Free Republic

We haven't really written much about the insane Theranos scandal, though we discussed it on our podcast. The whole story is pretty crazy -- involving a heavily hyped up company that appeared to basically be flat out lying to everyone about what it could do. The company still exists, but barely. The company's founder and CEO, who was plastered across magazine covers and compared frequently to Steve Jobs, has been banned from running a lab for two years, and the company is now facing a $140 million lawsuit from its biggest partner, Walgreens, who claims that Theranos repeatedly lied to...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

It's worth asking why Elizabeth Holmes is still leading the embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc. But there may be a good reason why she still is in charge, one that has little to do with the scandal-ridden company's performance to date. Forget what venture capitalist Tim Draper — one of the first to invest in the Palo Alto company — implied this week that Holmes is being attacked because she's a young, female entrepreneur. The simple fact is that Theranos has not been able to deliver on its technology from a commercial, scientific or regulatory standpoint, and that falls...

2016 has not been too kind to Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs wannabe in charge of fraudulent Theranos. She has thus far been banned for 2 years from operating labs, removed from hosting fundraisers for Hillary and lost her entire net worth. And now, the Wall Street Journal has published the "tell-all" story of the whistle-blower, 26 year old Tyler Shultz, who brought the the whole Theranos farce crashing down. It's a sordid tale complete with all the expected twists and turns of a Jason Bourne thriller including intimidation, coercion and private detectives. Tyler Shultz is the grandson of George Shultz,...

After working at Theranos Inc. for eight months, Tyler Shultz decided he had seen enough. On April 11, 2014, he emailed company founder Elizabeth Holmes to complain that Theranos had doctored research and ignored failed quality-control checks. The reply was withering. Ms. Holmes forwarded the email to Theranos President Sunny Balwani, who belittled Mr. Shultz’s grasp of basic mathematics and his knowledge of laboratory science, and then took a swipe at his relationship with George Shultz, the former secretary of state and a Theranos director. “The only reason I have taken so much time away from work to address this...

Embattled Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is a victim who has been "totally attacked," venture capitalist Tim Draper told CNBC on Tuesday. Holmes has been under fire since a series of reports by The Wall Street Journal suggested the blood-testing start-up's testing devices were flawed. "Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of maybe why the women are so frustrated. She is a woman entrepreneur who built a fabulous company, did great things for consumers and she got attacked," the founding partner of Draper Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson said in an interview with "Closing Bell." "This is a great entrepreneur who...

Theranos Inc. allegedly voided 11.3% of all blood-test reports that the Silicon Valley laboratory firm provided to customers of Walgreens stores through a yearslong partnership between the two companies, according to legal papers the drugstore chain filed Tuesday. Theranos, whose main lab failed an inspection by U.S. regulators earlier this year, told Walgreens in June that it subsequently voided 31,000 test reports provided to the chain’s customers, Walgreens said in the public version of a sealed lawsuit.

The Environmental Protection Agency has spent millions of dollars over the last decade on military-style weapons to arm its 200 “special agents” to fight environmental crime. Among the weapons purchased are guns, body armor, camouflage equipment, unmanned aircraft, amphibious assault ships, radar and night-vision gear and other military-style weaponry and surveillance activities, according to a new report by the watchdog group Open the Books. “Protecting the environment just got real. With millions of dollars spent on military style weaponry, the EPA is now literally ensconced with all institutional force,” said Adam Andrzejewski, founder of Open the Books and the author...

Special agents at the IRS equipped with AR-15 military-style rifles? Health and Human Services "Special Office of Inspector General Agents" being trained by the Army’s Special Forces contractors? The Department of Veterans Affairs arming 3,700 employees? The number of non-Defense Department federal officers authorized to make arrests and carry firearms (200,000) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). In its escalating arms and ammo stockpiling, this federal arms race is unlike anything in history. Over the last 20 years, the number of these federal officers with arrest-and-firearm authority has nearly tripled to over 200,000 today, from 74,500 in 1996....

After grabbing legal power, bureaucrats are amassing firepower. It’s time to scale back the federal arsenal. Special agents at the IRS equipped with AR-15 military-style rifles? Health and Human Services “Special Office of Inspector General Agents” being trained by the Army’s Special Forces contractors? The Department of Veterans Affairs arming 3,700 employees? The number of non-Defense Department federal officers authorized to make arrests and carry firearms (200,000) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). In its escalating arms and ammo stockpiling, this federal arms race is unlike anything in history. Over the last 20 years, the number of these...

