Free Republic

Prosecutors are asking a federal judge to reconsider a magistrate judge’s decision to free a former FBI source facing charges for falsely claiming that Joe Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian businessperson. Justice Department attorneys say the former source, Alexander Smirnov, has reported extensive contacts with high-level Russian intelligence operatives and could use those alleged connections to flee justice if allowed to remain out of custody. Prosecutors working for David Weiss, the special counsel probing issues related to the president’s son Hunter, obtained an indictment of Smirnov last week on charges of making false statements to the FBI and...

Former President Donald Trump signed legal documents describing evidence of election fraud that he knew were false, a federal judge indicated on Wednesday. U.S. District Court Judge David Carter wrote in an 18-page opinion that emails from attorney John Eastman, an architect of Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election, needed to be turned over to the Jan. 6 select committee. Those emails, Carter wrote, “show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public.” The emails are among the files that...

A court has rejected a lawsuit seeking to force the public disclosure of federal records about a 2018 episode in which a gun belonging to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was allegedly thrown in a trash can. In a ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras found that the public interest in the handling of any investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into the episode was “significant,” but that the importance of Hunter Biden’s privacy as a private citizen outweighed the value of releasing any such records to the public. “The privacy interest here is...

A decision by a judge appointed by former President Donald Trump to temporarily halt a Justice Department investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate triggered an avalanche of criticism from across the legal spectrum, including attacks from conservatives who served in the Trump administration. “It was deeply flawed in a number of ways,” former Attorney General William Barr said. But Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling is just one of a flurry of controversial decisions by Trump judges in recent months that have been criticized as out of step with longstanding legal principles. Among the provocative decisions from...

Trump White House aide’s bid to delay case due to Jan. 6 panel hearings is denied. A federal judge on Monday eviscerated nearly all of Steve Bannon’s defenses against a charge that he criminally defied a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee, leaving the longtime Donald Trump ally with few options to fight the contempt of Congress case against him. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols also denied Bannon’s bid to postpone for three months the jury trial set to open next Monday, rejecting defense arguments that such a delay was warranted due to intense media coverage around the ongoing...

A judge playing a central role overseeing the criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol building has forcefully rejected claims from many alleged rioters that they’re being treated more harshly than people who broke the law during the widespread protests that arose last year in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Speaking during a sentencing hearing for Capitol riot defendant Glenn Croy, Chief Judge Beryl Howell disputed the notion that participants charged in last year’s unrest were treated leniently. She also insisted that the motivations of those involved rendered the Jan. 6...

The fanatical Donald Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol in January are facing an unexpected obstacle to their freedom: Trump himself. Trump’s refusal to accept the reality that he lost the 2020 election — reflected in a torrent of recent statements renewing discredited claims about a “rigged” vote — has become a feature of prosecutors’ latest attempts to jail Capitol riot defendants they deem too dangerous to release pending trial. Judges have started citing this argument — as part of broader analysis — in cases where they've decided to detain defendants for presenting a threat of future violence, and even...

A federal appeals court has temporarily lifted a nationwide injunction against President Donald Trump’s effort to deny asylum to immigrants who enter the U.S. after passing through another country. Acting at the request of the Trump administration, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay Tuesday night that put on hold the injunction issued Monday by San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar. The temporary hold implemented while the appeals court considers a longer stay essentially restores the legal situation that existed prior to this week, with Trump’s policy blocked only in the Ninth Circuit, which includes...

A former Trump campaign aide who claimed she was “forcibly kissed” by Donald Trump during his presidential bid has dropped her lawsuit over the episode. Alva Johnson is also dropping another part of her suit that alleged the Trump campaign underpaid women and minority employees. Johnson’s suit grabbed headlines over her assertion that Trump abruptly kissed her as he was getting ready to make a public appearance at a campaign rally in Tampa, Fla., in August 2016. However, the outlook for the legal challenge dimmed in July when lawyers for Trump filed with the court and released publicly a video...

One partner at the firm, Doris Walker, was a Communist Party member at the time. Another partner, Robert Treuhaft, had left the party in 1958,

President Donald Trump has repeatedly hurled insults at the FBI agents working on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 campaign. Rudy Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney who’s now Trump’s lawyer, has attacked them as “stormtroopers.” The vitriol is unsurprising. The agents are powering an investigation that has shadowed Trump’s entire presidency — and they are mostly unknown to the public, making them easy targets. They are a mix of bureau veterans and relative newcomers handpicked by Mueller and his prosecutors to handle the highest-profile and most sensitive federal investigation in a generation. To assemble this portrait of Mueller’s...

