Free Republic

A Democratic effort is underway in at least 16 states to overturn restrictions on mail-in balloting and third-party ballot harvesting. A nationwide effort by Democrats is underway in at least 16 states to overturn restrictions on mail-in voting and third-party ballot harvesting. States where suits have been filed include the swing states of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The effort is being backed by the National Redistricting Foundation, a Democratic group headed by the Obama administration’s Attorney General Eric Holder. The suits appear to be funded by Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC. A Wall Street Journal headline from April read,...

Hillary Clinton is back, and so is Chris Steele, this time in the United Kingdom. They are no less than implying that current Conservative (Tory) Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a Russian plant. And it’s no mistake that these allegations are being made just before a U.K. general election on December 12 that will decide the fate of Brexit. It started last month, when the U.K.’s leftwing Guardian newspaper reported the existence of a secret report that said the Russians spent five years “cultivating leading Tories including Johnson…” The 50-page “dossier” from the U.K.’s intelligence and security committee is “based...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent more than $732,000 on outside contractors, including private investigators and researchers, records show, but his office refuses to say who they were. While it’s not unusual for special government offices to outsource for services such as computer support, Mueller also hired contractors to compile “investigative reports” and other “information.” The arrangement has led congressional investigators, government watchdog groups and others to speculate that the private investigators and researchers who worked for the special counsel’s office might have included Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, the private research firm that hired Steele to produce the Russia collusion...

The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton. The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” He replied within minutes: “If...

...Baumgartner had been working alongside Simpson as a Russian translator for a New York law firm defending a Russian holding company, Prevezon, in a money-laundering suit filed by the US Justice Department in Manhattan. Owned by Denis Katsyv, a Putin-tied oligarch, Prevezon was sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act. Also defending Prevezon was Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who Simpson helped lobby Congress to repeal the Magnitsky Act by attacking William Browder, the banker-turned-human-rights-activist who championed it. “He speaks Russian,” Simpson said of Baumgartner, after Senate Judiciary Committee staff asked about “subcontractors” he’d hired. “So he would work with the lawyers...

Google senior vice president Alan Eustace just beat the world record for highest-altitude space jump, The New York Times reports. A helium-filled balloon carried him 135,908 feet to nearly the top of the stratosphere — more than 25 miles — above the ground, before he cut himself loose and plunged toward the earth at speeds that peaked at more than 800 miles per hour.

Col. Joe Kittinger may be one of the most interesting people alive today. Not only did he set the record for the highest and longest skydive in history in 1960, but the 85-year-old retired Air Force colonel was also the first person ever to observe the curvature of the Earth from the edge of outer space, and the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in a helium balloon. Kittinger sat down with “Politics Confidential” to discuss his life’s many adventures and what it was like to help break his own skydiving record in 2012 as part of...

Austrian skydiver and daredevil Felix Baumgartner jumped from 128,100 feet above the Earth’s surface on October 14th, 2012. Seven GoPro cameras recorded the jump and GoPro just released this incredible footage, showing from a new perspective of what it was like from Baumgartner's point of view.

KNOXVILLE — A federal jury this afternoon convicted disgraced judge Richard Baumgartner on five of six counts of misprision of a felony. On their fourth day of deliberations, the 10-woman, two-man panel found the former Knox County Criminal Court judge guilty of lying to an Anderson County judge, a Knox County judge, a state prosecutor, a child support referee and the director of transitional housing at the YWCA.

Handing down a victory for Knox County prosecutors, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals today ruled Judge Jon Kerry Blackwood must recuse himself from presiding over retrials for three defendants convicted in the 2007 torture-slayings of a young Knox County couple. A stay previously entered in the retrial of these cases will remain in effect until the chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court appoints a replacement judge or pending further orders of this court of the Supreme Court, Judge Robert W. Wedemeyer wrote in the ruling for the three-member panel. "Upon that appointment, the new trial judge shall review...

MSNBC might want to put some of its graphics producers through basic physics classes again.   During a brief report on Sunday’s epic Felix Baumgartner sky-dive from the stratosphere, during which the native Austrian broke the sound barrier, the cable network mistakenly labeled his feat as having traveled “faster than the speed of light.”    Despite the mistaken chyron, host Andrea Mitchell correctly reported that “Fearless Felix” was the first human to travel faster than the speed of sound without being inside a craft of some sort.

YouTube.com has gone down thanks to Felix Baumgartner's historic jump from space. YouTube hosted Mr. Baumgartner's jump live and was sponsored by Red Bull. At its height, there were more than 7.5 Million people watching the same video at once. When Mr. Baumgartner was about to touch down after a successful jump, the site began to experience problems. A few minutes after, the entire website is having a server error, leading people to receive this message when they try to go to YouTube: Members of Twitter quickly took to the site to comment on YouTube's crash.

There will be a second attempt today for Felix to jump from a ballon at 120,000 feet and parachute, breaking the record for high altitude jumps. There should be a live feed on the website.

The Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner will attempt to become the first human to break the sound barrier unaided by a vehicle. He is going to jump out of a balloon at more than 120,000ft (36.5km) above Roswell, New Mexico. In the near vacuum at that altitude, he should accelerate beyond about 690mph (1,110km/h) within 40 seconds. If all goes well, he will open a parachute near the ground to land softly in the desert, 10 minutes later.

State Senator and U.S. Senate candidate Michael Baumgartner issued an apology Tuesday, then retracted it after apparently sending a profane email to a reporter for the political blog Publicola. "Let me just say, Josh had it coming in this email, and I don't apologize," Baumgartner told KIRO 7's Graham Johnson on Tuesday afternoon. "Look, it's a naughty word. It doesn't amount to a whole lot." The email, which Publicola writer Josh Feit published on his blog, featured a photo of Baumgartner holding a gun and included the text, “Josh, this is Pat Feeks, a Navy SEAL killed last week in...

Daredevil Felix Baumgartner this morning landed from his 18-mile dive back to Earth from the edge of space, in a plummet that reached a speed of more than 500 mph. Mission Control gave the go ahead this morning for the launch, saying "God Speed Felix" from Roswell, N.M., where the mission is being hosted. Baumgartner, an Austrian national, was lifted in a capsule carried afloat by a huge helium balloon. Click Here for Pictures: Felix Baumgartner's Dive The balloon took 90 minutes to get to 90,000 feet. The crane holding the capsule went up as fast as it could to...

Senator Michael Baumgartner will suspend his campaign for US Senate for two days this week to travel to Georgia to advise an army battalion soon to deploy to Afghanistan. Baumgartner will lecture the 63rd Signals Battalion at Fort Gordon on counterinsurgency and the economy of Afghanistan. He will return to the campaign trail on Friday, June 8. “It’s a tremendous honor to be asked once again to help prepare our nation’s finest for the difficult challenges of fighting the war in Afghanistan,” Baumgartner said. Baumgartner, who holds a Masters degree in International Development from Harvard, served as an economics officer...

KNOXVILLE — An order has been filed ordering new trials for the defendants in a January 2007 torture slaying, according to John Gill, special counsel to Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols. This comes despite a request from prosecutors that Special Judge Jon Kerry Blackwood recuse himself from the case of the killings of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23. . . . Late last month, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled Blackwood's legal reasoning for granting new trials was faulty but left the door open for him to do so if he found different legal grounds.

The Tennessee Supreme Court on Tuesday signaled a willingness to at least consider the state Attorney General's Office's bid to appeal a decision ordering new trials in the January 2007 torture slayings of a Knox County couple. Rather than dismissing at the onset the state's request to appeal Special Judge Jon Kerry Blackwood's ruling upending convictions in the slayings of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, the state's high court is inviting debate on the issue instead. In an order released Tuesday, the court is requiring attorneys for the defendants at issue in the case to respond to the...

Once a revered Knox County Criminal Court judge, Richard Baumgartner on Tuesday shuffled into a federal courtroom in shackles, accused of covering up the drug-trafficking crimes of the mistress he met via a Drug Court program he helped found. Baumgartner, who sent thousands of people to prison in his nearly two-decade-long tenure as judge, was arrested Tuesday as he drove away from his East Knox County farm and hauled into U.S. District Court with shackles on his feet and a chain wrapped around his belly and connected to handcuffs. He said little during his appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Clifford...