Free Republic

After listening to excuses from IRS officials about why they cannot produce "lost" emails requested through a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered the IRS to come up with a better explanation as to why the agency cannot produce valid documentation. He's also asking for details about IRS hard drive destruction policy and wants verification from an outside source that IRS hard drives in question were in fact destroyed as officials have claimed. "In an extraordinary step, U. S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan has launched an independent inquiry into the...

The United Nations Security Council took aim at Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria on Friday, blacklisting six people including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) spokesman and threatening sanctions against those who finance, recruit or supply weapons to the insurgents. The 15-member council unanimously adopted a resolution that aims to weaken ISIS and al Qaeda's Syrian wing Nusra Front, Reuters reported. ISIS has long been blacklisted by the Security Council, while Nusra Front was added earlier this year. Both groups are designated under the U.N. al Qaeda sanctions regime. EU ministers agreed Friday to back the arming...

Los Angeles is considering turning voting ballots into lottery tickets. With fewer than a fourth of voters showing up for recent local elections, the city's Ethics Commission voted unanimously Thursday to recommend that the City Council consider a cash-prize drawing as an incentive to vote. Commission President Nathan Hochman suggests the prizes could be $25,000 or $50,000, saying a pilot program should be used first to find out the number and size of prizes that would bump up turnout. The Los Angeles Times reports (http://lat.ms/1uV1Ekw) that federal law prohibits payment for voting, but Ethics Commissioner Jessica Levinson says that statute...

Erbil, Asharq Al-Awsat—Leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and self-proclaimed caliph Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi fled the northern city of Mosul to return to Syrian territory after the US authorized airstrikes on ISIS positions in Iraq, a Kurdish official said. In comments to Asharq Al-Awsat, Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) spokesman Saeed Mamo Zinni said: “Caliph of the Islamic State Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi left Mosul for Syria a few days ago.” “According to our intelligence sources, Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi traveled to Syria as part of a convoy of 30 Hummer vehicles after fearing being targeted by US airstrikes,” Zinni said. He...

August 14, 2014 Since 2006, the Pentagon has distributed 432 mine-resistant armored vehicles to local police departments. It has also doled out more than 400 other armored vehicles, 500 aircraft, and 93,000 machine guns.

A tea party-backed candidate asked a Mississippi court on Thursday to declare him the winner of the June 24 Republican runoff against incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran or order a new election. Certified results of the June 24 runoff show Cochran defeated McDaniel by 7,667 votes. But McDaniel says his campaign found thousands of irregularities, including about 3,500 people who voted in the June 3 Democratic primary and June 24 runoff. Mississippi voters don't register by party, but such crossover voting is prohibited.

Retired Marine Cpl. Robert Richards, a combat veteran who was badly wounded in Afghanistan and later appeared in a controversial video urinating on dead Taliban insurgents, was found dead Wednesday night in his home in North Carolina. He was 28. The death was confirmed Thursday morning by Guy Womack, a lawyer who represented Richards in his long legal battle with the Marine Corps after the video was published anonymously on YouTube in January 2012 and erupted into an international scandal. Womack said the death does not appear to have been a suicide, and the cause will not be known until...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Islamic State militants are massing near the Iraqi town of Qara Tappa, 122 km (73 miles) north of Baghdad, security sources and a local official said, in an apparent bid to broaden their front with Kurdish peshmerga fighters. The Sunni militants have made a dramatic push through the north to a position near Arbil, capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region. The movement around Qara Tappa suggests they are getting more confident and seeking to grab more territory closer to the capital after stalling in that region. "The Islamic State is massing its militants near Qara Tappa," said...

JERUSALEM—White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval. Since then the Obama administration has tightened its control on arms transfers to Israel. But Israeli and U.S. officials say that the adroit bureaucratic maneuvering made it plain how little influence the White House and State Department have with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu —and that both sides know it.

The Obama administration has ruled out for now a risky US military mission to rescue thousands of Iraqis stranded on a northern Iraqi mountain, declaring a siege by Islamist extremists to be over. After a small complement of special forces and US aid workers landed on Mount Sinjar to assess the situation of the Iraqi Yazidis – who for days have received air drops of food, water and medicine – the Pentagon said things were not as bad as initially feared. “An evacuation mission is far less likely,” said Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, late on Wednesday....

