Free Republic

Just over a week after Thomas Donlon became Interim Police Commissioner of New York City, federal authorities executed a search warrant at his home on Friday, Donlon said in a statement Saturday night. “On Friday, September 20th, federal authorities executed search warrants at my residences,” Donlon said in a statement. “They took materials that came into my possession approximately 20 years ago and are unrelated to my work with the New York City Police Department.” Law enforcement officials say the search warrant is related to documents that the commissioner may have retained from his previous positions...

(The Center Square) – Washington GOP Chair and State Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, has filed a federal lawsuit alongside Franklin County Auditor Matt Beaton against a consent decree agreed to by the Secretary of State’s Office that overturned a 30-day voter residency requirement in place since the state constitution was ratified in 1889. Announcing the lawsuit filed in U.S. Federal Court of Western Washington, Walsh wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that to he did so to “reverse a shady scheme to destroy the State Constitution's rule that a person be a WA resident for 30 days before registering...

Everything you have been taught, all your life, about the police and the courts and the justice system is a lie. Take all your mental images, everything you learned in primary school, every episode of "Perry Mason" or "Law and Order" or "The Rookie", crumple them up, throw them away. Banish them to a corner of your mind prominently labeled "fairy stories for little kids". That is not how any of this works. The police do not exist to protect you from criminals. Detectives do not exist to investigate crime and find the offenders. Courts do not exist to find...

The United States District Court for the Southern District of California (August 23, 2024) and the Supreme Judicial Court for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (August 27, 2024) reached opposite opinions on whether bladed weapons qualify as arms mentioned in the text of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment reads: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.In 2008, the Supreme Court examined the meaning of the words in the amendment. Heller found the meaning of “arms” to be the same at...

George McMillan III wanted to Talk about Trump, through the 7p framework, so we did.

Many circuit courts have said that law enforcement can hold your property for as long as they want. D.C.’s high court decided last week that’s unconstitutional.The Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures extends to the length of a seizure, a federal court ruled last week, significantly restricting how long law enforcement can retain private property after an arrest. "When the government seizes property incident to a lawful arrest, the Fourth Amendment requires that any continued possession of the property must be reasonable," wrote Judge Gregory Katsas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in...

A natural gas expansion project spanning portions of New Jersey, Delaware and New York was dealt a legal setback after a federal appeals court vacated the approval of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The U.S. Court of Appeals overturned federal approval of the $1 billion expansion of the Transco natural gas pipeline, which would run through sections of New Jersey and Pennsylvania with extensions stretching into southern New York. The panel ruled that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission overlooked studies that the market for expanded natural gas in New Jersey was low when it granted approval last year to the...

The GOP-led House has quietly filed a rare intervention in Steve Bannon's contempt of Congress case, arguing the Democrat-led House January 6 Select Committee failed in its formation to follow chamber rules – invalidating the two subpoenas it served Bannon that he ignore and ultimately put him behind bars. The Amicus Curiae brief filed by the House General Counsel fulfills a promise from Speaker Mike Johnson in June to intervene in the case. Bannon, a former Trump White House political adviser, refused to answer two subpoenas from the committee, citing executive privilege. He was convicted and sentenced under two charges...

When last we left Hunter Biden and his legal team, they were busy being scorched by U.S. District Court Judge Mark Scarsi in the California criminal tax case pending against Biden (and currently set to go to trial in September). As I noted in our reporting on the matter: But there's an even bigger problem with the motion than that: Biden's lawyers contended in the motion that Weiss only brought charges against Biden after he was appointed as Special Counsel. Which, as Scarsi very pointedly notes in his order, is false (emphasis mine): "The Court orders Mr. Biden’s counsel to...

The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Friday that oral arguments for its upcoming case involving the government’s ban on so-called “ghost guns” will begin on Oct. 8. It is the lone gun-related challenge on the court’s fall docket. The case, VanDerStok v. Garland, challenges the Department of Justice’s 2022 Final Rule that redefined important legal terms dealing with guns, including “firearm,” “receiver” and “frame,” making the longstanding American tradition of building personal firearms pretty much a thing of the past. Back in April, the court voted 4-3 to consider the challenge. At issue is whether the DOJ and Bureau of...

