Free Republic

Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign. Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm. That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump...

Excerpt, first three paragraphs: Anti-taping laws hurt democracy by shielding the powers that be from accountability, writes provocateur James “Break in, bribe, seduce and lie; anything to break through that palace guard and get the story,” said investigative reporter Robert Scheer, according to a article by Abbie Hoffman in a decades-old edition of Mother Jones magazine. Sometimes I’ve broken through the palace guards, and other times the palace guards have nearly broken me. What didn’t jail me made me stronger and smarter. I’ve become all too familiar with civil and criminal statutes that are bad for democracy because they insolate...

Progress Kentucky is a super PAC that is acting more like a rogue operation in its efforts to unseat Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell -- sending out racially sensitive tweets and allegedly making a secret recording of the Senate minority leader’s re-election strategy talks. The group has been around only since December, raising about $1,000 and spending $18, compared to the McConnell campaign that has raised $10 million toward 2014 re-election efforts, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings. Kentucky Democrats have over the past week made numerous, overt efforts to separate their party from Kentucky Progress and its questionable...

Which is, well, kinda what Sen. Mitch McConnell said yesterday. These are the same guys who sent out racist tweets about McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, and her Chinese heritage. Local news in Kentucky is reporting, via a Democratic official, that Progress Kentucky is behind the secret tapes published by Mother Jones this week, which revealed McConnell operatives in the act of…running a campaign. The story immediately went viral in political circles, not so much for teh videos’ content as for McConnell’s pushback. The Republican senator quickly went on offense, decrying the left’s “Nixonian-style” tactics, and turning the non-story of the...

The FBI has been asked to investigate how Mother Jones, a liberal magazine, obtained a recording of political aides meeting with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell discussing opposition research on Ashley Judd, a source close the McConnell re-election campaign tells CNN.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Two nurses in a Utah hospital's intensive care unit were fired this week for taping a patient's mouth shut and laughing about it, hospital officials said Friday. Penny Artalejo was admitted to Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo on Dec. 17 with nausea and anxiety from taking medication for chronic neck pain, her daughters told KSL ( http://bit.ly/tbVNuS ). Artalejo's daughter, Brittany Bilson, told the television station that her mother's teeth were chattering and she was moaning and shaking. Bilson said the nurses told her mother to shut up, taped her mouth closed and...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Bill Belichick has been illegally taping opponents' defensive signals since he became the New England Patriots' coach in 2000, according to Sen. Arlen Specter, who said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told him that during a meeting Wednesday. "There was confirmation that there has been taping since 2000, when Coach Belichick took over," Specter said. Specter said Goodell gave him that information during the 1-hour, 40-minute meeting, which was requested by Specter so the commissioner could explain his reasons for destroying the Spygate tapes and notes.

McDermott: Taping Dispute Not Personal By MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press Writer Last update: April 01, 2006 – 4:28 AM WASHINGTON (AP) - Rep. Jim McDermott says his eight-year dispute with House Majority Leader John Boehner over an intercepted telephone call is not personal, but involves a crucial right of voters to know what their leaders are doing. "Unfortunately, it's portrayed in the paper as Boehner v. McDermott. It really is the government versus the people,'' McDermott, D-Wash., said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. McDermott commented three days after a federal appeals court ruling against him in the...

In Columbus, Ohio, Mayor Coleman has apparently spent a bit too much time proving Glen Beck wrong, by searching for his manhood. His wife has, meanwhile, been charged with driving while under the influence of alcohol and failing to control her vehicle, which, though it failed to go off of a bridge in Chappaquidick, nonetheless did instead inflict grievous damage to a parked truck. Since Tom Harkin's staff have proven that you can illegally tape people and get away with it... and Wilson & Plame have proven that you can fabricate facts and become celebrated instead of excoriated, we at...

NEW YORK The firing of a Miami Herald columnist for secretly taping a phone conversation with a county commissioner minutes before the public official's suicide in the newspaper's lobby has raised questions about whether his actions constitute a fireable offense. Although Florida law prohibits the taping of anyone's phone conversation without their consent, legal experts differ over how that might apply to a reporter. Herald staffers, meanwhile, have expressed concern that the columnist, Jim DeFede, might have been fired too quickly by editors who were responding under duress from the suicide. Strictly interpreted, the law seems to indicate that DeFede...

Don't look now, but camera is watching Privacy: The video eye is almost everywhere these days, but the view isn't like they portray on crime shows By Bob Mims The Salt Lake Tribune Salt Lake Tribune 2004-08-13 00:25:49.959 On a plane, train or bus, strolling a mall or park, using an ATM, riding an elevator, pumping gas, feeding coins into a tollbooth, in class or even your doctor's examining room - someone could be watching.     Are you a store clerk? Your cash register may be the star attraction of a security cam. So may be the hallways at...

<p>Iowa Republican officials said today they believe the man who taped a private meeting of U.S. Rep. Greg Ganske was a former aide to Sen. Tom Harkin more than 20 years ago who early this year wrote a letter critical of Ganske to The Des Moines Register.</p>

An Ohio man filed a $1.5 million lawsuit Tuesday against the Knoxville Marriott hotel after finding a hidden camera in a bathroom light fixture in July. Bryan Brewer discovered the small video camera after noticing a tiny black spot - which he thought was an insect but turned out to be a hole - in the fixture, according to the lawsuit. At the time Brewer, the vice president of a California company, was staying at the Marriott while on business. His attorney, K.O. Herston, filed the lawsuit in Knox County Circuit Court. Named as defendants are Marriott International Inc. and...