Free Republic

It’s a lie often repeated that Obama was a Constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago law school. In fact, he was just a lecturer there for a short time who never much impressed his colleagues. Watching this administration in action one wonders what, if anything, he understands about the Constitution at all. His is an administration based on flouting it. It’s true that the judicial process moves slowly and such conduct can continue for a while until halted, but repeatedly the courts are catching up. In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled unanimously against the administration 20 times....

“Fast and Furious” is back in the news. The reason? In January, Judge Amy Berman, an Obama appointee, ordered the Department of Justice to produce documents relating to the “gun walking” scandal that Congress had been seeking for four years. DOJ finally produced them, some 20,000 pages worth, this month. For anyone who has forgotten about Fast and Furious, here’s the short version. In 2010, a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agent was killed while on patrol near the Mexican border. The only two firearms found at the scene were semi-automatic rifles the Obama-Holder Justice Department allowed to “walk”. That...

To accommodate the perceived wishes of a very small number of people, the federal government and many states are placing women and girls at risk of rape and assault in restrooms. There are about a mere 700,000 transgender individuals in the U.S., or 0.3% of the adult population. As John Hinderaker correctly notes -- that makes them almost as rare as unicorns. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that allowing men who decide they really want to be women to use women’s restrooms is a dangerous idea: not to the wise men of Charlotte, North Carolina who passed an...

Just moments before Attorney General Eric Holder was voted in contempt of Congress by Republicans and Democrats in June 2012 , President Obama asserted executive privilege over thousands of documents related to Operation Fast and Furious. Holder was held in contempt for stonewalling and failing to turn over the documents to the House Oversight Committee. Obama granted the executive privilege request despite claiming to have no knowledge about Operation Fast and Furious when it was active from 2009-2010. Now after years of court battles and a federal judge striking down the executive privilege assertion, Obama has finally agreed turned them...

The Obama administration caved to a judge’s order Friday and sent documents from the botched Fast & Furious gun-running operation to Congress, complying with a subpoena the House Oversight Committee issued years ago. President Obama had claimed executive privilege in trying to shield the documents from Congress, but a federal judge rejected that, insisting lawmakers had a right to see the information in order to complete their investigation into an operation that saw thousands of guns trafficked into Mexico, with the administration’s knowledge. With just hours to go before the judge’s 60-day deadline, the administration complied Friday. “As we’ve long...

The Obama administration failed to adhere to a court-ordered Friday deadline to turn over all subpoenaed documents to Congress about the government's role in the 2009-2011 Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, prompting immediate complaints from Congress. "Today, under court order, DOJ turned over some of the subpoenaed documents," House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz said in a statement late Friday. "The committee, however, is entitled to the full range of documents for which it brought this lawsuit. Accordingly, we have appealed the District Court's ruling in order to secure those additional documents." A U.S. District Court judge had ruled in January...

The White House has been stonewalling investigators for four years over the Obama Administration’s Operation Fast and Furious. Fast and Furious was gun-smuggling plot that armed the Sinaloa drug cartel with thousands of weapons in an apparent attempt to scapegoat American gun dealers in border states for drug cartel violence in Mexico...... In January, a federal district court judge rejected Obama’s executive privilege claim over records detailing the Justice Department and White House’s response to Operation Fast and Furious, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigation that may have allowed as many as 2,000 firearms to pass into...

In 2011, PJ Media published the Every Single One series. The series documented the Obama administration’s hiring of ideologically leftist and partisan lawyers to fill the career ranks of the lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division from the day it came into office. The different sections of the Division exercise enormous power over the everyday lives of Americans, ranging from employment, education, housing, religious liberty, abortion, prisons, policing, and much, much more. If a president wanted to launch a radical transformation of the country, he would start it in the Civil Rights Division . And a...

Despite being exposed before, nothing has changed. In 2011, we produced the Every Single One series for PJ Media about an unprecedented wave of ideological hiring of leftist attorneys into the career ranks of the Justice Department. The series documented the partisan and radical background of every single one of the 113 new Justice Department lawyershired into the Obama Civil Rights Division from January 2009 to January 2011. With the help of PJ Media, we will now be updating that revealing report -- and sharing details about the background of Justice Department attorneys hired since 2011. Because we have...

