Free Republic

Special Counsel Jack Smith hunted information on X users who liked or retweeted posts published by former President Donald Trump, according to redacted search warrants and other documents released Monday.According to the heavily redacted document issued to then-Twitter in January, the court ordered the social media giant to forfeit a bevy of information regarding Trump’s account, including “advertising information, including advertising IDs, ad activity, and ad topic preferences,” as well as IP addresses “used to create, login, and use the account” and privacy and account settings. The warrant also demanded information such as Trump’s search history, direct messages, and “content...

A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files....

... The former president wasted little time in reopening attacks on Judge Engoron, calling his actions "Radical and Unprecedented". "His Ridiculous and Unconstitutional Gag Order, not allowing me to defend myself against him and his politically biased and out of control, Trump Hating Clerk, who is sinking him and his Court to new levels of LOW, is a disgrace," the 77-year-old wrote in a lengthy post on social media.

“Separation of church and state … is a misnomer. People misunderstand it,” Johnson said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” when asked about him praying on the House floor. “Of course, it comes from a phrase that was in a letter that Jefferson wrote is not in the Constitution.” “And what he was explaining is they did not want the government to encroach upon the church, not that they didn’t want principles of faith to have influence on our public life. It’s exactly the opposite,” the Speaker added.

Former President Donald Trump on Monday tested a gag order imposed on him by a Washington, D.C., judge by saying those prosecuting him in a federal case involving alleged attempts to subvert the 2020 election will end up in a "mental institution" with "Trump Derangement Syndrome." U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan of the District of Columbia on Oct. 29 reimposed the gag order on Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, prohibiting him from publicly criticizing prosecutors and likely witnesses in the case, as well as members of the court's staff. Trump has said the gag order...

Misinformation is a key global threat, but Democrats and Republicans disagree about how to address the problem. In particular, Democrats and Republicans diverge sharply on removing misinformation from social media.Only three weeks after the Biden administration announced the Disinformation Governance Board in April 2022, the effort to develop best practices for countering disinformation was halted because of Republican concerns about its mission. Why do Democrats and Republicans have such different attitudes about content moderation?My colleagues Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts and I found in a study published in the journal Science Advances that Democrats and Republicans not only disagree...

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Donald Trump’s election interference case, threw the former president a lifeline during a late Sunday filing. Newsweek reported that Chutkan turned away a request from the Department of Justice to put Trump in jail for violating a gag order she re-imposed on him. In a footnote reinstating the gag order, the judge denied federal prosecutors’ request to incorporate her order into the conditions of Trump’s release. “Even assuming that request is procedurally proper, the court concludes that granting it is not necessary to effectively enforce the order at this time,” she wrote....

Nearly 5,000 people sent in an SMS "voting" for Hillary Clinton after a man the US Office of Public Affairs characterized as a "social media influencer" promoted it as an option. According to the Department of Justice (DoJ), Douglass Mackey, who is also known as Ricky Vaughn, was this week sentenced to seven months in prison and handed a $15,000 fine for trying to trick voters into believing they could vote by text message. The Florida man (no, not that one) had faced up to 10 years for his scheme to deprive American citizens of their constitutional right to vote....

A Texas judge ruled that Infowars host Alex Jones cannot use bankruptcy protection to avoid paying Sandy Hook massacre victims' families more than $1.1 billion for his conspiracy theories that the 2012 shooting was a hoax. U.S. District Judge Christopher Lopez of Houston issued the ruling Thursday. "The families are pleased with the Court’s ruling that Jones’s malicious conduct will find no safe harbor in the bankruptcy court," said lawyer Christopher Mattei, who represents the families. "As a result, Jones will continue to be accountable for his actions into the future regardless of his claimed bankruptcy."

The police chief who oversaw a controversial raid on a small Kansas newspaper has been suspended. The raid, carried out on the Marion County Record on August 11, was personally led by Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody . Another raid was enacted on the home of the newspaper's publisher' 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, who subsequently died. The police chief who led a highly criticized raid of a small Kansas newspaper, that saw its 98-year-old owner die the following day, has been suspended. ... The August 11 raids of the Marion County Record office and the homes of its publisher and...

