Free Republic

After Friday afternoon's release of 94,000 emails between Cylvia Hayes and former Gov. John Kitzhaber's staffers, reporters poured over the documents dating back to the beginning of his third term in 2011. Now it's your turn. Cast of characters The Governor's office Mike Bonetto, Kitzhaber's chief of staff, had a front-row seat to the blurring between Hayes' public and private roles. No longer working in the governor's office. .........snip........ You can access the same archive as reporters by going to this link on Gov. Kate Brown's state site.

CHICAGO (FOX 32 News) - Tinley Park squatter living rent and mortgage free The problem with squatters is hitting home in an upscale Tinley Park Subdivision. On Mallow Street where homes sell for $350,000 or more, a woman has been living in a house rent and mortgage free for two years. “It's very frustrating, our property taxes are very high, I work nights to pay mine and to help support my family. And I just see her coming and going without a care in the world it's enormously frustrating,” said neighbor Patti Yara. And no one is more frustrated than...

BRISTOL, VA (WJHL) - Applications for state jobs in Virginia will no longer will include questions regarding a person's criminal history. Governor Terry McAuliffe signed an executive order removing criminal history questions from state employment applications Friday. Under the order, employment decisions won't be based on an applicant's criminal history unless it's specifically related to the job they are being considered for. While it only applies to state employment applications, the order also encourages similar hiring practices for private employers throughout the Commonwealth. Some business owners we spoke to in Bristol, Virginia are not on board with the idea.

The Obama Justice Department has filed its much anticipated corruption indictment against Senator Robert Menendez. He is the New Jersey Democrat who, from his powerful senior seat on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, has vehemently opposed President Obama’s negotiations with the jihadist regime in Iran, as well as his outreach to Castro’s Cuba. Two things about the Obama administration cannot be denied. First, the president is desperate to cut a deal with the mullahs on their nuclear program, so much so that he has erased virtually every red line he ever purported to draw and has not been shy about...

ATLANTA Eleven former Atlanta public school educators were convicted Wednesday of racketeering for their role in a wide-ranging conspiracy to inflate scores on students’ standardized tests. One of those convicted was Tamara Cotman, a former upper-level administrator for Wichita schools. Only one teacher was acquitted of all charges. The 11 convicted represented teachers, testing coordinators and other administrators who were accused of participating in the conspiracy dating to 2005, motivated by pressure to meet federal and local standards to receive bonuses or keep their jobs in the Atlanta Public Schools district of about 50,000 students. A state investigation in 2011...

An email obtained by The Associated Press shows that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe's office rebuffed interview requests with a federal agent investigating the U.S. government's investor-visa program. The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General twice asked McAuliffe for an interview in the summer of 2014 but said in a recent report that the efforts were "unsuccessful." McAuliffe spokesman Brian Coy told The AP the governor was too busy "running the commonwealth" to sit down with investigators but offered to provide any specific information agents needed.

ATLANTA (AP) — A group of former Atlanta educators convicted in a test cheating scandal were locked up in jail Thursday as they await sentences that could send them to prison for years. In one of the nation's largest cheating scandals of its kind, the 11 defendants were convicted Wednesday of racketeering for their roles in a scheme to inflate students' scores on standardized exams. They include teachers, a principal and other administrators, who were accused of falsifying test results to collect bonuses or keep their jobs in the 50,000-student Atlanta public school system. A 12th defendant, a teacher, was...

Have you seen it? The outgoing Senate minority leader Harry Reid, whose pitiful lie about being severely beaten in a vicious attack by an elastic exercise band continues largely unchallenged by our lugubrious mainstream media, said in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that he had no regrets about another pitiful lie he told back in 2012. Asked whether he felt any regret for defaming then-Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012 by accusing him of tax evasion, in no less a venue than the floor of the U.S. Senate where he would be immune from suit, Reid’s answer was haughty...

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez has been indicted on 14 federal corruption charges, including allegedly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in improper gifts and campaign contributions in exchange for using his office to help a close friend and donor. The 68-page indictment against Menendez was handed down by a federal grand jury in Newark on Wednesday afternoon. Also indicted was Dr. Salomon Melgen, a longtime Menendez friend and close associate. The two men had been at the center of a lengthy criminal probe by the Justice Department and FBI. According to the indictment, “Menendez accepted close to $1...

Full title: Atlanta cheating scandal teachers go to cells in hand-cuffs: Eleven educators face up to 20 years in prison for inflating their students' test scores to get bonus money for their schools . . . and for themselves The 11 teachers, testing coordinators and other administrators were convicted Wednesday of racketeering after a five-year investigation Evidence of cheating was found in 44 schools across the Atlanta school system, with nearly 180 educators involved A racketeering charge could carry up to 20 years in prison and most of the defendants will be sentenced on April 8 The cheating came to...

