Free Republic

A judge on Tuesday hit former White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman with a $61,585 penalty for ignoring her duty to file a financial disclosure report after she was fired from her post as a communications aide to President Donald Trump in December 2017. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon rejected Manigault Newman’s claims that her firing was so abrupt that she did not have a chance to collect her personal files, which contained financial details she said were necessary for the filing.

A three-judge federal appeals court said Tuesday the DOJ’s settlement with Fokker Services B.V. for alleged sanctions violations could go ahead after a district court judge rejected the arrangement as “anemic.” The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC said prosecutors and not judges make decisions to enter into deferred prosecution agreement with corporate defendants. In February 2015, federal district court judge Richard Leon refused to approve the settlement. He said the proposed $21 million penalty was “grossly disproportionate to the gravity of Fokker Sercvices’ conduct in a post-911 world.” Holland-based Fokker Services admitted in a 2014 plea deal that...

Washington (CNN) A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit that former Trump national security official Charles Kupperman had filed challenging a House subpoena for him to testify in the impeachment inquiry after the chamber withdrew their subpoena. Judge Richard Leon wrote in a 14-page opinion that there is no expectation that the House will reissue the subpoena, therefore the lawsuit is unnecessary. Notably, by ruling the case is moot, Leon was able to sidestep the thorny issue of separation of powers and whether the White House could claim some administration witnesses have immunity. Leon, however, noted that things can...

A federal court unsealed documents in a lawsuit over Fusion GPS’s bank records on Tuesday, revealing new details of payments made last year to the opposition research firm that commissioned the infamous Trump dossier. The documents also shed new light on requests made by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about payments that Fusion GPS made to journalists. The records were unsealed in response to a ruling made last week by Richard Leon, a federal judge in the district court in Washington, D.C. The bank documents list 112 transactions involving Fusion GPS.

BIASED Judge in Fusion GPS Case FORCED to Recuse Herself This may be the most obvious case of conflict I’ve seen in a while. How this judge could have ever gotten the Fusion GPS case shows a lack of integrity in our justice system. As True Pundit wrote of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, and her “blatant conflicts of interest in the Fusion GPS case”: On Thursday the United States District Court for the District of Columbia re-assigned the Fusion GPS bank record case to a new federal judge, removing Chutkan from making any additional decisions on the case. This...

A federal judge scolded State Department attorneys during a tense hearing last week, ordering officials to produce Hillary Clinton-related records that The Associated Press has been requesting for years. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon said he wants to “find out what’s been going on” at the State Department,” or rather, “what’s not been going on over there” that the AP’s records requests have been ignored for four years, Politico reported. The news publication is reportedly seeking records about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s schedules and her former top staffers.

A federal judge in New York has ruled that the National Security Agency's massive collection of American citizens' telephone records is both legal and useful. U.S. District Judge William Pauley wrote in his opinion issued Friday that the program "represents the government's counter-punch" to eliminate al-Qaeda's terror network. Pauley raised the specter of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and how the phone data-collection system could have helped investigators connect the dots before the attacks occurred. Pauley's decision appears to conflict with a ruling earlier this month by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who granted a preliminary injunction against the...

“Almost Orwellian” -- that’s the description a federal judge gave earlier this week to the massive spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on virtually all 380 million cellphones in the United States. In the first meaningful and jurisdictionally grounded judicial review of the NSA cellphone spying program, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee sitting in Washington, D.C., ruled that the scheme of asking a secret judge on a secret court for a general warrant to spy on all American cellphone users without providing evidence of probable cause of criminal behavior against any of them...

A U.S. judge sided with tobacco companies on Wednesday, ruling that regulations requiring large graphic health warnings on cigarette packaging and advertising violate free-speech rights under the U.S. Constitution... "The government has failed to carry both its burden of demonstrating a compelling interest and its burden of demonstrating that the rule is narrowly tailored to achieve a constitutionally permissible form of compelled commercial speech," U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said in the ruling.

A federal judge in Washington ruled Tuesday that the government was properly holding two Guantánamo detainees as enemy combatants, the first clear-cut victories for the Bush administration in what are expected to be more than 200 similar cases. The ruling by a federal district judge, Richard J. Leon, followed his decision last month in a separate case declaring that five Algerians had been held unlawfully at the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for nearly seven years and ordering their release.