Free Republic

Below is my column in the New York Post on the opposition of the Justice Department to release of even a redaction affidavit in the ongoing controversy over the raid at Mar-a-Lago. As this litigation unfolds (including a key filing today), the Justice Department has been reportedly leaking some of the very same information to the press. In addition, National Archives and Records Administration released a letter contradicting claims of the Trump team, including refuting claims of cooperation or transparency by the former president. There has never been a more important time for Attorney General Merrick Garland to show leadership...

Twitter/@TayFromCAJordan Dixon-Hamilton26 Aug 2022DOJ released the affidavit on Friday after Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the search warrant, ordered the underlying affidavit to be unsealed on Thursday. However, the released affidavit was heavily redacted after Judge Reinhart found the federal government provided “good cause” to keep portions of the document under seal.The redactions were put in place “in order to protect the safety of multiple civilian witnesses,” according to a DOJ filing.Trump mocked the highly redacted document in a statement issued several hours after the affidavit was released.“They missed a page,” Trump said, along with an edited version of...

It took a jury just under three hours to find an Ohio man not guilty Friday of murdering his wife and staging it to look like a suicide. Matheau Moore, 51, sobbed and cradled his face in the palms of his hands in a Delaware County courtroom when the judge read the verdict of not guilty to two counts of murder and one count of felonious assault. Emily Noble vanished on her 52nd birthday May 24, 2020, sparking a manhunt, according to the Columbus Dispatch. She was found about four months later, her badly decomposed remains hanging from a tree...

The affidavit is out. The one wherein the U.S. government found it necessary to raid a former president’s home earlier this month. And despite a whopping 413 redacted lines (yes, I counted each one), the document appears to implicate the FBI, DOJ, and Judge Bruce Reinhart in colluding to remove documents related to the long-debunked “Russiagate” saga. Here’s why.Page three of the document asserts U.S. Code 793 (e), 1519, and 2071, which means they were looking for general, “national defense information,” and alleging that there had been some concealment, mutilation, or destruction of records without the approval of the bureaucracy....

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As RedState reported, the affidavit for the search warrant that led to an unprecedented FBI raid on Donald Trump’s home has been released in heavily redacted form. As if to play out the meme that had been going around for days suggesting the affidavit would be a giant blob of black ink, that turned out to be mostly true.The document is full of redacted sections, to the point of absurdity, representing a giant middle finger to transparency by a federal bureaucracy that simply doesn’t care.It was supposed to be a meme but then the meme came true. https://t.co/2S54fOQ1Dr— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate)...

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had an important announcement to make yesterday regarding the impending start of the new school year. Despite the fact that most parts of the country are easing off on various pandemic restrictions that were in place over the past two and a half years, the District of Columbia will require all students age 12 and over to show proof of vaccination in order to attend classes. But the rules being imposed contain several bizarre caveats, along with a glaring omission in whatever planning went into this decision. The omission comes in the form of a...

... An American military intelligence officer points to historical precedents for such odd hesitation by Russian forces over the past two months. He cites the observation by BH Liddell Hart of the puzzling behavior of the Russians in World War II after the critical victory at Kursk: Advance of Russian forces was very slow and never able to decisively exploit obvious holes in the German line. But the successes kept coming and the Red Army leadership never risked or incurred a major loss or a major flanking movement again as had happened at the outset of Germany’s Operation Barbarossa. It’s...

THE SCENE: As the curtain rises, we see an empty podium, in front of the humble 60-room mansion that serves as the village hall of the remote, rural village of Chelm. Next to the podium, on the lawn, is a shiny new American-made electric car. It is mid-morning on a weekday, and the members of the local village council – the Wise Men of Chelm – have just completed their weekly board meeting. A few reporters walk on stage, taking their seats in front of the podiums, and finally, the Mayor of Chelm’s press secretary, Benito Bugiardo, walks on stage,...

Yesterday, Allahpundit wrote about the Russian effort to feed more troops into the stalled war on Ukraine. Russia’s inability to advance creates a possible opening for a Ukrainian counterattack. And we’ve seen some signs that Ukraine has been taking the initiative with attacks on supply lines and ammunition depots in Crimea and elsewhere. Just today there is another story that Ukraine struck a Russian base and killed 200 paratroopers:“The Armed Forces of Ukraine struck enemy fortifications in occupied Kadiivka, killing about 200 Russian paratroopers,” he wrote on Twitter.Haidai noted that the occupiers had been based in a hotel in Kadiivka...

A recently released FBI affidavit related to the Mar-a-Lago search spells trouble for Trump. "Donald Trump will be indicted in the classified documents matter," a national security lawyer said. The affidavit also throws a wrench into Trump's claim of innocence because "it was all declassified."

The military in New Zealand says 94 of its members are on leave without pay right now and it's checking to see if any of them are fighting in Ukraine... We still don't know the final results from Alaska's primary elections and the Special Election for the state's US House seat on Tuesday August 16th... Wall Street with a big dive today... The Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz in the United States amidst an expected nuclear deal bringing the US back into the JCPOA agreement with Iran... Russia says that Syrian crews used Russian anti-aircraft missiles during yesterday evening's Israeli...

The USDA National Agricultural Library is hosting a free three-part series on alternative land ownership models. Please feel free to share this information with any students, fellows, or instructors/professors you think may be interested. The series includes: Transitional Lands: Farm to Forest - September 1 - 2:00 pm ET Emerging Land Ownership Models: Agrarian Commons - September 22 - 2:00 pm ET Equitable Land Access: Resources & Tools - September 29 - 2:00 pm ET Please visit the Eventbrite pages (linked above) to learn more about each session and register. Land access issues disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, people of color...

WHICH SEEMS TO BE GETTING NO COVERAGE IN THE AMERICAN MEDIA. WONDER WHY. ... The United Kingdom has rolled out a financial compensation program for individuals and families who have been harmed by the COVID-19 vaccine, despite repeated claims by U.S. corporate media entities denying any negative health impacts of the vaccines created by their largest advertisers. Under the program, the first payments, which amount to a maximum of almost $150,000, have already been made to family members of individuals injured or killed as a result of the experimental vaccine. Vikki Spit, whose 48-year-old partner Zion became unwell eight days...

Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller explained how the affidavit for the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago shows that the United States turned into a "banana republic" Friday on "Jesse Watters Primetime." STEPHEN MILLER: If you read that affidavit, what's so offensive, what's so outrageous, what's so shocking? To summarize it in a sentence, it's angry, unfulfilled, partisan bureaucrats at the National Archives decided that they would sic the FBI at whim on President Trump for purely political reasons, with a major assist, of course, from White House counsel's office, which, of course, reports to President Biden. But the idea that the...

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” host Chris Hayes responded to the criticism of President Joe Biden’s student loan cancellation plan that the plan forces people to pay for other people’s loans by stating that “No one is paying” off loans because the plan is “deficit-financed, like a lot of stuff we’ve done.” Hayes played a clip of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) that the plan isn’t fair to taxpayers who didn’t take out loans or didn’t go to college to make them pay for student loans

Russia is burning off significant quantities of natural gas worth millions of dollars daily, which would have gone to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. Experts at Norway-based Rystad Energy found that a new liquified natural gas (LNG) facility northwest of St. Petersburg is burning an estimated $10 million worth of gas every day. The LNG plant is located close to a compressor station at the start of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which transports gas to Germany under the sea via a Baltic Sea pipeline. Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, announced in July that it would reduce natural...

The spirits in Germany still haven't calmed down after Abu Mazen's words in Berlin - and in Munich there was an anti-Semitic incident: a security man saluted an Israeli delegation in the Olympic village in Munich. It happened when members of the Israeli delegation to the European Athletics Championships arrived at the memorial site in memory of the 11 Martyrs. A security man of Arab origin encountered them on the bridge that connects the village and the Olympic stadium, waved his hand high - and a policeman accompanying the Israeli team arrested him on the spot. The suspect, a German...

Former President Trump is ripping the affidavit released Friday afternoon by the Justice Department that allowed FBI agents to raid his Florida home, calling it "total public relations subterfuge" by the agencies and releasing a parody press release. In the release, Trump shared a heavily redacted paragraph that only showed the words "Make," "America," "Great," and "Again." "They missed a page," was the release's only other line. He previously posted a series of messages deriding the heavy redactions on the affidavit. "Affidavit heavily redacted!!!," Trump posted on his TRUTH Social account shortly after the redacted affidavit was released by the...

Republican lawmakers have been quick to slam President Joe Biden's recent student-loan forgiveness announcement — and Democrats aren't letting it slide. On Wednesday, Biden announced up to $20,000 in student-loan forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients making under $125,000 a year, and $10,000 for other federal borrowers within the same income cap. While this was a long-awaited policy that many Democrats were waiting for the president to implement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was not thrilled with the expansive relief.