Wall Street Journal op-ed: Why Does the IRS Need Guns?, by Tom Coburn (former U.S. Senator) & Adam Andrzejewski (Founder, OpenTheBooks.com): Special agents at the IRS equipped with AR-15 military-style rifles? Health and Human Services “Special Office of Inspector General Agents” being trained by the Army’s Special Forces contractors? The Department of Veterans Affairs arming 3,700 employees? The number of non-Defense Department federal officers authorized to make arrests and carry firearms (200,000) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). In its escalating arms and ammo stockpiling, this federal arms race is unlike anything in history. Over the last 20...

Special agents at the IRS equipped with AR-15 military-style rifles? Health and Human Services “Special Office of Inspector General Agents” being trained by the Army’s Special Forces contractors? The Department of Veterans Affairs arming 3,700 employees? The number of non-Defense Department federal officers authorized to make arrests and carry firearms (200,000) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). In its escalating arms and ammo stockpiling, this federal arms race is unlike anything in history. Over the last 20 years, the number of these federal officers with arrest-and-firearm authority has nearly tripled to over 200,000 today, from 74,500 in 1996....

Trump is America’s answer to Hugo Chávez. If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling. If you have reached physical maturity and still chuckle at Mr. Trump’s pubescent jokes about Rosie O’Donnell or Heidi Klum, you will never reach mental maturity. If you watched Mr. Trump mock fellow candidate Lindsey Graham’s low poll numbers and didn’t cringe at the lack of class, you are incapable of class. If you think we need to build new airports in Queens the way they build them in Qatar, you should be sent to join the millions of forced laborers who...

The author of a book about Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster, the aide whose death in 1993 was ruled a suicide, says Clinton triggered Foster’s death by bullying him unmercifully, calling him out from among his colleagues as a failure. The claim comes from Ronald Kessler, formerly an investigative reporter with the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and the author of “The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents and The Secrets of the FBI.” Kessler wrote about his claim in the London Daily Mail on Thursday. The controversies surrounding Foster’s death...

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler and Colleen McCain Nelson broke the news that Hillary Clinton is vetting Elizabeth Warren for the vice presidency — but not vetting Bernie Sanders. In the process, they provided a shortlist of candidates that Clinton is considering: Beyond the Massachusetts senator, other prospective candidates include Labor Secretary Tom Perez; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro; Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Cory Booker of New Jersey; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and Reps. Xavier Becerra of California and Tim Ryan of Ohio, several Democrats said. Now, this...

Some people who know Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump say he has two aspects: a thoughtful, charming private demeanor and an impulsive, inflammatory public persona. But now, two public images of Mr. Trump appear to be emerging: the scripted candidate who affirms conservative ideals and attacks presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and the free-wheeling headliner at rallies who seems willing to hurl insults at any and all, even within his own party. The latter public version of Mr. Trump showed up on Saturday at campaign stops in Tampa, Fl., and Pittsburgh, Pa., offering a stark contrast from the more-restrained...

Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, is the New York Times bestselling author of The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents and The Secrets of the FBI. FBI agents investigating the death of Bill Clinton's Deputy White House Counsel found that Hillary Clinton 'triggered' his suicide when she attacked and humiliated her mentor from their former Rose Law Firm in front of other White House aides a week before he took his own life. Vince Foster's suicide has been the focus of much speculation since he shot...

Speaking to CNN's Fareed Zakaria Sunday afternoon, Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens said that it was important for Donald Trump to lose the general election so utterly that the Republican party and its voters "learn their lesson" and never nominate someone like him ever again. Stephens has been one of Trump's most outspoken conservative critics, writing in March, for instance, that Trump is essentially an amplified version of Barack Obama. Both men were "epic narcissists who see themselves as singularly suited to redeem an America that is not only imperfect but fundamentally broken," he wrote. "The candidacy of Donald Trump...

Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” The Wall Street Journal’s deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens argued against presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s candidacy and said he must be “decisively rebuked” to the point that it will teach Republican voters a “lesson".

Retired USA Today White House reporter Richard Benedetto penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on Friday titled “How Obama Gets Away With It.” He suggested “Usually when an incumbent president is leaving office and a slew of candidates are battling for his job, that departing chief executive’s record is a major campaign issue.” But Obama’s record in office is not an issue. Obviously, one reason is the Republican establishment didn’t want Obama to be an issue, which is why they moved to take any budget fight with Obama off the table for the rest of his presidency. …