The U.S. intelligence community has retreated from claims that two emails in Hillary Clinton’s private account contained top secret information, a source familiar with the situation told POLITICO. The determination came from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office and concluded that the two emails did not include highly classified intelligence secrets. Concerns about the emails' classification helped trigger an on-going FBI inquiry into Clinton's private email set-up.

A new batch of Hillary Clinton's emails made public by the State Department Monday night show her expressing interest in the presidential aspirations of Gen. David Petraeus, who ultimately took a job as CIA director in the Obama administration instead of running for president in 2012 and was then driven out of government by scandal. Clinton--who's now the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination next year--sounded intrigued when her longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal reported to her on a Saturday morning in February 2010 that prominent Washington foreign policy blogger Steve Clemons said Petraeus was talking frankly about the possibility of...

Hillary Clinton on Friday sought to downplay the latest twist in the long-running scandal over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, saying reports of a possible criminal probe are full of inaccuracies. News emerged on Thursday evening that at least one inspector general passed to the Justice Department evidence of potential mishandling of classified information, a referral that could lead to a criminal investigation. Clinton on Friday said people are getting worked up over not much. “Maybe the heat is getting to everybody,” she said, in remarks before a policy speech in New...

Hillary Clinton and the State Department on Tuesday insisted they are not slow-walking the public release of her emails during her time as secretary of state, while a federal judge ordered up a plan for a rolling release of the hotly anticipated documents. “Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do,” Clinton said to reporters in a rare instance of fielding press questions on the campaign trail. The 55,000 pages of emails have become the source of much heartburn, speculation and bureaucratic man-hours since news emerged earlier this year that Clinton used a private email...

NBC Universal, News Corporation, Turner Broadcasting and Thomson Reuters are among more than a dozen media organizations that have made charitable contributions to the Clinton Foundation in recent years, the foundation's records show....The following list includes news media organizations that have donated to the foundation, as well as other media networks, companies, foundations or individuals that have donated. It is organized by the size of the contribution:....$1,000,000-$5,000,000 Carlos Slim Chairman & CEO of Telmex, largest New York Times shareholder James Murdoch Chief Operating Officer of 21st Century Fox Newsmax Media Florida-based conservative media network

The mystery man linked to Hillary Clinton’s personal e-mail account appears to be a Washington, D.C. stockbroker and former aide to the Clintons who played a walk-on role in controversies that dogged the former first family soon after it left the White House in 2001.The initial Associated Press report Wednesday about Hillary Clinton’s use as secretary of state of a personal e-mail server installed in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. traced the creation of the system to a man named “Eric Hoteham.” There’s virtually no trace of an individual by that name in public records or other online databases. Story...

If the reaction to President Obama's post-election press conference is any indication, he's in Dutch not only with voters but with the mainstream press as well, after several gave Obama two thumbs down for his performance. The Daily Beast's Jonathan Alter, for one, was not impressed. "His post-election press conference was too long, too provocative and too stingy in his phoned-in praise for the winners. Obama managed the extraordinary feat of making (Senate Minority Leader Mitch) McConnell look gracious by comparison." Politico's White House reporter, Josh Gerstein, poked holes in Obama's defense of his record. "President Barack Obama and his...

President Barack Obama swore as far back as 2008 he’d close the U.S.-run prison for terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay. Five and a half years later, he finally took a real risk to get that process moving. The president defied Congress over the weekend, ignoring a 30-day notice rule required by law to greenlight the transfer to Qatar of five alleged members of the Taliban held at Guantánamo in exchange for the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. It’s Obama’s most assertive move to shrink Guantánamo’s population since U.S. embassy bombings suspect Ahmed Ghailani was flown from the...

I have a new story up tonight about the latest polling on public views about President Barack Obama's religious beliefs. There's a lot of startling news in these polls — from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and Time magazine. But one number that could catch significant attention is this: in the Time poll, 46 percent of Republicans said they believe Obama is a Muslim. In the Pew survey, that number came in somewhat lower: 31 percent. The Time GOP number isn't posted on the Web, as best I can tell, but a spokeswoman for the magazine shared...