Free Republic

As a family in Clark County, Nev. continues to face an onslaught of heavily armed federal agents determined to kick them off of their ranch, reports have surfaced that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might be behind the entire ordeal. The ranch, which has been in Cliven Bundy’s family for more than a century, is ground zero for a growing showdown between federal authorities and individual rights activists. Despite attempting to silence protesters by limiting them to so-called “First Amendment areas,” law enforcement personnel, legislators, and militia members are heading to the site in droves to express their outrage over...

The Bureau of Land Management, whose Director was Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) former senior adviser, has purged documents from its web site stating that the agency wants Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle off of the land his family has worked for over 140 years in order to make way for solar panel power stations. Corrupt Democratic Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) working with the Chinese gov’t to take land from hard-working Americans. Deleted from BLM.gov but reposted for posterity by the Free Republic, the BLM document entitled “Cattle Trespass Impacts” directly states that Bundy’s cattle “impacts” solar development, more specifically the construction of...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is at the center of a growing political controversy after it was revealed Thursday that more payments from his campaign funds had been made to his granddaughter than previously reported. The Nevada Democrat promised earlier this week to reimburse $16,787 his campaign gave to Ryan Elisabeth Reid in 2013 for what was described as payments for “holiday gifts.” Those payments were reportedly made to purchase items from Ryan Elisabeth Reid, who has her own line of jewelry. Reid defended the payments, saying they complied with Federal Election Commission standards that allow the purchase of goods...

The woman who admitted to voting for President Barack Obama six times worked for and sat on the board of a group that received an Obama administration Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant. Melowese Richardson admitted in 2013 to voting six times for Obama’s re-election while working as a poll worker in Hamilton County, Ohio. Initially convicted on state voter fraud charges and sentenced to five years in prison, Richardson served eight months before the George Soros-funded Ohio Justice and Policy Center helped lessen her sentence to probation. Richardson appeared last week at a rally with some Ohio Democrats and Al...

Oh my gosh — This is really bad— James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released video tonight showing an Obamacare navigator conspiring to release private data for political purposes. Busted! Do you know where your personal data is going? After meeting with several Obamacare Navigators who openly encouraged our undercover reporters to lie about income status, health history and more, it became clear that personal data was also being “cross-pollinated.” Enter Enroll America, a Sebelius-linked group dedicated to signing people up for Obamacare and Chris Tarango, Texas Enroll America Communications Director who Project Veritas caught on tape agreeing to help obtain a...

The Department of Energy withheld troubling cost and performance data on a major stimulus award from a federal watchdog before the company servicing the award went bankrupt, according to a report released on Tuesday. The report focuses on the department’s handling of a pair of federal awards worth about $126 million for ECOtality, a San Francisco-based green energy company that declared bankruptcy in September. DOE’s inspector general, which authored Tuesday’s report, released an audit in July that expressed concerns about the department’s management of ECOtality’s $100 million stimulus award for the installation of electric vehicle charging stations. The report revealed...

July 18,2013 IRS Political Targeting Scandal: Democrats, Media Desperate to Shut It Down as Links to White House Emerge by Graham Noble A damning indictment of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) continues to emerge Thursday, during a Congressional investigation into the agency’s targeting of Conservative organizations. Congressional Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media are desperate to shut this investigation down as details linking the IRS strategy to the White House emerge. The Democrats are arguing that delays in processing applications for tax-exempt status from TEA Party and other ‘patriot’ groups – plus the extra scrutiny that these groups...

Scandal: A retiring IRS lawyer implicates the IRS chief counsel's office, headed by an Obama appointee, as well as the head of the IRS' exempt organizations office. The targeting included a Tea Party Senate candidate. In Thursday's hearing before the House Oversight Committee, 72-year-old retiring IRS lawyer Carter Hull implicated the IRS chief counsel's office headed by William J. Wilkins, who attended at least nine White House meetings, and Lois Lerner, head of the exempt-organizations office, in the IRS scandal. In so doing, he made clear the targeting of Tea Party groups started in Washington and was directed from Washington....

The Department of Transitional Assistance paid out more than $2 million in benefits to 1,164 people who were dead, according to a scathing new audit calling on the embattled agency to tighten up its fraud investigations. The report, released this afternoon by state Auditor Suzanne Bump’s office, also showed where DTA failed to use technology that could have identified $15 million in questionable benefits and shelled out a $1 million more to those using fake Social Security numbers. The audits follows a damning report released earlier this year by the Inspector General’s Office, which found $25 million in EBT money...

Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was informed of management corruption and abuse issues at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) before allegations of “gunwalking” surfaced, but opted to do nothing about it. That allegation comes from veteran Special Agent Vince Cefalu, who recently informed Gun Rights Examiner of his efforts to persuade the powerful Democrat to investigate documented instances of gross mismanagement and perjury. Cefalu is the veteran street agent who was served termination papers last June for his efforts to bring management wrongdoing to light, a move perceived by other whistleblowers and observers as not just retaliation,...