ATLANTA -- A Georgia judge has denied a preliminary challenge to block a commission created to discipline and remove state prosecutors, finding that it doesn't violate the U.S. or state constitution. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Paige Reese Whitaker on Tuesday rejected the request for an injunction against Georgia’s Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission... Republicans in Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Florida have pushed back on prosecutors who announced they would pursue fewer drug possession cases and shorter prison sentences as a matter of criminal justice reform.... District attorneys argue that they should be able to reject prosecution of whole categories...

The California Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Proposition 22, the voter initiative that allows Uber, Lyft and other gig economy companies to classify drivers for their ride-hailing and delivery services as independent contractors rather than as employees. In a unanimous decision released Thursday morning, the state’s top court rejected claims brought by a group of drivers and unions that the law is unconstitutional because it interferes with lawmakers’ authority over matters dealing with worker compensation. The ruling, which was expected following a lopsided hearing in the case in May, marks the end of a years-long legal fight over Proposition 22,...

Ouch! That's the only thing I could think to say in response to reading the order handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Mark Scarsi on Wednesday requiring Hunter Biden's legal team to show cause why they should not be sanctioned for making false statements in their recently filed motion to dismiss. While Hunter was presumably focused on his father's Oval Office address, his attorneys were getting lit up by a federal judge. Here's what happened: On July 15th, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the Florida criminal case against former President Donald Trump regarding his alleged improper retention of classified documents...

Joe Biden directed Department of Homeland Security boss Alexandro Mayorkas to assemble an “independent security review” of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13. The inclusion of Obama DHS boss Janet Napolitano ensures that this review will be anything but independent. Napolitano made her public debut in the 1991 campaign to keep Clarence Thomas off the U.S. Supreme Court. Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexually harassing her and Napolitano, then with a Phoenix law firm, represented Hill in the matter. In the confirmation proceedings, Hill’s witness Susan Hoerchner, “suddenly developed amnesia,” about parts of her story that contradicted...

Conservative activists are taking aim at race-based grants and programs designed to help members of marginalized communities. Will philanthropies soon find themselves in the crosshairs?The DEI dominoes started falling — or at least wobbling — last summer. There was a Supreme Court ruling all but gutting affirmative action on college campuses. In Hollywood, there was the mass exodus of diversity officers — at Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, Netflix and the Motion Picture Academy. Meanwhile, conservative activists launched a barrage of anti-DEI lawsuits with corporations in the crosshairs, like the one filed in March against CBS and Paramount by former (and...

A U.S. judge on Wednesday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a new rule against discrimination on the basis of gender identity in health care. U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola in Gulfport, Mississippi, sided with 15 Republican-led states that sued to challenge the rule, arguing that it exceeded the administration’s authority. The rule was finalized in May and was set to take effect on Friday. It states that a federal prohibition on sex discrimination, part of the Affordable Care Act health insurance law, extends to discrimination against transgender people.

Eight of eleven people indicted in connection with a 2021 Pacific Beach protest that turned violent received sentences Friday ranging from six months to two years in custody....Prosecutors contended the defendants converged on San Diego under the banner of antifa... and while clad in tactical gear proceeded to pepper spray, beat, throw objects at, and use Tasers on various people....The case was believed to be the first criminal conspiracy prosecution in the country against anti-fascist protesters...

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri granted his motion to block what he called President Biden’s latest illegal student loan handout scheme. Bailey said that Congress never gave Biden the authority to saddle working Americans with half-a-trillion dollars in other people's debt and that this is a huge win for the Constitution. Bailey told FOX Business exclusively that it's a huge win for the rule of law. "The Constitution makes clear that Joe Biden does not get to thwart Congress when it suits his political agenda. The Constitution will...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday ruled against a California woman who said her rights were violated after federal officials refused to allow her husband into the country, in part, because of the way his tattoos were interpreted. The 6-3 decision along ideological lines found that citizens don’t necessarily have the right to participate in federal government decisions about whether immigrant spouse can legally live in the U.S. “While Congress has made it easier for spouses to immigrate... said Justice Amy Coney Barrett..it is a fallacy to leap from that premise to the conclusion that United States citizens...

The Supreme Court’s recent blockbuster cases have had to do with hot-button issues like abortion, racial preferences and guns. But this year, one of the court’s most highly anticipated cases has to do with fishermen and administrative law. Don’t be fooled. It may sound dry, but it’s a fascinating case that could upend a deep injustice in the way that courts treat people who find themselves at odds with powerful executive agencies. In Loper-Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the court will consider whether to do away with a doctrine called Chevron deference. Chevron states that when resolving cases between administrative agencies...