Free Republic

ProPublica recently released the story of a woman who faced a life-threatening pregnancy complication in Tennessee in 2022. The outlet followed Mayron Michelle Hollis and her family for a year, inaccurately claiming that she was denied an abortion, and falsely blaming her long-term struggles on the state’s pro-life law. The Tennessee law Two months following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Tennessee enacted a law protecting the majority of preborn children from abortion. That law does allow induced abortion — the direct and intentional killing of preborn children — in situations in which the mother’s life is considered to be...

EXCLUSIVE: The House Ways and Means Committee is demanding answers from the Justice Department on why it charged a former IRS consultant with one count of unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information, including information belonging to former President Trump and thousands of wealthy Americans, despite the individual admitting to two separate disclosures. The former IRS official, Charles Littlejohn, pleaded guilty last month to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax return information. The Justice Department accused him of leaking tax information belonging to former President Trump and "thousands of the nation’s wealthiest individuals" to news outlets between 2018 and 2020. The...

The new financial disclosure filed by Justice Thomas Thursday delivers a rebuke to activists’ smear campaign.Democrats have kept the knives out for Clarence Thomas since his 1991 confirmation to the nation’s highest court. The mere existence of a prominent black conservative has offended leftist sensibilities for decades and has placed a target on the judge for his entire career. Some of the most relentless attacks on Thomas’ integrity have come from left-wing media outlets that malign the justice with contrived scandals, free from any factual accountability for their smears. But now, a new financial disclosure from the current court’s longest-serving...

Public officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp.Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as "racist," up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn't respond to our interview request, said it wasn't worth even considering the possibility that...

Journal Editorial Report: 'Ethics' is the latest weapon against the Court's independence. Images: Reuters/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly The first attack in the left’s spring offensive against the U.S. Supreme Court was an April 6 ProPublica hit piece about Justice Clarence Thomas. The site quotes “ethics experts” who accuse him of violating federal law by not disclosing trips he had taken with a longtime friend. The accusation turns out to be old news that was adjudicated more than a decade ago.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday said he “was advised” that he did not have to disclose a series of trips reportedly paid for by a Republican mega-donor. The trips, which were revealed on Thursday by a ProPublica investigation, led to outrage from Democrats and judicial watchdog groups. COURT BATTLES Clarence Thomas says he ‘was advised’ he didn’t have to disclose trips paid for by GOP donor BY ZACH SCHONFELD - 04/07/23 11:26 AM ET SHARE TWEET Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday said he “was advised” that he did not have to disclose a series of trips...

The New York Times ran a lengthy hit piece, titled, “Inside Ron DeSantis’s Politicized Removal of an Elected Prosecutor,” that demonstrates how fearful Democrats are of his appeal in an era when crime is on the mind of so many voters. So potent is the crime issue that President Biden and a significant number Congressional Democrats are overriding a soft-on-crime law passed the by the DC City Council over the veto of the District’s Mayor Muriel Bowser. Only a deep fear of voters’ wrath over spiraling crime would motivate these Democrats to anger their SJW pro-crime base. Thus, it fell...

The reconciliation bill working its way through the U.S. House calls on the American taxpayer to subsidize Democrats' media allies. The bill provides a special tax cut for the media under the guise of helping "local journalists" but eligible media companies will receive the funds for up to 1,500 reporters per company. This provision would provide a refundable payroll tax credit equal to 50 percent of wages up to $12,500 per quarter per employee for the first four calendar quarters and a 30 percent credit for each calendar quarter thereafter. On page 1,957 of the 2000+page bill, section 138516 would...

When the coronavirus first swept across Florida last year, Angela Gambrel did everything she could to lock down her home in Sumter County, northeast of Tampa. Her 10-year-old grandson Jayden has a rare brain disease that disrupts his immune system and impairs his memory, making it harder for him to process complex tasks. His doctors urged her to take every possible precaution against the virus. No more supermarket runs. No more football scrimmages with his Special Olympics team. Fact-based, independent journalism is needed now more than ever. Donate Jayden’s school, like others across the state, halted in-person instruction, distributing worksheets...

George Soros is at it again. The leftist billionaire dumped a new batch of cash into a far-left group that is behind efforts to stoke anti-police hatred. Data from Soros-funded ProPublica showed that Soros donated $1 million to the radical group Color of Change PAC. The Soros super PAC, Democracy PAC, also fueled $2,500,000 into the group during the 2020 electoral cycle. Color of Change PAC is currently behind a disgusting petition called “Cut Ties With The [Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)].” FOP is self-described as “the voice of our nation’s law enforcement officers.” Color of Change PAC spewed metaphorical...

