Free Republic

Maybe he should have taken traveler’s checks. But it’s too late for that now. All the money – $16,000 in cash – that Joseph Rivers said he had saved and relatives had given him to launch his dream in Hollywood is gone, seized during his trip out West not by thieves but by Drug Enforcement Administration agents during a stop at the Amtrak train station in Albuquerque. An incident some might argue is still theft, just with the government’s blessing. Rivers, 22, wasn’t detained and has not been charged with any crime since his money was taken last month. That...

The drug war means never having to say you’re sorry. A Houston-based federal judge ruled that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration does not owe the owner of a small Texas trucking company anything, not even the cost of repairing the bullet holes to a tractor-trailer truck that the agency used without his permission for a wild 2011 drug cartel sting that resulted in the execution-style murder of the truck’s driver, who was secretly working as a government informant. The Houston Chronicle story also points out that the ruling will spare the DEA a “potentially embarrassing trial.” Another way to phrase...

A New Jersey lawmaker wants to ban an organic herb fueling the latest drug craze among teens. As WCBS 880’s Sean Adams reported, Kratom gives a high similar to heroin. The substance is legal and kids can buy it, Adams reported. The plant is related to coffee; it is native to southeast Asia and has long been used as an herbal pain reliever. But it is also psychoactive and can cause hallucinations and addictions, says New Jersey Assemblyman Ron Dancer, who wants to make the substance illegal. “According to the FDA, there is a known toxicity in multiple organs that...

**SNIP** EARLIER: WASHINGTON - A U.S. congressional panel will examine whether federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents divulged secrets at sex parties that Colombian drug lords may have staged to elicit sensitive information. Following revelations of misconduct by DEA agents, a senior Obama administration official told Reuters on Tuesday that DEA chief Michele Leonhart, who was grilled in a congressional hearing last week about the sex parties, was expected to step down from her post in the near future. A DEA spokesman had no immediate comment. A spokeswoman for the Republican majority at the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform...

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee accused the FBI on Monday of not cooperating with the Department of Justice’s top watchdog in the investigation of the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal, among others, endangering Congress’s ability to be a check on the administration’s actions

With the Secret Service still smarting from its 2012 prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, another federal law agency is in hot water over an even more salacious sex scandal—in the same country. The Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Michelle Leonhart, Tuesday faced a grueling three-hour inquisition from the House Oversight Committee over an Inspector General’s report that found DEA agents in Bogota, Colombia engaged in “sex parties” with prostitutes and that the parties were paid for by the very drug cartels the DEA was sent to fight. “This behavior is not acceptable,” Leonhart said in her opening statement. “It...

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...

Utah is considering a bill that would allow patients with certain debilitating conditions to be treated with edible forms of marijuana. If the bill passes, the state's wildlife may "cultivate a taste" for the plant, lose their fear of humans, and basically be high all the time. That's according to testimony presented to a Utah Senate panel (time stamp 58:00) last week by an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "I deal in facts. I deal in science," said special agent Matt Fairbanks, who's been working in the state for a decade. He is member of the "marijuana eradication" team...

Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly had “sex parties” with prostitutes hired by drug cartels in Colombia, according to a new inspector general report released by the Justice Department on Thursday. In addition, Colombian police officers allegedly provided “protection for the DEA agents’ weapons and property during the parties,” the report states. Ten DEA agents later admitted attending the parties, and some of the agents received suspensions of two to 10 days. The stunning allegations are part of an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general into claims of sexual harassment and misconduct within DEA; FBI; the Bureau of...

The unveiling of a new statue built to memorialize the murdered U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on Saturday at the Homeland Security Department's Brian Terry Border Patrol Station in Bisbee, Arizona, received minimal news coverage by the nation's media except for the Fox News Channel, a news agency maligned and denigrated by President Barack Obama and his administration. In fact, no official from the Obama government attended the event and the sycophants in the legacy media made certain not to cover the story. In the battle at the Mexican-U.S. border, Obama and his minions seem to have chosen the...

I’ve been a reporter for 30 years at CBS News, PBS, CNN and in local news. My producers and I have probed countless political, corporate, charitable and financial stories ranging from Iraq contract waste and fraud under Bush to green energy waste under Obama to consumer stories relating to the drug industry. Some of these reports have been recognized for excellence in journalism—most recently, investigative Emmy nominations and awards for reporting on TARP, Benghazi, green energy spending, Fast and Furious and a group of stories including an undercover investigation into Republican fundraising. But the job of getting at the truth...

