Free Republic

If anyone still has any doubt about the utter cynicism of the Obama administration, a recent agreement between the federal government and the Minneapolis Public Schools should open their eyes. Under the Obama administration, both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have been leaning on public schools around the country to reduce what they call the "disproportionate" numbers of black male students who are punished for various offenses in schools. Under an implicit threat of losing their federal subsidies, the Minneapolis Public Schools have agreed to reduce the disparity in punishment of black students by 25 percent...

U.S. Attorney Loretta E. Lynch announced Friday that the Eastern District of New York, working collaboratively with other offices as well as on its own, collected over $904 million in criminal and civil actions in Fiscal Year 2013. ... The combined joint collections and asset forfeiture recoveries for the Eastern District total of more than $2.2 billion exceeds the appropriated $1.86 billion operating budget for all U.S. Attorneys’ Offices nationwide. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced on Thursday that the Justice Department collected approximately $8.1 billion in civil and criminal actions in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2013. The...

Loretta Lynch, President Obama's choice to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General, has an especially weak record of investigating and prosecuting political corruption. Moreover, her longstanding ties to the New York political machine have limited her independence as a prosecutor. Lynch, who currently serves as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, has watched as Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the neighboring Southern District of New York, has prosecuted case after case. And Bharara would not have acted except for a slew of newspaper headlines about political corruption generated by the National Legal and Policy Center....

At a press conference in southeast Asia, Obama was asked the question in the title. He was also asked if he had been informed by DOJ about the legal authority of his proposed actions. Obama said he had been informed, and when asked if he would share that info, he said NO.

Of course the real story is being overlooked here... WASHINGTON – A Justice Department official on Friday defended the legality of a program to scoop up data from thousands of mobile phones as the secret operation came under scrutiny from lawmakers and caught the federal agency that regulates the nation’s airwaves by surprise. The Justice Department, without formally acknowledging the existence of the program, defended the legality of the operation by the U.S. Marshals Service, saying the agency doesn’t maintain a database of everyday Americans’ cellphones. Whether they maintain such a database is immaterial to the underlying issue, which is...

As the Senate prepares to hold confirmation hearings for new Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch and as outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder continues to allocate Department of Justice resources to the situation in Ferguson, former FBI Assistant Director and Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund President Ron Hosko has sent a scathing letter to President Obama detailing the damage done to the relationship between law enforcement and DOJ over the past six years. "The hyper-politicization of justice issues has made it immeasurably more difficult for police officers to simply do their jobs. The growing divide between the police and the people...

Full title: EXCLUSIVE: In Scathing Letter to Obama, Former FBI Assistant Director Slams Holder as "Chief Among Antagonists" in Ferguson As the Senate prepares to hold confirmation hearings for new Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch and as outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder continues to allocate Department of Justice resources to the situation in Ferguson, former FBI Assistant Director and Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund President Ron Hosko has sent a scathing letter to President Obama detailing the damage done to the relationship between law enforcement and DOJ over the past six years. "The hyper-politicization of justice issues has made it...

The Justice Department acknowledged that it misled a federal Appeals Court during oral arguments last month in a case reviewing whether the government should be able to secretly conduct electronic surveillance of Americans without a warrant. In a newly unsealed letter, a Justice Department lawyer told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that it spoke erroneously when describing the disclosure restrictions placed upon the FBI's use of so-called national security letters. NSLs, as they are often referred, can compel companies to hand over communications data or financial records of certain users to authorities conducting a national security...

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of cellphones through fake communications towers deployed on airplanes, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations. The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program. Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which...

Documents obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) from the Department of Justice provide "hard evidence" that former Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) should have been prosecuted after NLPC exposed his questionable financial dealings, and triggered a Justice Department investigation. CREW executive director Melanie Sloantold Politico yesterday, "It was clear the Justice Department should have indicted Mollohan." Mollohan was defeated for re-election in 2010 in a Democratic primary. His ethics woes were a key issue in the campaign. Although we have not yet had the opportunity to study the underlying documents, CREW has released a very concise...

The nomination of Loretta Lynch to succeed Eric Holder as Attorney General is a deft political decision by President Obama. Lynch’s nomination satisfies the racial interest groups yet doesn’t carry the toxic record that other possible nominees carried. Al Sharpton promised he would play a role in selecting Holder’s successor, and it appears he did. Lynch promises to be Eric Holder’s sequel, particularly when it comes to federal enforcement of civil rights laws. What she provides the White House is a clean slate. She provides the false promise of luring some Republicans into thinking the Justice Department may improve once...

