Free Republic

Unless you've been living under several rocks, you've heard by now that the New England Patriots were investigated for under-inflating the footballs used during the first half of their 45-7 victory in the AFC Championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. The whole matter has come to be known as "Deflategate" or "Ballghazi," and has dominated the national news this past week.In response to all of this, Rep. Todd Young (R-IN), a Colts fan, published a "Who said it?" quiz on his official website comparing the rhetoric used in DeflateGate with the White House's official response to several scandals during the...

Funeral Mass at St. Ignatius Church on Park Avenue, New York.

A secret plea deal for Britain’s Prince Andrew’s pal Jeffrey Epstein protected the prince and any other high-powered friends who may have used his alleged sex slaves, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned. Federal prosecutors promised they “will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein” if the Wall Street money manager pled guilty to two relatively minor state underage sex charges that put him in a local jail for 13 months, the confidential plea agreement obtained by Radar says. A lawsuit filed by four women, who say federal prosecutors illegally ignored them and kept them in the dark...

Now that Prince Andrew has found himself ensnared in the sleazy sex slave story of wealthy degenerate Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton can’t be too far behind. Epstein, who paid teenage girls for naked massages at his Palm Beach, Florida mansion, is a convicted sex offender whose circle of powerful friends has included financiers, celebrities, politicians, and scientists. [Snip] While Clinton was never deposed [in a civil suit against Epstein], lawyers obtained Epstein’s computerized phone directory, which included “e-mail addresses for Clinton along with 21 phone numbers for him, including those for his assistant (Doug Band),” according to a court filing.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- A missing Ohio State University football player told his mother in a text message the day he disappeared that concussions had his head messed up, according to a report filed with police.

IRS Accused Of Sharing 2,500 Private Taxpayer Documents With White House By Cheryl K. Chumley November 28, 2014 The Internal Revenue Service may have given thousands of confidential filings from private taxpayers to the White House to review, a lawsuit against the Treasury Department just revealed. The suit, filed against Treasury’s inspector general by Cause of Action, a legal advocacy outfit, reveals a steady stream of communication went on between the White House and the IRS — a potentially “improper” stream, the group alleged, The Daily Caller reported.

The Obama Administration’s IRS scandal is multi-faceted. In addition to the persecution of conservative non-profits by Lois Lerner et al., the question has been percolating for some years whether Obama’s IRS has transferred confidential taxpayer information to Obama’s White House in violation of federal criminal laws. The issue first arose when Austin Goolsbee of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers told reporters that he had information about Koch Industries that could only have come, illegally, from confidential IRS files. When questions were asked, the administration immediately clammed up. Years later, the judicial system may be poised to expose another layer...

CRUDELE: I began investigating when I was told Census data collectors were inventing interviews....and of possible financial mis-doings on contracts, expenses, maybe even pension funds. Four of the six Census regions apparently falsified economic data. Philadelphia, NY, Atlanta, LA, Chicago and Denver Census Offices have million dollar tax-paid budgets w/ little oversight. A couple weeks ago, the whistleblower — Ivan Irizarry, lead scientist at Census’ Demographic Statistical Methods Division — came to me out of frustration. The UofM contract was never put up for competitive bid....and was the most costly and most interesting: Robert Groves, who was picked by President...

This week the New York Post [1] reported that Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has emerged as a leading contender for the top spot at DOJ. The race to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder has included the controversial Labor Secretary Tom Perez, and like Perez, MayorkasÂ’ tenure in the federal government is filled with a considerable amount of ethics-defying shadiness.Prior to taking his current position as the number two man at DHS, Mayorkas was head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is mandated to administer the biggest immigration system in the world...

**SNIP** Other information in the ‘Vaughn index’, according to Judicial Watch, included: –Numerous emails that detail Attorney General Holder’s direct involvement in crafting talking points, the timing of public disclosures, and handling Congressional inquiries in the Fast and Furious matter. –DOJ communications (including those of Eric Holder) concerning the White House about Fast and Furious. –Communications to and from the United States Ambassador to Mexico about Fast and Furious.

The largest newspaper in South Dakota broke a story that could cost the GOP a red state Senate seat. The Fiscal Times reports:  The three-way race for South Dakota’s open Senate seat got more complicated Wednesday, when the Sioux Falls Argus Leader published a page one story alleging that former Governor Mike Rounds, the Republican candidate and current leader in the polls, had approved $600,000 in state assistance to a company that was about hire a member of his cabinet. According to reporter David Montgomery, then Secretary of Tourism and State Development Richard Benda requested the assistance for Northern Beef Packers about two...

