Free Republic

Two police officers who defended the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack filed a federal civil lawsuit, asking a judge to order the hanging of a plaque to honor police heroes who protected the Capitol, lawmakers and staff from rioters. The lawsuit cites a 2022 law signed by President Biden that required the honorary plaque be hung by March 2023. The plaque has been completed and in storage since at least last year, but GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson has not committed to installing it at the Capitol. The dispute over the plaque has angered victims and inflamed a...

Since the 2016 elections, politicians, journalists, and many others have raised the alarm about “foreign election influence” and “disinformation,” demanding greater “content moderation” by social media platforms. It is too easy, they argued, for foreign and malign actors to quickly “go viral” at low cost, leaving the good guys unable to correct bad information. We must become more “resilient” to disinformation. It’s now clear that all of that rhetoric was cover for a sweeping censorship effort by the federal government and government contractors. Since December, a small but growing group of journalists, analysts, and researchers have documented the rise of...

The FBI arrested Sarah Beth Clendaniel of Catonsville and Brandon Russell of Orlando, Florida, last month. Federal prosecutors allege that the pair were planning to destroy five energy facilities in Norrisville, Reisterstown, Perry Hall and other parts of the Baltimore area. Clendaniel, 34, and Russell, 27, plotted to shoot up and damage the substations because they thought the attacks would “completely destroy this whole city [of Baltimore]” and cause a “cascading failure costing billions of dollars,” according to an FBI affidavit. The two were indicted Feb. 14 of a single count of conspiring to destroy an energy facility, after being...

A DEA agent accused of killing a cyclist in Salem while on duty had his case presented before a federal appeals court today in Seattle. At the center of today’s hearing was whether the agent could claim immunity from state prosecution because he was an on-duty federal agent. On March 28, 2023, Marganne Allen was riding her bike home from work in southeast Salem. Video from that day shows a black pickup truck running a stop sign moments before striking and killing the cyclist.

A trans-identified male who goes by Lilly, though his given name is William Whitworth, was arrested and charged after a police investigation in Colorado Springs revealed that the 19-year-old was responsible for "threats involving schools in Colorado Springs Academy District 20." Whitworth faces charges of attempted murder after allegedly making threats against schools in Colorado Springs, Colo., according to local news. The Elbert County Sheriff's Office charged Whitworth with two counts of a criminal attempt to commit murder in the first degree, criminal mischief, menacing, and interference with staff, faculty or students of educational institutions. Whitworth is an alum of...

Volodymyr Zelensky has sacked his wartime minister of defence and replaced him with a trusted political ally who took part in failed peace talks last year with Russia.The dismissal of Oleksii Reznikov, who has headed Ukraine’s defence ministry since Russia invaded in February 2022, needs to be approved by the Ukrainian parliament.“I believe that the Ministry needs new approaches and other formats of interaction with both the military and society at large,” Mr Zelensky said.The 57-year-old Mr Reznikov became one of the most high-profile Ukrainians of the war, representing Ukraine at Nato meetings and dozens of bilateral talks to secure...

A little-known network funded by the Rockefellers, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and top foundations is behind a disruptive climate activist group that is drawing the attention of law enforcement, according to tax records. Over the last year, an organization known as Climate Defiance has propelled itself into the national spotlight by deploying activists... Now, newly filed financial disclosures reveal how Climate Defiance, which aims to “make support for any fossil fuels as unacceptable on the Left as opposing abortion or gay marriage,” keeps its lights on...

Wednesday’s annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity was disrupted when a group of protesters stormed the field to make a political statement about the alleged climate doomsday. The game which raises money for local charities pits members of the House and Senate against each other in an event that has been a cherished local tradition for over a century, with fans who turned out to watch the action at Nationals Stadium having their enjoyment briefly interrupted by the left-wing activists. In the early stages of the contest, the group of protesters who were wearing white shirts reading “End Fossil Fuels”...

Climate change protesters are hoping to “shut down” the annual Congressional Baseball Game on Wednesday night. Youth-led activist group Climate Defiance plans to protest at the north gate of Nationals Park and “shut” the game down, Evan Drukker-Schardl, an organizer for the group, told The Hill. “This game is an important kind of illustration of what’s wrong with our politics and our political elite that’s destroying our planet,” Drukker-Schardl said. “We’re not going to let this celebration of corporate political corruption go unchallenged.” The organization, established in March 2023, also led a plan to blockade the White House Correspondents’ Dinner...

One of the benefits of being a Washington insider, from the president of the United States to the lowliest bureaucrat, is never having to admit your policies are wrong. In the case of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) - the nation's 10th largest - the financial policy chickens of this, and previous administrations, have predictably come home to roost. Record debt, massive new spending, and the failure of regulators to see what was coming contributed to the run on SVB. It didn't help that in 2018 President Donald Trump signed the biggest rollback of Dodd-Frank bank regulations since the global financial...