Taaffe to testify to Grand Jury that he couldn’t be sure “racist call” was from Zimmerman.Earlier this month we posted news that Frank Taafe, a self-proclaimed “friend” of George Zimmerman, was going to testify before a Grand Jury that he now believed Zimmerman had a racist motivation for the shooting of Trayvon Martin. This news came just days before the hotly contested November 4 election in which the Democrats took the same kind of beating that Trayvon delivered to Zimmerman, but without the benefit of being armed. (See: Key Witness for Zimmerman Grand Jury Changes Story.) Taaffe’s Grand Jury appearance,...

A video has surfaced showing President Barack Obama’s attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch is just "as radical" as outgoing AG Eric Holder, according to Top Right News. On the video filmed in Long Beach, California, earlier this year, Lynch lashed out at voter identification laws passed in the South, saying that they deprive blacks and Hispanics of the right to vote. "Fifty years after the march on Washington, 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement, we stand in this country at a time when we see people trying to take back so much of what Dr. King fought for," she...

Judicial Watch is investigating yet another Obama Justice Department scandal this time involving the reversal of a law passed by Congress decades ago banning all forms of online gambling, a move that allowed companies—and big Democratic Party donors—with connections to Attorney General Eric Holder to amass huge profits. It involves the Wire Act, enacted by Congress in 1961 as an antiracketeering measure to prohibit the use of wire communications for the interstate transfer of bets or wagers. When the internet came around years later the law was naturally applied to online gambling and U.S. courts, as well as the Department...

The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars. In one seminar, captured on video in September, Harry S. Connelly Jr., the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., called them “little goodies.” And then Mr. Connelly described how officers in his jurisdiction could not wait to seize one man’s “exotic vehicle” outside a local bar. “A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new,”...

If confirmed, it looks as if Barack Obama's nominee for Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, will be carrying out Eric Holder's politics of racial vengeance. Based on her family history, social justice statements and close ties to black activists, Lynch will deploy law enforcement resources based on race and political ideology, not on the rule of law. Lynch has a close relationship with Eric Holder and in a speech at the Martin Luther King Center in Long Beach, New York last year she vowed to continue his work at the Department of Justice and fight those in the "deep south" who...

Holder responds by saying that they needed to be very careful. He goes on to criticize Issa, and calls his investigation a purely political move. In the process however, he basically admits that the operation at the center of the investigation led to the death of thousands of Mexican civilians. “Ok. We have to be careful. His decision has to truly be his. If he testifies so be it.” “Issa and his idiot cronies never gave a damn about this when all that was happening was that thousands of Mexicans were being killed with guns from our country. All they...

Brooklyn-based federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s pick to become the next attorney general, is a big fan of Eric Holder’s reforms to the criminal justice system, recently pledging to do “even more,” WND has found. In remarks she made at a legal convention in August, Lynch lauded Holder’s creation of a Racial Disparities Working Group, which she said was aimed at identifying policies that result in “unwarranted disparities within criminal justice and to eliminate those disparities as quickly as possible.” Lynch continued: “From the reduction of the use of solitary confinement, to the expansion of the federal clemency program,...

President Barack Obama introduced his choice for attorney general Saturday as an accomplished prosecutor from New York City who will carry on a “fierce commitment to equal justice.” Obama argued at a White House ceremony that it’s “pretty hard to be more qualified” for the job of attorney general than Brooklyn federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch. “Loretta might be the only lawyer in America who battles mobsters and drug lords and terrorists, and still has the reputation for being a charming people person,” Obama said to laughter from those who packed the Roosevelt Room for the announcement. …

The abject failure of the nation's top law enforcer to enforce the law against bankers of any significance in the wake of a $10,000 billion crisis is notorious. Less well-known are (1) the astounding lengths to which Eric Holder's DOJ has gone to protect criminal banks, which just so happen to be clients of his law firm, (2) the degree to which the rule of law has been subverted (it's been destroyed; we have been living under the rule of man, officially, for some time), and (3) the broader implications of Holder's reign on U.S. national sovereignty (grave).