I find the left to be just annoying,” Carville told Maher. “The western far left is habitually the most stupid, naive people you can imagine. They come up with these really goofy constructs and it’s all about feeling good about yourself.” Maher agreed and criticized progressives for demanding society cater to their feelings. “If your feelings are hurt, that’s more important than free speech,” he argued. Carville revisited his criticisms of progressive Democrats later in the program, arguing they were a burden to the party.Carville said he found them “annoying and silly” after Maher mocked the notion of “pregnant men.”

That poses a problem for Biden, who shed the faux centrist label that he used for the campaign once he took office, but there is a larger issue at play. Biden is losing ground among black and Hispanic working-class voters because those voters are not the priority of the Democratic Party anymore. The Democratic Party is run by elitists, for elitists, and that means leaving behind blue-collar workers of all races.

A federal appeals court has agreed with a lower court that the Biden administration likely can be proven to have pressured Big Tech to censor Americans whose views did not align with the Democrat talking points. And the result is that leftists en masse are trying to deny it, a sentiment expressed by the White House, which stated, “This administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections. Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account...

A court document filed on Tuesday has revealed that Department of Justice prosecutors are seeking a 120-day sentence for InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, who did not enter the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. The Biden DOJ claimed that Shroyer "spread election disinformation paired with violent rhetoric" to viewers in the months leading up to January 6, and that on the day, "Shroyer took to a megaphone before leading a crowd to the Capitol" and said "The Democrats are posing as communists, but we know what they really are: they’re just tyrants, they’re tyrants. And so today, on January 6,...

MARION, Kan. (KCTV) - The Kansas Bureau of Investigation has confirmed it’s taking the lead in the investigation of what happened in Marion County. On Friday, Marion Police raided the Marion County Record and seized phones and computers. Yesterday, KBI spokesperson Melissa Underwood said that Marion Police and the Marion County Attorney had asked to KBI to join an investigation into allegations of Identity theft. An agent had been assigned on Tuesday to assist in the investigation. Now, KBI appears to be distancing itself from the raid. They confirm they were part of the initial investigation, Underwood says that the...

“This changes the rules of the game,” Dershowitz said. “This basically says RICO is not just applicable to organized crime or to organized, commercial crime with hierarchies, but it also applies to protests against election results. It’s going to deter and chill people from challenging legitimate election results.”

The police chief whose “Gestapo”-style raid on a small town newspaper has become the focus of national outrage was being investigated by its reporters over claims of alleged sexual misconduct. Gideon Cody and every officer in the Marion Police Department stormed into the Marion County Record’s offices Friday with a search warrant where they seized computers and servers. They also raided the home of the editor and publisher, Eric Meyer, and his 98-year-old mother Joan Meyer, the paper’s co-owner. She died the following day of “shock and grief,” Meyer said, stressed and unable to sleep when police seized her computer...

'The more a party makes inflammatory statements about this case … the greater the urgency will be that we proceed to trial quickly.’ U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan warned Donald Trump and his attorney Friday that repeated “inflammatory” statements about his latest criminal prosecution would force her to speed his trial on charges related to his bid to subvert the 2020 election. “I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements about this case,” Chutkan told Trump lawyer John Lauro during a hearing. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of...

Former President Donald Trump's attorneys opposed special counsel Jack Smith's proposal for a protective order in the case related to the 2020 election, according to a court document filed Monday. Trump's attorneys argued Smith's protective order, which prosecutors typically use to dictate how discovery is handled in a case, was "overbroad" and accused the Department of Justice of seeking to "restrict First Amendment rights" with it. Protecting certain discovery "does not require a blanket gag order over all documents produced by the government," Trump's defense team wrote. His lawyers added, "Rather, the Court can, and should, limit its protective order...

On Friday President Trump posted this warning on Truth Social. [Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU! Aug 04, 2023, 3:16 PM] This should not be a surprise. Trump ALWAYS goes after those who attack him first. Just ask Rosie O’Donnell or CNN. As reported earlier – In response to President Trump’s post on Truth Social, dirty Jack Smith asked the far-left Obama judge overseeing the DOJ’s latest case against Trump to prevent the president from sharing information on the case with the public. .....snip..... Now this… The Obama judge on the case gave...