ACI Prensa Staff, Mar 28, 2023 / 09:15 am The auxiliary bishop of Managua, Silvio Báez, who lives in exile in the United States, called the Daniel Ortega dictatorship’s staging this weekend of a prison interview with Bishop Rolando Álvarez “repugnant and cynical.” Álvarez was sentenced to 26 years and four months in prison on Feb. 10 as a “traitor to the homeland.” El 19 Digital, a news outlet supportive of the dictatorship, released over the weekend photos and a video of Álvarez, the bishop of Matagalpa, who was visited by a brother and sister on March 25 in the...

The public murder of Matt Gaetz begins. In 2020, it was first reported that popular MAGA Rep. Matt Gaetz was involved in a sex-trafficking scandal. The bogus allegation arose in 2020 and was pushed continuously by the far-left mainstream media. Months later, in February 2023, the Merrick Garland Department of Justice decided not to charge Matt Gaetz in the sensationalized sex-scandal probe. The investigation originally stemmed from allegations that Rep. Gaetz was had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl. The DOJ investigated the accusations but decided against pressing charges. Gaetz was exonerated of all criminal accusations. It should be...

A judge on Tuesday sentenced former Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira to 15 years in prison after he admitted to posting classified military information online. Teixeira, who was 21 when he was arrested in April 2023, pleaded guilty to six charges of willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act in March. Prosecutors have argued the case is "one of the most significant and consequential violations of the Espionage Act in American history." The former national guardsman reportedly uploaded hundreds of pages of sensitive military intelligence, including an assessment of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries,...

An Afghan man arrested on charges of planning a terrorist attack on Election Day worked as a security guard in Afghanistan for the CIA, two sources with knowledge of the matter told NBC News. Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, was arrested on Monday in Oklahoma and accused of plotting to kill Americans with an assault rifle on behalf of ISIS. Court documents said he had contributed to an ISIS charity in March and accessed online ISIS propaganda, but they did not say whether he was radicalized before or after he came to the U.S. in 2021. A senior law enforcement official...

Many of you may remember my reporting around "Operation Choke Point 2.0" from the spring of 2023; TLDR, Biden's financial regulators, namely the Fed, FDIC, and OCC, launched a crackdown on banks covering the crypto space. The first casualty was Silvergate Bank, which voluntarily liquidated. The standard reporting around Silvergate was that the bank lent to crypto depositors and those depositors were flighty; when rates rose, Silvergate suffered M2M losses on bond portfolios and ended up insolvent. Except that's not true. Silvergate weathered the storm, even though short sellers and members of Congress like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) encouraged a...

In March 2023, Robert Kennedy, Jr. announced on Twitter that the Biden Administration had still not provided his campaign with Secret Service protection. Robert says after several requests they had received no response after 88 days! This was shocking and unconscionable. Robert’s father Bobby Kennedy and uncle John F. Kennedy were both assassinated when he was a child. Since his first request, Robert Kennedy, Jr. has been denied Secret Service protection by the Biden administration at least three times. Even after an intruder broke into his home, Robert Kennedy, Jr. was denied Secret Service protection. .... Snip.... On Monday Judicial...

Editor’s Note: The following information is deeply disturbing and explicit. Reader discretion is advised. CV NEWS FEED // The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh analyzed the “manifesto” of a “transgender” gunwoman who murdered six people at a Nashville Christian school in March 2023. On Wednesday, Walsh posted several alleged photographs of the “manifesto” to his X (formerly Twitter) account. He wrote on the platform that the writings are evidence of the 28-year-old woman’s “anti-Christian, pro-trans, and perverse ideas.” “In one passage, the shooter rails against ‘Christian friends’ that her parents have encouraged her to make,” Walsh noted. “She writes, ‘Parents actually...

Covenant School shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale reportedly used funds from a federal Pell Grant to buy the guns she used to perpetrate a mass shooting in March 2023. 99.7 WTN afternoon radio host Brian Wilson reported Wednesday that Hale “took money from an education grant she received to purchase her weapons and to pay for training at a local gun range.” Hale purchased seven guns, three of which were recovered from the Covenant School after she died during an encounter with Metro Nashville Police Department officers, police said at the time in a post to X. She killed six people,...

"Are African leaders now ignoring Washington DC and its endless wars? Are they now sensing a new world of opportunities based on development and cooperation? Or are they sheep being led to the slaughterhouse? Putin is also scoring big on global diplomacy. Meetings with Africa, followed by Xi Jinping’s 3-day visit!"

Did the FBI get a bad rap in the wake of the raid on Mar-a-Lago? According to the Washington Post, the raid took place only after months of debate between the FBI and prosecutors from the Department of Justice. The FBI argued that a request for a full search of the property would have sufficed, according to two senior officials from the bureau. The prosecutors wanted a raid, however, and the DoJ agreed: "Prosecutors argued that new evidence suggested Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise raid...