Free Republic

Back in July after a long FOIA lawsuit from government watchdog Judicial Watch, a federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to produce a detailed list or Vaughn Index of documents being withheld from Congress and the American people under President Obama's executive privilege claim. A month later in August, a federal judge ordered DOJ to turn over a privilege log of withheld documents to the House Oversight Committee. Both orders were to be completed by October 1. Now, Attorney General Eric Holder is asking fa federal judge to delay (again) an order requiring him to turn over thousands of Fast and Furious...

Attorney General Eric Holder is again asking a federal court to delay the transfer of disputed documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious to a House committee. In a new court filing Monday night, Justice Department lawyers asked U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson not to require Holder to turn over any of the roughly 64,000 pages of documents to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee until after her rulings can be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. "The Department respectfully submits that it would be preferable for the parties, this Court, and...

Attorney General Eric Holder is prepared to tell the plaintiff in a private lawsuit that he cannot seek damages because doing so could potentially result in the release of sensitive information. Victor Restis, a Greek businessman, is attempting to sue a private organization, United Against Nuclear Iran, for defamation. He claims the group has erroneously accused him of engaging in business with Iran and, in the pursuit of legal recourse, has sought the release of certain relevant data. Holder, however, has responded that publicizing information from the non-governmental entity could lead to national security concerns.

Criticized for zealously defending a cop killer, President Barack Obama’s beleaguered nominee to lead to the Justice Department’s civil rights division has withdrawn his nomination. The law firm of WilmerHale said Debo Adegbile has returned to private practice in its New York office. The White House confirmed that Mr. Adegbile withdrew his nomination. The Senate blocked Mr. Adegbile’s nomination in March, with critics citing his representation of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted 30 years ago of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. As the former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Mr. Adegbile helped Abu-Jamal get his death sentence overturned....

Yet another indication of the endemic corruption that infests the Obama administration, their Democrat colleagues and a willfully somnambulant mainstream media In a letter written to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), Issa reveals there was an attempt to coordinate media spin regarding the IRS investigation between the DOJ and the staff of the Committee’s Ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). How did Issa find out? A DOJ official in the Office of Public Affairs who thought he was calling Cummings’ office, mistakenly phoned Issa’s office instead.

IRS: An aide to the attorney general accidentally calls the office of the House Oversight Committee chairman, asking for help in spinning the defense of the agency whose head just said they obey the law when they can. We have commented many times of the all-too-cozy relationship between the IRS and Democratic members of the House and Senate, with members writing to the agency demanding that specific conservative groups and political action committees they find particularly irritating be subject to the "special scrutiny" that the Tea Party and other conservative and religious groups were subjected to in the ongoing scandal....

A remarkable conversation about the IRSÂ’s illegal targeting of conservative groups took place on Friday in Washington. According to Rep. Darrell IssaÂ’s office, at 5:01 Friday Brian Fallon, a former aide to Chuck Schumer and currently a communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder, called IssaÂ’s office. By mistake. And itÂ’s quite a mistake.The purpose of the call, according to a letter Issa wrote to Holder, was to work with the intended recipient of the call to strategically leak damaging information to selected, friendly reporters and to coordinate a damage-control plan. The intended recipient of the call was apparently Rep....

A senior communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder seemingly called House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa's staff by accident and asked for their help spinning new revelations about the IRS scandal, Issa said in a September 8 letter to Holder. The aide, Brian Fallon, is a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a well-known personality on Capitol Hill. The letter describes Fallon as “audibly shaken” when he realizes his request to leak documents to help get ahead of news stories about them was mistakenly made to the very office he was seeking to undermine. Issa believes...

Head of Marshals Service in Chicago reassigned AP , Associated Press Sep. 9, 2014 4:02 AM ET CHICAGO (AP) — The U.S. Marshals Service has announced it has replaced the head of its Chicago office for the past four years in a re-organization, appointing an interim chief for its high-profile northern Illinois district. Darryl McPherson, who was named to the top Chicago post by President Barack Obama in 2010, was recently reassigned to the same office's judicial security division, said Drew Wade, an agency spokesman in Washington. Wade, however, declined to discuss why the 17-year Marshals Service veteran was moved...

A former U.S. ambassador is being investigated for laundering, according to papers found in a garbage container in Vienna. Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, is being investigated for money laundering, and several of his wife's bank accounts have been frozen in connection with the probe. The Justice Department investigation only became public on Sunday, when a blogger found relevant documents in a garbage container used by a state prosecutor's office in Vienna and posted them online. A day later, Austrian magazine Profil reported on the case.