The Obama administration informed House Speaker John A. Boehner this week it will not prosecute former IRS executive Lois G. Lerner for contempt of Congress, concluding that she did not waive her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid answering questions when she was called to testify nearly two years ago. Ms. Lerner, the figure at the center of the IRS’s tea party targeting scandal, is still facing investigation over the intrusive scrutiny of conservative groups, but the decision by U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen not to pursue the contempt charge approved by the U.S. House does away with at least some of...

Labor giant SEIU spent more than $100 million on union overhead and political activities in 2014, according to federal labor filings released Tuesday evening. The union collected about $320 million from its 1.8 million members, who are primarily government employees and health care workers. For every $3 that a union member contributed to its coffers, $1 went to functions outside of membership services. The union spent about $55 million paying union administrators and covering overhead costs, including more than $276,000 to president Mary Kay Henry.

WASHINGTON — The White House on Tuesday introduced President Obama’s blueprint for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by nearly a third over the next decade. Mr. Obama’s plan, part of a formal written submission to the United Nations ahead of efforts to forge a global climate change accord in Paris in December, detailed the United States’ part of an ambitious joint pledge made by Mr. Obama and President Xi Jinping of China in November. The United States and China are the world’s two largest greenhouse gas polluters. Mr. Obama said the United States would cut its emissions...

Scandal: RNC Chairman Reince Priebus reminds us of the similarity between the 18-1/2-minute gap that doomed a presidency and an email server wiped clean by a lawyer who served on a Watergate committee staff. Hillary Clinton should know better, know that the cover-up is often worse than any crime, for she once worked as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff for the House Judiciary Committee investigating the "third-rate burglary" at the Watergate Hotel that doomed Richard Nixon's presidency. The end came when tapes of presidential conversations were found and became public knowledge with one tape containing that famous 18-1/2-minute...

I've just about given up on America. My hope is to teach my kids so they can maintain decency in an evil world. We're educating them, teaching them about God, decency, Western culture, beauty, and truth. My fear is they'll inherit an Idiocracy at best, and a Satanic theocracy at worst. We're on the road to both. God will not be surprised by it either way. Nothing in the political process gives me any hope. Nothing. Not even Ted Cruz because he still has faith in the political system. Even when he gets bounced out of the primary by the...

Hillary is not going to run for president. Oh, she may put her name up. But run, as in the sense of actually campaigning, that’s another story altogether. There’s a line from the first Godfather that’s always stuck in my mind. Sollozzo (Al Lettieri), the family’s deadly enemy who has just taken an almost fatal crack at Don Corleone, bends forward and near-whispers, “Could I have gotten to him ten years ago?” That line has been running through my mind the past several weeks as the e-mail saga has unfolded: Could anybody have gotten to Hillary ten years ago? The...

Two former federal agents accused of stealing bitcoins have been charged with wire fraud, money laundering and related offenses, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement. Carl Force, a former special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Shaun Bridges, a former Secret Service special agent, were both part of a Baltimore task force investigating Silk Road, the online marketplace often labeled the eBay of the drug trade. Force was given the task of establishing communications with Ross Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts," the San Francisco man who has been linked to Silk Road. Ulbricht was convicted last month...

You’d never know it from the mainstream media puff pieces of Harry Reid’s sudden retirement, but it was a long string of corruption scandals—including a recent one involving his attorney son—that drove the veteran Nevada senator to abruptly leave public office. For nearly a decade Judicial Watch has investigated and exposed Reid’s involvement in a multitude of transgressions and JW even warned the Senate Ethics Committee, but not surprisingly, no action was ever taken. On multiple occasions the Senate minority leader appeared on JW’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” list for his role in a number of political scandals that...

"An inspector general called them courageous, but Sen. Harry Reid said Friday that the government whistleblowers who accused him of using political pressure to try to win special treatment for a Las Vegas casino were “a bunch of whiners.” ........[Homeland Security Inspector General John] Roth said the special treatment was brought to his attention by more than 15 whistleblowers — an extraordinary number, in Mr. Roth’s judgment — who believed Mr. Mayorkas was caving to political pressure. “That so many individuals were willing to step forward and tell us what happened is evidence of deep resentment about Mr. Mayorkas‘ actions...

Senate Republicans are again attempting to ascertain why former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton top assistant Huma Abedin, was allowed to keep working at the State Department under a special, part-time status while also being employed at a politically-connected consulting firm, according to news reports on Saturday. Questions also linger about Ms. Abedin's alleged connection to the Muslim Brotherhood's women's auxiliary while having access to classified information and documents.