CATO Director of Tax Policy Studies Chris Edwards joined Fox Business to dismantle a leftist argument from the Soros-funded ProPublica that the rich don’t pay their fair share in taxes. Edwards ripped ProPublica’s recent report that used selective data to claim that “[e]xperts have long understood the broad outlines of how little the wealthy are taxed in the United States.” He retorted on the June 17 edition of Kudlow: “ProPublica summarized data on just 25 tax returns of selected wealthy people, but they were unrepresentative of the broader group of wealthy people in America.” Edwards lambasted the outlet for being...

Liberal billionaire George Soros signed an open letter in 2019 calling on 2020 presidential candidates to adopt the infamous “wealth tax” on the rich. But he reportedly paid no federal income tax three years in a row. Soros-funded outlet ProPublica published a report exposing how “Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.” A Soros spokesman reportedly told ProPublica: “‘Between 2016 and 2018 George Soros lost money on his investments, therefore he did not owe federal income taxes in those years. Mr. Soros has long supported higher taxes for wealthy Americans.’” [Emphasis added.] But as The Dan...

Several of the richest U.S. corporate executives have either paid a fraction of their cumulative wealth in federal taxes of nothing at all, according to a new report from the nonprofit media outlet ProPublica.What Happened: In its coverage, ProPublica said "America's billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell."However, ProPublica did not offer evidence that the executives being spotlighted were violating the U.S. tax code.The...

If a child doesn't have to die to save grandma from coronavirus, why would we ever let that child die? A heartbreaking longread from ProPublica challenges the nation.One year ago, when lockdowns began, Americans were told we had to make a terrible choice akin to the climax of the superhero movies in which a villain threatens two things the hero loves, forcing him to choose which to save and which to sacrifice. We were told that millions of Americans were going to die from a Chinese supervirus, and the only way to reduce that death toll from inflating even higher...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A former leader of the white supremacist group Atomwaffen Division pleaded guilty today to charges related to his role in a conspiracy that conducted multiple swatting events targeting journalists, a Virginia university, a historic Virginia church, and a former cabinet official.According to court documents, John Cameron Denton, 26, of Montgomery, Texas, is a former leader of the Atomwaffen Division in Texas. From October 2018 to at least April 2019, Denton and several others conspired together to conduct “swatting” calls. Swatting is a harassment tactic that involves deceiving dispatchers into believing that a person or persons are...

ProPublica analyzed thousands of fake and hijacked Twitter accounts to understand how covert Chinese propaganda spreads around the globe. Kalen Keegan, a college student at the University of Nebraska Omaha, immediately noticed when her Twitter account unleashed a torrent of posts in Chinese. “My other account got hacked👍🏽,” the soccer player posted on a replacement account. The new author tweeting as @Kalenkayyy had strong views on geopolitics — all aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. It was obsessed with the protests in Hong Kong, offered uncritical praise of the Hong Kong police and accused demonstrators of fomenting a “color revolution”...

Some local governments have published where coronavirus cases appear, down to the neighborhood level. New York City has made public only county-by-county data, making it difficult to see which communities are being hardest hit. Residents of Los Angeles can go to a county website to look up how many confirmed coronavirus cases there are in Beverlywood, or Koreatown, or Echo Park. Officials in Charlotte, North Carolina, have released figures at the ZIP code level. The South Korean government is sending geotargeted texts to alert citizens to positive cases near them. In New York, now at the center of the outbreak,...

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a journalist for left-leaning media outlet ProPublica. You come across data showing that in the wake of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s (TCJA) caps on deductions that artificially inflated home values, home prices across the country have fallen, particularly in high-income, upper-class areas. How do you respond?If you guessed “spin this news into a narrative about how the TCJA hurt middle-class homeowners,” you’re a winner! That’s exactly what ProPublica editor Allan Sloan did.Sloan used data showing that home values nationally are 4% lower than they otherwise would have been, extrapolating this into a...

Full title: Newly uncovered tax documents show Trump 'kept two sets of books for his buildings in New York City - one for lenders and another for inspectors - and may have committed financial fraud' Tax documents relating to President Donald Trump's properties in New York City have been uncovered - with experts suggesting they could point to financial fraud. The documents obtained by ProPublica were part of records detailing four Trump properties: The Trump International Hotel and Tower, 40 Wall Street, Trump Tower, and 1290 Avenue of the Americas. The website claims that there are discrepancies in the tax...

The skies grew dark Saturday afternoon as tornado alerts buzzed cell phones across the city. Which might have explained the initial lackluster turnout for an Independence Mall protest against President Donald Trump — the third in Philadelphia in a week. But eventually, as a steady rain began to fall, three dozen protesters were listening as organizers with Refuse Fascism Philly played an audio recording published by ProPublica in 2018 of immigrant children separated from their families at the Mexican border. Chanting, “Close the camps! Trump, Pence must go!” protesters then marched with police escorts to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement...