Free Republic

Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico accused his Republican opponent of voter fraud — all while being guilty of the same violations himself, according to two new reports on Wednesday. The reports — from The Texas Tribune and ProPublica — found Talarico "may have violated state voting laws" by voting in five elections using his parents' address instead of the one where he actually resides. At minimum, it would be hypocritical, given what he said about Texas Attorney General and Senate candidate Ken Paxton last month.

The US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the United States’ first mRNA-based flu vaccine for adults 50 and older, drugmaker Moderna said. “Flu remains a significant public health challenge, and mFLUSIVA provides an important new option for America’s seniors,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement. “This approval also reflects the ongoing potential of our mRNA platform to help address important public health challenges through continued scientific innovation.” The new vaccine was found to be about 27% more effective during the 2024–25 respiratory virus season than standard flu shots in Moderna’s study, which enrolled over 40,000 adults...

The Epstein files: what we know about his links to Iran. Feb 4, 2026. Newly released documents from the Jeffrey Epstein case include multiple references to Iran, ranging from claims of a meeting with a former Iranian president to allegations of arms trading, financial networks, and property links connected to Tehran. Among the emails released from the Jeffrey Epstein case is a letter written by Robert Trivers, a prominent American evolutionary biologist, referring to a meeting between Epstein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s former president. This is not the only instance in which Iran appears in the documents made public by...

The FBI opened a criminal probe specifically targeting Donald Trump in May 2017, alleging the newly elected president may have been acting as a Russian asset when he fired then-Director James Comey even though the bureau’s own evidence overwhelmingly showed at the time there was no collusion with the Kremlin. Internal memos newly declassified by the White House show the investigation – codenamed "Oxferd Comma" – was launched in the immediate aftermath of Comey’s May 9, 2017, firing and was predicated on an allegation that previously released memos show the bureau’s own agents had mostly dismissed. “The FBI is opening...

Private credit companies are key owners of AI-related assets. Many of their parent private equity firms own life insurers that are dumping grounds for bad loans—and subject to state bailouts. If AI is propping up the economy, who is propping up AI? The answer, extrapolating from a fascinating new paper about private credit and the life insurance industry, could be the U.S. taxpayer. Private credit is private equity’s $3 trillion financing arm. They make largely unregulated, relatively high-risk, relatively complex and opaque loans, mostly to their own portfolio companies. Private credit is entangled, maybe more than the rest of Wall...

The former president of Taylor Farms’ Tennessee division has been accused of stealing $32 million from the company through multiple schemes that included funneling money to a sham company and keeping his wife and other family members on the payroll. Taylor Farms, the major U.S. produce supplier at the center of a lettuce recall and diarrheal illness outbreak, made the allegations in a federal lawsuit filed in Tennessee. According to the lawsuit, Brian Thure served as president of Taylor Farms Tennessee from 2012 through March of this year. In the roughly 14 years he was head of the Tennessee division,...

More than 50 officials from seven southeastern states convened Thursday to sign a data-sharing agreement with the Department of Justice aimed at rooting out fraud. Across the seven states, officials have uncovered roughly $350 million in alleged fraud, according to information shared with the Daily Caller. Under the Memorandum of Understanding signed Thursday, the states will give the DOJ access to “publicly available corporate registration and public benefits payment data held by these state agencies.” It is data officials said will help the department spot fraud patterns faster. Colin McDonald, assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s National Fraud...

Audio recordings that former President Joe Biden fought for years to keep private have now been released. The roughly 70 hours of audio recordings, shared with CBS News, were cited in a 2024 special counsel's report, which said Biden kept volumes of notes at his home that included classified information. Biden, now 83, is at one point in the recordings heard telling his ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer: "Some of this may be classified … So, be careful. I'm not sure ... It's not marked classified but —" At another point in the recordings he says again: "The next thing I have...

... The League of Women Voters claimed that keeping men who claim to be women out of women’s sports was “an egregious example of sex discrimination.” Deborah Turner, the League’s black former president, argued that keeping men out was racist and “will disproportionately target women and girls of color” even though Mr. Hecox was a white man and the most notorious men competing against women, like Lia Thomas, have been white men. This senseless argument paralleled the descent of the League of Women Voters from its 1890s suffrage roots into a bland and interchangeable Democratic operation and then, by way...

In the coming months, for the first time in the 191-year history of the Chicago Police Department, white officers will no longer be the largest racial group in the department’s rank-and-file. Data from the city’s Office of Inspector General shows that likely before the end of 2026, Latino officers will overtake white officers as the plurality in the department. For many, the literal changing face of the department will take it further from the ingrained imagery of its past, when the sons of immigrants from Ireland and other points in Europe may have been the first to come to mind....