The police department in a St. Louis suburb where a man was shot and killed by a police officer is asking protesters to gather only during daylight. Ferguson has been the site of nightly protests and unrest since 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed during a confrontation with an officer on Saturday. In a news release issued Wednesday, the department asked that all people who assemble to pray or protest do so in “an organized and respectful” manner and disperse well before evening to ensure the safety of participants and the community. “The City of Ferguson mourns the loss of...

A new report reveals that US President Barack Obama's administration stopped a shipment of missiles to Israel late last month and tightened weapons shipment procedures to Israel, as tensions between the two nations grow amid Operation Protective Edge. The report in the Wall Street Journal, released Wednesday night, cites US officials in Obama's administration, who say they discovered Israel had requested a large number of Hellfire missiles directly through military-to-military channels. An initial batch of the missiles was about to be shipped, according to sources in Israel and the US Congress. At that point, the Pentagon stepped in and put...

HOUSTON, Texas — Members of the Texas National Guard currently in training at Camp Swift, near Austin, have been told to stand by for a personal briefing from Texas Governor Rick Perry. Perry is expected to arrive at Camp Swift this morning to brief the troops on his expectations of their deployment. It is still not clear as to exactly where this first batch of troops will be deployed, according to one of the soldiers currently at Camp Swift. The soldier has been at the camp receiving training this week and expects to be deployed somewhere along the border this...

The New York Times yesterday featured a story about how the Tea Party has influenced the GOP on immigration: "On Capitol Hill, the Tea Party wing continues to drive the party’s agenda. Last winter, as House Republican leaders drafted their 'principles' for immigration overhaul, they largely disregarded the opponents of any form of legal status for immigrants in the country illegally, dismissing them as a loud but small minority.” Niger Innis, the executive director of TheTeaParty.net, the nation’s largest grassroots tea party organization and convener of regular Tea Party caucus events on Capitol Hill, issued the following statement: What we’re...

On Tuesday #Anonymous released the private information of St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar and his wife and children. The group posted a link to the information in a tweet.

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) is throwing down the gauntlet again. He is calling on every American citizen to call their U.S. senators and demand to know where they stand on President Barack Obama’s planned executive amnesty. Sessions, in a statement exclusively provided to Breitbart News, berated House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, calling on Reid to allow a vote on the House-passed measure that would block President Obama’s attempts to continue or expand the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive amnesty to millions more illegal aliens. “Recent developments suggest...

The legality of President’s Obama’s sustained and targeted airstrike campaign in Iraq against ISIS forces is a matter of contention among some constitutional scholars. What they all seem to agree upon, however, is that any targeted military operation, lasting no longer than a few days, does in fact pass constitutional muster (via The Hill): “I think any conflict of a couple days in nature could be justified,” said Louis Fisher, a scholar at the Constitutional Law Project, “but as President Obama said last weekend, this is not going to be for just a couple days or weeks, it could go...

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's top cleric has condemned the extremist Islamic State group, describing it as a "terrorist" organization that poses a danger to Islam and Muslims. Grand Mufti Shawki Allam, Egypt's highest religious authority, said the extremist group is "violating all the Islamic principles and the intentions of the Shariah (Islamic law)." In his remarks, which were carried by Egypt's state news agency late Tuesday, Allam also said the "bloody extremist group" had tarnished the image of Islam and paved the way for the destruction of Muslim nations.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the situation on the ground in northern Iraq is so perilous that President Obama is seriously considering sending a rescue mission to save the displaced Yazidi refugees trapped on Mount Sinjar. The details of such an operation are still in their earliest stages of development (and, of course, there’s no telling whether or not the president would even sign off on such a daring operation) but such a rescue attempt, if approved, would send shockwaves through the nation for one obvious reason: it would almost certainly involve redeploying U.S. ground troops to Iraq: The...

At about 1 a.m., a St. Louis County Police officer shot and critically wounded a man who police said pointed a handgun at the officer near the intersection of West Florissant and Chambers Road. The shooting happened near Chambers and Sheffingdell Court close to the site of protests against police for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. Police said they received a call about four to five men in the area armed with shotguns and wearing ski masks and they got reports of shots fired in the area. Police officers arrived and saw "multiple subjects running," said police spokesman Officer...