill Taylor, Fiona Hill, and Alex Vindman—four of the bureaucrats who testified against President Trump in the impeachment hearings—as individuals who had the courage to “follow the law.” While these four might have “followed the law” by testifying under subpoena, the broad-based effort to impeach President Trump based on a phone call with Ukrainian...

Former CIA and FBI Director William Webster declared in an op-ed Monday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not a “broken institution” and criticizing it threatens the “rule of law,” in an attempt to quell public outcry over agents’ misconduct during the 2016 election.Webster’s full-throated defense of the two agencies comes amid the fallout from the Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) report, in which it was confirmed that FBI officials made 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in its submissions to the FISA court to obtain warrants to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page during the 2016 presidential election.“The...

The Department of Justice sided with college students reprimanded for promoting free speech by slamming Jones County Junior College’s “Orwellian,” “draconian,” and “unconstitutional” treatment of them in a Statement of Interest filed on Monday. The DOJ made explicitly clear that public colleges cannot “trample” on their students’ First Amendment rights. In a news release from the DOJ announcing the Statement of Interest filing, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division clearly stated, “Repressive speech codes are the indecent hallmark of despotic, totalitarian regimes. They have absolutely no place in our country, and the First Amendment outlaws all...

U.S. attorney John Durham issues a response to the DOJ IG report, saying his office does "not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”