Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Siding with a small time drug offender in Indiana whose $42,000 Land Rover was seized by law enforcement officials, the Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that the Constitution places limits on civil forfeiture laws that allow states and localities to take and keep private property used to commit crimes. Civil forfeiture is a popular way to raise revenue, and its use has been the subject of widespread criticism across the political spectrum. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Eighth Amendment, which bars “excessive fines,” limits the ability of the federal government to seize property. On Wednesday, the...

Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce as early as next week the completion of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller's confidential report, according to people familiar with the plans. The preparations are the clearest indication yet that Mueller is nearly done with his almost two-year investigation. The precise timing of the announcement is subject to change. The scope and contours of what Barr will send to Congress remain unclear. Also unclear is how long it will take Justice officials to prepare what will be submitted to...

In early February, Google announced that its home security and alarm system Nest Secure would be getting an update. Users, the company said, could now enable its virtual-assistant technology, Google Assistant. The problem: Nest users didn't know a microphone existed on their security device to begin with. The existence of a microphone on the Nest Guard, which is the alarm, keypad, and motion-sensor component in the Nest Secure offering, was never disclosed in any of the product material for the device.

The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it was canceling a federal grant to California worth nearly $1 billion after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the cancelation of the state’s high-speed rail project last week.

Lawyers for 16-year-old Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School junior who faced off with Omaha Nation elder Nathan Phillips on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last month, have filed a $250 million lawsuit against The Washington Post, one of many newspapers to report on viral video of the incident. “This is only the beginning,” said the attorneys, Lin Wood and Todd McMurtry, on their firm’s website, noting that it was the “first lawsuit” on Sandmann’s behalf. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Kentucky, Reuters reported, and it states that the sum – which is for...

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returned to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to hear her first oral arguments since undergoing an operation in December

RALEIGH, N.C. — A key witness testified Monday that she engaged in fraudulent and illegal activity involving absentee ballots in a congressional race in North Carolina as part of a get-out-the vote operation to benefit the Republican congressional candidate in a race that is still unresolved. In frank testimony before the North Carolina State Board of Elections, Lisa Britt said that she was paid to collect absentee ballots in the 2018 election by McCrae Dowless, a political operative hired by consultants for Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris. Britt said some of the ballots she collected were unsealed and uncompleted and...

Sen. Bernie Sanders has confirmed to VPR that he is seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. His official announcement video is expected to stream online Tuesday morning. "I wanted to let the people of the state of Vermont know about this first," Sanders told VPR's Bob Kinzel. "And what I promise to do is, as I go around the country, is to take the values that all of us in Vermont are proud of — a belief in justice, in community, in grassroots politics, in town meetings — that's what I'm going to carry all over this country."

President Trump suggested Monday night that former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe committed treason, making his case in a tweet that cited Fox News’s Sean Hannity, hours after lobbing similar claims at Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. Trump sent the tweet during Hannity’s nightly show, in which the host assailed McCabe for claiming that he and Rosenstein discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power. Quoting Hannity, Trump wrote, “’The biggest abuse of power and corruption scandal in our history, and it’s much worse than we thought. Andrew McCabe (FBI) admitted to plotting a coup (government overthrow)...

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is expected to leave his role at the Justice Department by mid-March, a senior DOJ official told Fox News on Monday. An announcement of who has been selected to replace Rosenstein could come as early as this week. A Trump administration official added that Attorney General William Barr has picked Jeffrey Rosen to serve as his deputy attorney general. Fox News reported in January that Rosenstein was expected to step down in the coming weeks to ensure a smooth transition for Barr, who was sworn in on Thursday.

The Trump 2020 campaign is highlighting examples of the president keeping his promises, advisory board member Marc Lotter says. The attorneys general of California, New York, and 14 other states on Monday filed a lawsuit in the Ninth Circuit against the White House's recent national emergency declaration over border security, claiming President Trump has "veered the country toward a constitutional crisis of his own making." President Trump sarcastically had predicted the lawsuit last week. He's slammed the Ninth Circuit multiple times as "disgraceful" and politically biased. The litigation, brought before a federal trial court in the Northern District of California,...

The Talk Shows February 17th, 2019 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: CBS’ “Face the Nation”: President Trump!FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Radio host Rush ; Stephen Miller, senior White House policy adviser. The panel will be Marc Short of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and former Trump White House director of legislative affairs; Katie Pavlich, editor of Townhall; Bob Woodward of The Amazon Bozos Post and author of “Fear”; and Charles Lane of The Amazon Bozos Post.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.; New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio; Tom Perez, Commissar,...

The U.S. Supreme Court will decide the fate of a fiercely contested plan by President Donald Trump’s administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, agreeing on Friday to an expedited review of a judge’s ruling blocking the plan.

Live | The White House – 02/15/2019 President Trump Speaks on the National Security and Humanitarian Crisis on Our Southern Border 10:00 AM EST The White House https://www.whitehouse.gov/live/

Oh, wait — is Bill Weld a Republican again? Gary Johnson’s running mate on 2016’s Libertarian ticket announced this morning in New Hampshire that he will launch an exploratory committee as the first step to challenging Donald Trump in a 2020 primary. In doing so, Weld sacrifices quite a bit — his potential opportunity to beat Trump in the general election at the top of a Libertarian ticket.Did I write that with a straight face? You’ll never know. Former Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld is launching a presidential exploratory committee to challenge President Trump in the Republican primaries, saying...

President Trump will take dramatic actions to fund his long-promised border wall and declare a national emergency, which will enable his administration to move $8 billion from various federal agencies to fund the project, a senior administration official told Fox News late Thursday. The news comes as Trump is expected to sign a House border security package that provides $1.4 billion for the project, which is far below the $5.7 billion Trump insisted he needed and would finance just a quarter of the 200-plus miles he wanted. Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, said earlier today that Trump will...

MCCONNELL; Trump has said he will sign the spending bill AND issue an emergency declaration at the same time.

The White House is still vetting the massive spending deal that was released late Wednesday and is trying to get several questions answered, according to several Republican senators and aides. GOP senators said they would like to get assurances that President Trump will sign the bill if it gets to his desk, possibly later today. “We’d like to know it’s a bill the President is going to sign. Hopefully they will let us know,” said Sen. John Thune, the second-ranking GOP leader as he left a Republican conference lunch where the issue was discussed at length. Sen. John Kennedy, a...

Soon after speaking to President Trump about the firing of his boss James Comey, Andrew McCabe, who became the bureau's acting director, began obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigations involving the president and his ties to Russia. In his first television interview since his own firing, McCabe tells 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley he wanted those inquiries to be documented and underway so they would be difficult to quash without raising scrutiny. "I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion," McCabe tells Pelley in the interview. "That were...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that the Senate would vote on the Green New Deal introduced last week by Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. "I've noted with great interest the Green New Deal, and we're going to be voting on that in the Senate to give everybody an opportunity to go on record," McConnell told reporters. The bill, which is not expected to pass the Republican-dominated upper chamber, could force some Democrats to make a politically awkward calculation.