The DOJ division investigating Ferguson was exposed years ago at PJ Media, when all its new hires had leftist backgrounds. It’s not enough that the Justice Department is investigating the shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, MO police officer. Now it’s opening up a “pattern and practice” investigation of the entire Ferguson police force. The big question: Is this Justice Department capable of conducting a fair and impartial investigation? The applicable federal law (42 U.S.C. §14141) makes it unlawful for any governmental authority “to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers … that deprives...

More Swiss banks are dropping out of the U.S. banking program that the IRS supposedly uses to prevent American citizens from stashing cash overseas to avoid taxes. Known for 100 years as the original tax haven, free from the prying eyes of governments around the world, Swiss banks have provided banking services that guaranteed anonymity to arms dealers, Nazis, and law-abiding Americans alike.Offshore banks, especially Swiss banks, are not generally used to evade taxes however. The government already has enforcement mechanisms in place to prevent tax evasion by the use of offshore banks by American citizens. No smart rich person,...

Washington, DC — Two weeks after the highly-publicized armed confrontation with renegade rancher Cliven Bundy and self-styled militia supporters, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management filed 35 formal requests for prosecution with the U.S. Attorney in Nevada but all these charges have been held without action, according to records released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The Justice Department is also refusing to release information specifying the specific counts and the individuals named in these criminal referrals.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced in a press release on September 2 that it had “reached an agreement” with Culinaire International, a Houston, Texas-based catering and restaurant management company, resolving a claim that Culinaire had engaged in “citizenship discrimination” during the work eligibility verification process. DOJ said that the company’s policies were in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). “Employers cannot discriminate against workers by requiring them to produce more documents than necessary in the employment eligibility verification and reverification processes,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Molly Moran, speaking for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, was quoted as...

Venezuela's Roman Catholic Church has admonished the ruling Socialist Party for re-writing the Christian "Lord's Prayer" into an ode to its beloved late leader Hugo Chavez. "The Lord's Prayer, the typical prayer for Christians around the world, comes from the very lips of our Lord Jesus Christ... and is therefore untouchable," the local Catholic Church said in a statement. A party member introduced the prayer on the podium of the party congress on Monday, imploring Chavez for protection from the evils of capitalism."Our Chavez who art in heaven, the earth, the sea and in us delegates," red-shirted delegate Maria Estrella...

Activists say Holder dropped the ball on investigation of Sanford shooting. The NAACP delivered 1.7 million signatures to the U. S. Department of Justice a year ago, requesting a federal civil rights investigation into the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford. Despite the outrage and demands for justice after Zimmerman was acquitted of manslaughter, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to announce a clear answer on his findings in the shooting of the unarmed 17-year-old who quickly became a household name across America. Ben Jealous, the NAACP President who collected and electronically delivered the signatures says...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is launching a broad investigation into the practices of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department. That's according to Attorney General Eric Holder. He announced the investigation following the shooting last month of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb.

In an article about police shootings in last Sunday's New York Times (8/31), Michael Wines disputes the conventional wisdom about a disproportionate number of African-Americans being shot by police, saying there are no data one way or another. But Wines revives the canard about blacks being disproportionately targeted in traffic stops. There actually is a study for that. Throughout the 1990s, the nation was fixated on tales of jack-booted New Jersey state troopers who were stopping speeders on the turnpike just because they were black! In a 2000 primary debate, Vice President Al Gore sneered at then-New Jersey Sen. Bill...

The U.S. Department of Justice will conduct a civil-rights investigation of the Ferguson, Mo., police department, not looking further into the shooting of Michael Brown, who was killed by a Ferguson police officer earlier this summer, but at the department’s pattern of conduct over the years. Federal law-enforcement officers have already been in the area for weeks to conduct a civil-rights investigation of the Brown, which would determine whether the federal government will bring civil-rights charges. Former DOJ civil-rights attorney Robert Driscoll has explained on NRO why a civil-rights prosecution in the Brown case is unlikely — it’s quite possible...

While everyone is focusing on what Obama will do with his upcoming illegal alien executive order, the rest of his administration is quietly working behind the scenes to enact amnesty through a piecemeal approach. Now, we have learned that the Department of Justice is actively targeting businesses and punishing them for trying to verify an employee’s residency status! That’s right, the DOJ has fined Culinaire International – a restaurant-management company – more than $20,000 because the business had the gall to ask employees to provide proof of legal residency in the United States! In this case, this company sought to...