President Obama believes in big government. He truly believes that government is best able to decide the great issues of the day. He’s expanded government like no other President since LBJ in the 60’s. Obamacare alone is the biggest government program since the Great Society. Obama has added nearly $8 trillion in new debt. Yet for all of Obama’s belief in big government, his administration has done more to hurt the image of government than any administration since Nixon. In that, the damage Nixon did was about corruption at the top. With Obama the damage he is doing is to...

You may be wondering why Barack Obama, with his propensity to name “czars” for every problem that ails us, has not named an Ebola Czar. The reason is because he has, in fact, named an Ebola Czar. So why are we constantly seeing Dr. Tom Frieden of the CDC embarrass himself in press conferences instead of our Ebola Czar? It turns out Dr. Nicole Lurie, the czar in charge of potential infectious disease catastrophes, has made the most of her time by funneling federal dollars to Democratic donors. That would be the federal dollars the left says we need more...

Complete Headline: EXCLUSIVE: RFK Jr will be deposed in bitter divorce battle by the husband of his 'mistress' - weeks after he wed Cheryl Hines Robert F Kennedy Jr. is set to be quizzed over the exact nature of his relationship with his alleged mistress Chelsea Kirwan, MailOnline can reveal. The Kennedy scion, who only married actress Cheryl Hines just weeks ago, will be dragged into the bitter divorce battle between Mrs Kirwan and her estranged husband, plastic surgeon to the stars Laurence Kirwan. Dr Kirwan’s lawyers have informed Chelsea's legal team that they plan to depose both her and...

Two years ago a slew of Secret Service agents got busted for hiring prostitutes while on an official trip in Cartagena, Colombia. That scandal erupted after an agent failed to properly pay a woman for her services. They were fired and the White House denied aides had any involvement. Now, the Washington Post is out with a stunning report about the scandal not only detailing that former White House presidential advance team member and volunteer Jonathan Dach officially registered a prostitute as an overnight guest in his hotel room, but that White House aides knew about Dach's actions and interfered with...

The EPA is poised to “do an IRS” — similar to what the tax agency had to do with dismissed top official Lois G. Lerner — and officially notify the National Archives that it may have lost key electronic records, according to a think tank that’s suing to get text messages under an open-records request. Justice Department lawyers told a federal court on Tuesday that the alert will be coming soon, in a case that’s shaping up as a significant battle over whether government agencies are required to keep cellphone text messages as “official” records. In this case, researcher Chris...

ABC’s Scandal, which has a fresh episode tonight, last week featured “President Fitzgerald Grant,” supposedly a Republican, channeling Piers Morgan as he used the State of the Union address to plead for more gun control: “How many other people’s children are we going to let die before we put a stop to this?” “Grant,” played by Tony Goldwyn, recalled how his teen son died of a “fluke” infection (not true, that’s one of many of Scandal’s wild conspiracies), but “there were thousands of people last year who lost their lives in a completely avoidable way.” He then compared gun rights...

At first, this story from the Washington Post seems impossible to believe. After all, the White House insists that they were cleared of any involvement in the Cartagena prostitute scandal by, er, their own internal investigation — a claim that White House aide Eric Schultz repeated to the Post’s Carol Leonnig and David Nakamura. That settles it, right? Wrong: But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that...

While strong cases can be made for both Benghazi and Fast and Furious, most voters consider Barack Obama’s misuse of the IRS to be his administration’s worst scandal so far. But, as we wrote last year, targeting of conservative non-profits for harassment is not the only dimension of the IRS scandal. In addition, there is strong reason to believe that one or more White House political appointees have illegally accessed private taxpayer information and used it for political gain.Austan Goolsbee directed Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and later chaired his Council of Economic Advisers. In August 2010, Goolsbee conducted...

Julia Pierson, the director of the United States Secret Service, resigned on Wednesday amid a rush of criticism over recent White House security breaches. "Today Julia Pierson, the Director of the United States Secret Service, offered her resignation, and I accepted it," said Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. "I salute her 30 years of distinguished service to the Secret Service and the Nation." Joseph Clancy, the former special agent in charge of the presidential protective division of the Secret Service, will take over as interim director, Johnson said. Johnson also announced the formation of an independent panel to investigate...