Free Republic

Former US Attorney General Eric Holder is a huge fan of NBA hall of famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. So much so that Holder used Abdul-Jabbar's birth name, Lew Alcindor, as an alias for his official Department of Justice (DOJ) email account, raising more questions about the email practices of top Obama administration officials, and about the ability of US government agencies to track down correspondence in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Related: A Judge Has Scolded the State Department for Blowing the Deadline on the Clinton Emails The Lew Alcindor revelation was made in a February 16 letter...

A Muslim terrorist attacked a handful of innocent Americans spending time in an Israeli-owned restaurant in Ohio. The violent attacker, Mohammad Barry, walked into the deli in the early evening and asked for some information on who the owner was and where he was from. After finding out that the owner was of Israeli background, the man left, but returned half an hour later with a machete... At this point things got very ugly. Barry attacked the folks inside with the machete; four of them were rushed to the hospital and treated for their injuries. The man left after he...

Update: One source directed me to a Fox News interview yesterday with Gowdy for the source of the “crucial national security records” referenced in his statement. “You will hear new names that no one else has heard,” Gowdy said. “Even this past week, we got information from the CIA that no other committee of Congress has ever bothered to ask for or receive.” Hmmmmm.Original post follows …===Looks like we may find out sooner rather than later what the House Select Committee on Benghazi has found about the attack that left four Americans dead, dozens more waiting for help, and the...

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) - After two years of painstaking work, experts have completed the initial phase of a delicate restoration project at the Church of the Nativity, giving a much-needed face-lift to one of Christianity's holiest sites. The project, partially funded by the Palestinians and conducted by a team of Palestinian and international experts, is the biggest restoration at the iconic church in some 600 years. The removal of centuries of dust has left Crusader-era mosaics sparkling in sunlight filtering through brand new windows. Structural repairs on the fragile rooftop and windows have been completed and art treasures have...

Classified messages from 2012 concerned US-Israel tensions and a raid by terrorists from Sinai The State Department on Saturday released 550 more Hillary Clinton emails from her period as secretary of state, including 84 that were marked as classified, the American political magazine Politico reported. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign up! Two of the emails, whose contents were marked "secret," concerned American policy toward Israel, including an August 2012 exchange between top US officials over a cross-border attack from the Sinai peninsula into Israel, and a September 2012...

Just one week after Peyton Manning triumphed in Super Bowl 50, the Denver Broncos quarterback's reputation has been called into question due to his alleged involvement in a sexual assault during his time at the University of Tennessee.According to Shaun King of the New York Daily News, in court documents from 2003 that were recently obtained, it was alleged that in 1996, Manning sexually assaulted Dr. Jamie Naughright, who was serving as the associate athletic trainer for the Volunteers football program. Per the document, which was drafted by Naughright's lawyer, when Naughright was examining Manning's foot for a potential stress fracture, he...

So, in the era of fighting radical Islamic terrorism, the Obama administration reportedly told workers at the Department of Homeland Security to scrub the records of Muslims with terror ties; information that has been collected for years, according to Philip Haney. Haney broke his silence on the matter last week in The Hill, where he said that the president’s remarks that the intelligence community could not connect the dots post-underwear bomber in 2009 was infuriating since these actions would remove any chance at doing so. Haney had been a DHS employee for 15 years:

Sunday, radio host John Catsimatidis interviewed James Carville, long-time ally of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, on his New York City show AM 970 “The Cats Roundtable.”

The names of thousands of New York State sex offenders are due to come off a public registry, prompting demands for a change in the law. State law requiring Level 1 offenders to report their whereabouts to the registy for a 20-year period was up Jan. 1, News 12 Long Island reports. The law took effect in 1996. Laura Ahearn of the Long Island advocacy group Parents of Megan’s Law told the station about 60 to 70 Level 1 sex offenders in Nassau and Suffolk alone will come off the registry this year. “We have a stack of Level 1...

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said today that "based on what we know" it does not look like Hillary Clinton will be indicted. Earnest made the remarks the White House podium. A reporter asked, "Can you say with certainty and confidence that Secretary Clinton will not be indicted because of this email scandal "That will be a decision made by the Department of Justice and prosecutors over there," said Earnest. "What I know that some officials over there have said is that she is not a target of the investigation. So that does not seem to be the direction that...