Democratic Hawaii Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke was indicted by a grand jury on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery and falsifying candidate committee reports stemming from a bribe she allegedly took as a state lawmaker in 2022. The indictment alleges that local businessman and lobbyist Tobi Solidum offered Luke a $35,000 bribe connected to a COVID-19 testing contract a company he recommended had with the state. Solidum was also indicted as part of the state attorney general’s probe, along with former state representative Ryan Yamane, Hawaii’s Transportation Department official Ford Fuchigami, and Leo Asunción, a former official for...

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. halted the distribution of $1 billion to California and Minnesota, saying "Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn) have opened the floodgates to theft. They dismantled basic program integrity and oversight. We are not sending any more Medicaid dollars out the door to them until we have confidence that they are being spent lawfully and appropriately." "One example of the fraud we found was in the payments California made to so-called hospices," the Secretary explained. "These are places where the terminally ill go to die. The average time...

A federal appeals court has blocked the Trump administration from ending the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of the approximately 350,000 Haitians living in the United States, CBS News reports. As News Center 7 previously reported, TPS was set to end on Friday. The new ruling extends it to Monday, July 27. TPS allows people from countries affected by war, natural disasters, or other major crises to legally live and work in the U.S. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that the Trump Administration could end TPS for Haitians.

An 88-year-old widow living in a trailer in rural Michigan has been listed as funneling over $150,000 to Democrat causes through ActBlue. Nearly 15,000 separate donations averaging eight per day, every single day, for five years, Michigan Enjoyer first reported. The latest allegations come as ActBlue continues to face intense scrutiny from congressional investigators and federal authorities over its donor verification practices and allegations of potentially fraudulent contributions.

Former Biden special counsel Jack Smith could face potential criminal prosecution after Republicans accused the ex-prosecutor of misleading Congress about the scope of his investigation into President Donald Trump. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, issued a criminal referral for Smith Wednesday, arguing newly released records contradict Smith's testimony to his committee that he did not obtain or review lawmakers' text messages during his multiple probes into President Donald Trump. "All individuals have an obligation to comply with a duly authorized congressional inquiry. Mr. Smith, a former public servant, is no different," Jordan wrote in a letter to acting...

No-bid contracts require justification to the Department of General Services and public posting Gavin Newsom has a $6.2 million diaper problem. His administration awarded a no-bid contract to Baby2Baby, a nonprofit with longstanding ties to the Newsom administration. One of its co-CEOs, Norah Weinstein, also serves on the board of the California Partners Project, the nonprofit co-founded by First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Then Newsom told Californians the deal had gone through “a competitive bidding process.” It had not. California’s own contracting database labels the $6.2 million deal “NON-COMPETITIVELY BID.” Newsom’s administration now says the governor was referring to the...

Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (D) received a harsh reception from an attendee at his town hall in Houston on Sunday. Video from the event, during which Talarico took questions for more than 90 minutes, captured by the Austin American-Statesman’s Faith Bugenhagen, shows a Black woman yelling, “So you stay here, you answer our questions or you suffer the consequences.” Other attendees clapped in support of the woman’s remarks, while one man said, “Say it with your chest.” When Talarico told the woman he appreciated her for traveling to attend the town hall, she replied, “I did it for my...

Trust is important. Verification is essential. More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal posed a timeless question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — “Who will guard the guards themselves?” or “Who watches the watchers?” The Romans could never have imagined artificial intelligence, facial recognition, or nationwide networks of automated license-plate readers. Yet their question may be even more relevant today than it was three millennia ago. Recent debate over Flock Safety cameras illustrates why. The cameras have become an invaluable law enforcement tool. A stolen vehicle that crosses several jurisdictions can now be identified in minutes rather than days....

Trust is important. Verification is essential. More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal posed a timeless question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — “Who will guard the guards themselves?” or “Who watches the watchers?” The Romans could never have imagined artificial intelligence, facial recognition, or nationwide networks of automated license-plate readers. Yet their question may be even more relevant today than it was three millennia ago. Recent debate over Flock Safety cameras illustrates why. The cameras have become an invaluable law enforcement tool. A stolen vehicle that crosses several jurisdictions can now be identified in minutes rather than days....

In 2025, Rep. Maxine Dexter gave a speech comparing Israel’s campaign against Hamas terrorists to the Holocaust, falsely calling it “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide”. “After the Holocaust, the international community made a commitment that such evil can never happen again to any people, anywhere. Never again, they said. That is why I recently signed on to a resolution recognizing Israel’s actions in Gaza led by the Netanyahu government as a genocide,” Rep. Dexter said in her speech, backing Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s pro-terrorist resolution “Recognizing the Genocide of the Palestinian People in Gaza.” The director of the United States Holocaust Memorial...