Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — Hundreds of rioters have been charged, convicted and sentenced for joining the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. Unlike their cases, Samuel Lazar’s appears to have been resolved in secret — kept under seal with no explanation, even after his release from prison.Lazar, 37, of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, was arrested in July 2021 on charges that he came to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, dressed in tactical gear and protective goggles, and used chemical spray on officers who were desperately trying to beat back the angry Donald Trump supporters.There is no public record of a conviction or...

WASHINGTON - Monday seemed like the end of President Donald Trump’s relentless challenges to the election, after the federal government acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden was the “apparent winner” and Trump cleared the way for cooperation on a transition of power. But his baseless claims have a way of coming back. And back. And back. The 2020 presidential race is turning into the zombie election that Trump just won’t let die. Despite dozens of legal and procedural setbacks, his campaign keeps filing new challenges that have no hope of succeeding and making fresh, unfounded claims of fraud. But that’s the point....

Hundreds of rioters have been charged, convicted and sentenced for joining the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. Unlike their cases, Samuel Lazar’s appears to have been resolved in secret — kept under seal with no explanation, even after his release from prison. Lazar, 37, of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, was arrested in July 2021 on charges that he came to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, dressed in tactical gear and protective goggles, and used chemical spray on officers who were desperately trying to beat back the angry Donald Trump supporters. There is no public record of a conviction or a...

Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar has criticized remarks by his country’s foreign minister, who suggested that some of the worst antisemites were Jewish and that Adolf Hitler had Jewish ancestry. Lazar’s criticism of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s remarks Sunday — he called them “shocking” and said he wished Lavrov would apologize — is unusual in Russia, where other clergy have been supportive of the war in Ukraine and where dissent has largely been made illegal. Widely viewed as having close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Lazar and the organization he leads, the Chabad Lubavitch-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities of...

A California man has been charged with taking illegal kickbacks to act as a plaintiff in dozens of corporate class-action lawsuits filed by Milberg Weiss, a move that brings a three-year federal probe to the door of one of the leading U.S. securities law firms. The indictment handed down by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on Thursday comes as prosecutors try to make a case that Milberg Weiss improperly paid plaintiffs to file lawsuits against publicly traded companies. A spokeswoman for the law firm said on Friday that Milberg Weiss had been subpoenaed in connection with the investigation...

Marcel Lehel Lazar, a computer hacker known as “Guccifer” who is credited with revealing the existence of Hillary Clinton’s controversial private email server, has been released from a prison in his native Romania and is expected to be extradited to the United States for the second time since 2016. Lazar was freed on parole this week in the midst of serving a seven-year sentence related to hacking a slew of Romanian celebrities and politicians, putting him on path to be sent to the U.S. to serve the remainder of a prison stint connected to a cybercrime spree that claimed several...

Following Ted Cruz's endorsement of Donald Trump and president Obama's veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, aka the "Sept 11" bill allowing victims to sue Saudi Arabia in US court, the trifecta of Friday afternoon data dumps was completed by the FBI, when the agency released 189 pages of notes from its investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server, just three days before she squares off against Donald Trump in the first presidential debate. The notes are from FBI's interviews with some of Clinton’s closest aides, such as Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills; senior State Department officials;...

The Romanian hacker who claimed he easily breached Hillary Clinton’s personal email server is finalizing a plea deal with the FBI and U.S. attorney, Fox News has learned. Marcel Lehel Lazar, the 44-year-old hacker also known as “Guccifer,” first gave indications he wanted to cooperate with the U.S. government in mid-April, during an interview with Fox News. Lazar, in a subsequent discussion, said he was working on a plea deal – he then suspended media contact earlier this month. On Monday, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia confirmed that a change of plea hearing...

The Romanian hacker whose illegal exploits first exposed Hillary Clinton’s use of a non-governmental e-mail system is set to waive extradition later this month so he can face trial in the United States on a nine-count felony indictment. Known as “Guccifer,” hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, 43, is scheduled for a February 17 extradition hearing in Romania, where he has been jailed since his arrest in January 2014. Lazar is serving a four-year sentence for hacking into the e-mail accounts of several public figures in Romania, including the head of the country’s intelligence service. In a phone interview from a Bucharest...

The Hillary Clinton confidant who was caught running a clandestine intelligence service for her may have also illegally lobbied for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ally in the nation of Georgia. According to a Gawker report, Sidney Blumenthal, the top Clinton confidant, and “another former official from Bill Clinton’s administration were secretly lobbying the secretary of state on behalf of a billionaire in the former Soviet state of Georgia who was seeking closer ties with Putin’s Russia—seemingly in violation of a federal law designed to prevent foreign powers from covertly wielding influence within the United States.” Blumenthal “passed along a note...

Updated March 27 to include responses from the FBI and the State Department. Emails disclosed by a hacker show a close family friend was funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack. Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal’s account. The emails, which were posted on the internet...

The depressed Democratic base needs to ask itself some questions: Do women want more representatives who oppose abortion? Do Hispanics want to see immigration reform postponed? Do young voters want college loans slashed? If they don’t, they’ll set aside whatever valid grievances they may have with Obama and mobilize. If Democrats lose control anyway, maybe nothing too bad will happen. Obama will veto GOP bills, and politics will be paralyzed for two years as the parties jostle for 2012. But a right-wing Republican takeover of Congress and state capitals isn’t something to accept with indifference. Midterms matter, and voters tempted...

$69 can get you a trace of the commonly used lethal industrial substance... It's one of the deadliest imaginable poisons, a radioactive substance about 100 billion times as deadly as cyanide -- and a Web site run by a physicist and flying saucer enthusiast offers to sell you a trace amount of it for $69 and send it via the U.S. Postal Service or UPS. Contrary to early news reports, polonium-210 -- the poison suspected in the death of an ex-Russian spy in England -- is not some exotic material available solely from nuclear laboratories. The isotope is available from...

...If a recent federal indictment that refers to Milberg Weiss is anything to go by, the trial bar has its Enron.... Sham "screenings" to round up asbestos plaintiffs, forum shopping for friendly juries, "coupon" settlements that enrich only lawyers and frivolous lawsuits have all become staples of today's tort system. Yet they have received almost no media, much less legal, scrutiny. ...The focus of the charges is retired Palm Springs lawyer Seymour Lazar, who seems to have had a second career as a plaintiff in Milberg Weiss lawsuits. From 1976 to 2004, Mr. Lazar and family members... served as named...