He began by expressing his well-wishes for the officer who the Muslim man attempted to execute, but then spent the latter part of his statement distancing Islam from the shooter, who claimed he was carrying out the shooting for Islam. “In no way shape or form does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam has anything to do with what you’ve seen on the screen,” said Mayor Kenney. “That is abhorrent. It’s just terrible and it does not represent this religion [Islam] in any way shape or form or any of its teachings,” he added....

State Department officials released roughly 2,900 pages of Hillary Clinton's private emails early Friday morning, several hours past their target of late Thursday evening. State first set a broad target of somewhere between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Thursday. But as the night wore on, that shifted to a 2 a.m. estimate. They were finally released right around 1 a.m. The late release was on top of State's failure to release all the emails by New Year's Eve. Instead of releasing everything on Dec. 31, State said it needed another few days to finish the group of Clinton messages. The...

The latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department early Friday contain what may be the smoking gun that forces the Justice Department to charge the former secretary of state with a crime, according to former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova. "This is gigantic," said diGenova. "She caused to be removed a classified marking and then had it transmitted in an unencrypted manner. That is a felony. The removal of the classified marking is a federal crime. It is the same thing to order someone to do it as if she had done it herself." On the June...

The Obama Administration's Justice Department is now suing Volkswagen for "up to $90 billion for allegedly violating environmental law." Politically-favored General Motors was fined $900 million, or 1% of that amount, for covering up an ignition switch defect that led to the deaths of at least 124 people. At last count, the number of people who lost their lives as a result of emissions' tampering by VW stood at zero. Meanwhile, the GM board unanimoulsy elected CEO Mary Barra as its Chairman, demonstrating that it is still not independent of the White House political operation, even years after the...

..."Just for the record, if she does not already know, ......... is one of the biggest jerks in the foreign service," the US ambassador to Germany John Kornblum is quoted as saying in a newly-released email from Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal.

**SNIP** The agency is unable to search Pagliano's work computer for the emails, which were requested by the Senate Judiciary Committee, because the FBI has taken the computer into custody, according to a letter made public by Sen. Chuck Grassley's office Friday. "The Department has searched for Mr. Pagliano's email .pst file, and we have not yet located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton's tenure," Alec Gerlach, a State Department spokesman, told the Washington Examiner Monday. "We are continuing to search for Mr. Pagliano's emails which the Department may have otherwise retained." A .pst file stores emails...

It took about two days for the FBI to announce it was investigating the Dec. 2 attack that killed 14 in San Bernardino, California, as an act of terror. Nearly five months after the killing of five military personnel in Chattanooga, Tennessee, authorities have carefully avoided using the same wording about the attack by a Kuwaiti-born gunman. ... Joyce McCants, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Knoxville, Tennessee, which oversees Chattanooga, said Thursday that the bureau is likely to provide an updated statement this week about the July 16 killings by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez. Abdulazeez, 24, was fatally shot by...

Newly released emails show that a senior Defense Department official offered the State Department “forces that could move to Benghazi” immediately during the deadly 2012 attack there on the American consulate. Jeremy Bash, the former Pentagon chief of staff, offered to provide forces at 7:19 p.m. on the evening of the attack, "only hours after they had begun," according to Judicial Watch, which disclosed the email on Tuesday. "We have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak," Bash wrote. Portions of the email remain redacted by the Obama administration. "The Obama administration...

Analysts at U.S. Central Command were pressured to ease off negative assessments about the Islamic State threat and were even told in an email to “cut it out,” Fox News has learned – as an investigation expands into whether intelligence reports were altered to present a more positive picture. Fox News is told by a source close to the CENTCOM analysts that the pressure on them included at least two emails saying they needed to “cut it out” and “toe the line.”

**SNIP** "This is by far the most aggressive assault on the inspector general concept since the beginning," said Light, and Peace Corps inspector general Kathy Buller said it "runs against transparency." The new rules come from a dispute within the Justice Department after its former inspector general, Glenn Fine, gave a series of reports on FBI abuses. After that, FBI attorneys said that he could no longer have access to their confidential records. A Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion, though, said a law passed in 1978 did not mean the inspector general did not have all access in...