With Republican-controlled Indiana on the verge of becoming a "right to work" state, Democrats in the state House on Tuesday took the only step they have left to prevent it, if only for a bit longer. They disappeared. Again. A final vote on the measure, which would bar union contracts from requiring nonunion members to pay fees for representation, had been expected Tuesday in the House, which Republicans dominate, 60-40. But with scores of union members and supporters filling the Statehouse halls in Indianapolis in protest, most Democrats refused to turn up for floor sessions -- not once, but twice...

Via POLITICO Pro: "President Obama today threatened to veto the “Regulatory Accountability Act” (H.R. 3010), a bill the House is set to take up this week that would revamp the regulatory process. In a Statement of Administration Policy, the White House said the bill “would impose unprecedented procedural requirements on agencies that would prevent them from performing their statutory responsibilities. It would also create needless regulatory and legal uncertainty and increase costs for businesses, as well as state, tribal, and local governments, and further impede the implementation of commonsense protections for the American public.” The White House also threatened to...

President John F. Kennedy’s nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., netted a $1.4 billion bailout for his company, BrightSource, through a loan guarantee issued by a former employee-turned Department of Energy official. It’s just one more in a string of eye-opening revelations by investigative journalist and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer in his explosive new book, Throw Them All Out. The details of how BrightSource managed to land its ten-figure taxpayer bailout have yet to emerge fully. However, one clue might be found in the person of Sanjay Wagle. Wagle was one of the principals in Kennedy’s firm who raised money for Barack...

The Arizona Daily Star's Tim Stellar is reporting the federal case file against illegal Mexican bandits accused of killing Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, has disappeared. The case against the alleged killers of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry has disappeared from federal court records, apparently sealed by a federal judge. In May, federal prosecutors won an indictment against Manuel Osorio-Arellanes and others, and they announced it with a press release. Only Osorio-Arellanes’ name was visible in the indictment, but there were blacked-out words where other defendants’ names go. Osorio-Arellanes was charged with second-degree murder and was not considered the likely...

After the collapse of Solyndra, a solar company that received over $500,000,000 in loans from the Obama Administration, Republicans noted the unsettling amount of ties that the White House had with the defunct company. Vice President Biden called on his advisers to hurry through the loan, President Obama toured the Solyndra plant in 2010, and the top executives of Solyndra donated heavily to then-candidate Obama in 2008. President Bush rejected loaning the company money, saying that it was too risky, and even President Obama's advisors told him in person that the half-a-billion-dollar loan was "not ready for prime time." The...

Democratic Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi of Castro Valley has been charged with felony grand theft after being caught on video surveillance allegedly shoplifting more than $2,000 worth of merchandise from San Francisco’s Neiman Marcus store on Union Square, prosecutors say. Hayashi, 45, who has served in the Assembly since 2006 — and is married to Alameda Superior Court Judge Dennis Hayashi — was arraigned Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court. She had earlier posted $15,000 bail.

If a private health insurer had engaged in the kind of criminal obstruction that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been tied to in her home state of Kansas, it would be a federal case. Instead, it's a non-story in the Washington press. Nothing to see here. Move along. On Monday, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. World Magazine, a Christian news publication, reported on new bombshell court filings showing that Kansas health officials "shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion...

High-powered assault weapons illegally purchased under the ATF's Fast and Furious program in Phoenix ended up in a home belonging to the purported top Sinaloa cartel enforcer in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, whose organization was terrorizing that city with the worst violence in the Mexican drug wars. In all, 100 assault weapons acquired under Fast and Furious were transported 350 miles from Phoenix to El Paso, making that West Texas city a central hub for gun traffickers. Forty of the weapons made it across the border and into the arsenal of Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a feared cartel leader in Ciudad...

I’ve heard enough now. It’s time for Congress to appoint a special prosecutor in the Solyndra case. Beside the foot dragging inside the White House and the OMB in document production, revelations made recently about political pressure from inside the administration on the Office of Management and Budget to approve the Solyndra deal, and the subsequent restructuring that put taxpayers at greater risk, say that there is no way the administration can be expected to investigate itself with any reasonable level of objectivity. And an investigation is warranted. In February, the administration renegotiated with Solyndra’s billionaire investor- remember the one...

This morning I called Bob Sanders, Chief of Criminal Investigations at ATF in the early '80s, and shared with him the substance of the FOX exclusive. Bob told me, "This is obstruction of a criminal investigation no matter which way you look at it." As far as the FBI picking up informants dropped for cause by DEA and the Marshal's Service described in the story as "stone cold killers," Bob said: "All major federal enforcement agencies have very structured, very rigid, formal informant procedures, including lie detectors, psych reports, etc. to vett them. The agency SAC keeps these records in...