As a candidate on 2008 Obama claimed to support whistleblowers. His website claimed that whistleblowing events were "acts of courage and patriotism" that "should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration." If back then we had used our Obama Bullshit Decoder Ring and applied DrJohn's Law, we would have known how that was going to go. The Obama regime has conducted a war on whistleblowers like none in history. It's so aggressive that even Common Dreams says the Obama administration has reached "a new low." "The Sterling case...sends a clear message to people in...

Are you starting to forget just how creepy government agencies can be when they decide to spy on average (law abiding) citizens? Well, this should help refocus your distrust of big government. According to AP News:The Drug Enforcement Administration abandoned an internal proposal to use surveillance cameras for photographing vehicle license plates near gun shows in the United States to investigate gun-trafficking, the agency's chief said Wednesday.Um, good… Also: “What the heck?”So the DEA was planning on tracking everyone that went to a gun show? Wow… Nothing like being innocent until proven guilty, right? It might be time to start borrowing...

Critics of marijuana legalization love to argue about its repercussions for “the children”—paging Nancy Grace—but the American Academy of Pediatrics seems to disagree. The group has now appealed to the Drug Enforcement Agency to reclassify marijuana and allow them to research its medical benefits for children, the Wall Street Journal reports. They have also asked the federal government to permit marijuana use by children with serious conditions. Marijuana is currently listed as a Schedule 1 drug by the federal government, classifying it with drugs like heroin. This scheduling prohibits research by ranking marijuana as having no acceptable medical use. “A...

The U.S. Department of Justice secretly spies on millions of cars by gathering and storing information about motorists in order to build a national database to track movements, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. The database was originally used by the Drug Enforcement Administration to hunt vehicles involved in drug crimes by tracking license plates, but according to the WSJ, the program expanded to hunt for criminals sought for crimes that were non-drug related. DEA officials have been on record saying they track vehicles near the U.S.-Mexico border to help fight drug cartels, but the new...

The Drug Enforcement Administration formerly maintained a secret database of Americans’ telephone calls to some foreign countries, the Justice Department revealed this week. A document filed by the department in a criminal case on Thursday revealed that the agency collected details about Americans’ calls to certain countries believed to be closely linked to drug trafficking networks. The program is different from a more well-known database maintained by the National Security Agency (NSA), though it appears similar in some respects. According to the government’s brief, the DEA tracked information about phone calls from the United States to other “designated” countries that...

Full title: Judicial Watch Obtains Fast and Furious Crime Scene Photos from Phoenix 2013 Gang-Style Assault with Rifle Supplied by Obama Justice Department Photos include close-up shots of Fast and Furious AK-47 rifle, blood-stained apartment, victim with massive head wound (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained graphic crime scene photos taken at the site of a 2013 gang-style assault on a Phoenix, AZ, apartment building, including a close-up photo revealing the serial number of the AK-47 rifle used by the assailants. As a result of Judicial Watch’s October 2, 2014, public records lawsuit, the weapon...

Just as Second Amendment civil rights activists feared, federal government bureaucrats were supplying illegal firearms to Mexican drug cartels in the expectation that it would led to pressure for more regulation. Analyzing a 60 page document release in response to a FOIA action by Judicial Watch Attkisson writes:

Obama quietly eliminated the NATIONAL DRUG INTELLIGENCE CENTER, that was monitoring terrorist activity on the border. Mexican cartel violence is at an all-time high along the increasingly porous southern border yet the Obama Administration has shut down a critical intelligence agency dedicated to identifying, tracking and severing the nexus between drug trafficking and terrorism. It’s a senseless move, which is why it was done very quietly. The only real way to discover that the Justice Department’s 19-year-old National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) has been closed is by trying to visit its website. It simply says that on June 15, 2012,...

Full title: Judicial Watch Joins Sharyl Attkisson in Lawsuit against Justice Department to Obtain FBI Records about Attkisson Earlier FOIA records obtained by Judicial Watch show award-winning journalist was targeted by Obama White House and Justice Department over critical reporting (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that on November 19, 2014, it joined investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson to file a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) seeking “any and all records” relating to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) background checks and other records on the award-winning correspondent. The request includes correspondence between Attkisson and...