A federal appeals court spanked the IRS Tuesday, saying it has taken laws designed to protect taxpayers from the government and turned them on their head, using them to try to protect the tax agency from the very tea party groups it targeted. The judges ordered the IRS to quickly turn over the full list of groups it targeted so that a class-action lawsuit, filed by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, can proceed. The judges also accused the Justice Department lawyers, who are representing the IRS in the case, of acting in bad faith — compounding the initial targeting —...

In October 2015 the DOJ announced it was dropping the investigation into the IRS, Lois Lerner, and the unlawful sharing of taxpayer data in the IRS targeting investigation surrounding True The Vote et al.

Rifle found at El Chapo hideout tied to Fast and Furious WASHINGTON — One of the guns that Mexican officials say was found at the hideout of drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera has been found to be associated with Fast and Furious, a failed “gun-walking” operation, according to the Justice Department. The department said in a letter to members of Congress that a .50-caliber rifle that Mexican officials sent for tracing after Guzman’s arrest in January has been connected to Fast and Furious. Officials say the weapon was one of 19 firearms that Mexican authorities said were recovered...

One of the weapons used in a deadly Mexican shootout last year was traced to the U.S. government's disastrous Fast and Furious operation. Three Mexican police officers were killed in the shootout. A Justice Department summary provided to two Republican congressional committee chairmen Tuesday found that a WASR-10 rifle, purchased six years before in the U.S., was one of three rifles fired in the July 27 assault in the town of Valle de Zaragoza. It was not immediately known which weapon caused the officers’ fatal wounds. Nevertheless, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives officials traced the WASR rifle to...

The Justice Department has confirmed that a .50 caliber sniper rifled found at El Chapo's Mexican hideout and used to shoot down helicopters was sold through the Fast and Furious program. The rifle was found inside the Los Mochis property where the Sinaloa Cartel kingpin was discovered hiding on January 8 this year before a raid by the Mexican Marines that led to his capture. Excerpt, more at link. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3495177/US-Rifle-El-Chapo-hideout-tied-gun-smuggle-operation.html

It ’s no secret Fast and Furious was a bad idea. One or more likelу two federal agents were murdered bу guns the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let walk from Arizona gun dealers. Despite the outrage from agents in the ill-fated Fast and Furious Phoenix home office, overzealous leaders in ATF and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) clamored at the idea of netting drug cartel leaders. This objective draws the Department of Homeland Securitу (DHS) into the gun-walking fraу. The political posturing between DHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ) provides a glimpse of what unsupervised-bureaucratic...

US Attorney General Loretta Lynch was scheduled to appear at a Portland Police gang task force meeting, but no-showed after learning that folks from Don’t Shoot Portland planned on attending and possibly protesting. In lieu of Ms. Lynch, the moderator at the regularly held meeting used a big easel to jot down concerns and comments from the community to take to Lynch. But the moderator only wanted to hear from certain organizations and agencies, and refused to call on anyone else. Finally, after Penny Okamoto, of Ceasefire Oregon, gave a monologue about wanting stricter oversight of federally licensed gun dealers,

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...

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. he Lew Alcindor revelation was made in a February 16 letter that DOJ sent to VICE News and Ryan Shapiro, a historian and doctoral candidate at the...

On a network that is full of extremely weird talking points, it takes a lot to stand out as truly bizarre, but Gavin McInnes managed to pull it off recently on Fox News. In a discussion about women getting drafted, McInnes took the usual anti-feminist blather of the network to a whole new level, arguing that it’s actually men who are the second sex in our society. “By every metric, men have it worse off,” he argued, as the other guests looked on with disbelief. “We’re more likely to get raped if you include prison, we’re more likely to be...

President Obama has said he will push forward a nominee for deceased Justice Antonin Scalia “in due time,” and while some Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail see a delay on the horizon, legal minds are mulling the shortlist – which includes names like former Attorney General Eric Holder and current Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Yahooo! Politics reported the list of names currently being bantered about includes “Sri Srinivasan, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge for the District of Columbia circuits; Merrick Garland, chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of...