Free Republic

FBI Attorney 2 was assigned to the Midyear investigation early in 2016. FBI Attorney 2 was not the lead FBI attorney assigned to Midyear and he told us he provided support to the investigation as needed. FBI Attorney 2 told us that he was also assigned to the investigation into Russian election interference and was the primary FBI attorney assigned to that investigation beginning in early 2017. FBI Attorney 2 told us that he was then assigned to the Special Counsel investigation once it began. FBI Attorney 2 left the Special Counsel’s investigation and returned to the FBI in late...

When Neera Tanden assumed a role as senior adviser at the White House last week, after her bid for a Cabinet post went off the rails, it was viewed as a consolation prize. In reality, Tanden may have just stepped into a more quietly powerful position: entering President Joe Biden’s inner sanctum and avoiding the scrutiny from her detractors that would have come with a more public-facing role. As senior adviser, Tanden is now among a small, select circle of advisers in the White House. She’s included in daily briefings. She’s one of a half dozen senior advisers and one...

The Democratic response to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson raises questions about the scope and significance of the federal healthcare reform legislation they passed without any Republican votes under former President Barack Obama. President Joe Biden, then the vice president, famously called the enactment of the Affordable Care Act a “big f***ing deal” at the 2010 signing ceremony. But when he sought the Democratic presidential nomination himself 10 years later, he was the only top-tier candidate running on Obamacare rather than other more government-centric healthcare plans. Biden won the nomination, defeating several proponents of Medicare for All, including...

A new report released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that if the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) extended subsidies are allowed to expire at the end of 2025, millions of people will become uninsured and premiums will rise. Responding to the Senate Finance Committee, the CBO found that “not extending the credit will increase the number of people without health insurance and raise the average gross benchmark premiums for plans purchased through the marketplaces.” The extended tax subsidies were first enacted in 2021 through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and extended to the end of 2025 through the...

Tomorrow morning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will hear oral arguments in Halbig v. Sebelius, a case that challenges the IRS’s ability to implement ObamaCare’s health insurance subsidies and mandate penalties in the 34 states with federally established health “exchanges.” Though the IRS prevailed at the district-court level, its allies have been inadvertently undermining the agency’s case ever since. First, a little background. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 clearly, repeatedly, and consistently says that the above-mentioned subsidies and penalties are authorized only “through an Exchange established by the State.” The IRS breezed...

Even the left now admits that Obamacare failed. The former Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary who helped oversee implementation of the disastrous Obamacare law just argued that “27-28 million” Americans have no health insurance. And that’s about 10 years after the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” was enacted in 2010.

UnitedHealth cured the Ingenix stigma by simply changing its name to OptumInsight. It’s as though they made a deal with a witness protection program. Like other large medical insurers, over the years, they sustain fines for federal racketeering, skirt state laws by systematically reducing, denying and delaying payments owed to doctors for medical care and pay fines in the billions and still they continue on! Who dispenses Medicare and ACA money? Who controls the prices that the exchanges charge? And who is operating the very workings of the exchanges? That would be the leaders of the pack, UnitedHealth and Optum....

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) and co-counsel Jonathan F. Mitchell secured a resounding win before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Braidwood Management Inc. v. Becerra. A unanimous panel of the Fifth Circuit held that a key provision of the Affordable Care Act violates Article II’s Appointments Clause by empowering the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to dictate the preventive care that all private insurers must cover. In other words—unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats don’t get to make unilateral decisions about Americans’ healthcare coverage, which has led to tremendous increases in the cost of...

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly asked President Trump to nominate Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick this week; urging the Commander-in-Chief to put forward Merrick Garland to replace outgoing Justice Anthony Kennedy. According to the Hill, Schumer made the request in private; asking Trump to advance Garland after his nomination process stalled in 2016. “A person familiar with the conversation said on Thursday that Schumer told Trump in a phone call that lasted less than five minutes on Tuesday that the move would help unify the country,” writes the Hill. The Democratic leader penned an editorial in the New York...

Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Thursday on CNN’s “Inside Politics” that she believed the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot was an assault on “personal freedoms” that former President Donald Trump must be held accountable for. When asked about President Joe Biden’s campaign ad highlighting the Capitol riot, Pelosi said, “I think it’s very important, but I think it also recognizes that democracy is a personal issue. Freedom to whether it is to have access to health care, when, if, and how to expand your family, freedom to be in the workplace in a very strong way because you have...

FBI agents raided a Manhattan building in the fall of 2022 that was allegedly being used as a secret Chinese police station and was staffed with 'illegal cops' who solved crimes. The raid occurred at the headquarters of the American Changle Association, a non-profit that helps Chinese nationals who live in New York. The group's former chairman was Lu Jianshun, who in 2021 donated $4,000 to Eric Adams' mayoral campaign, reports The New York Times. The police station was located on the third floor of the organization's building. The police unit is linked to a unit code named 110 Overseas,...

A large Planned Parenthood affiliate has been doing more sterilizations on men this fall since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Dr. Grace Shih, director of vasectomy services for Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, told KIRO 7 News that they have seen a 34-percent increase since the June abortion ruling, according to Fox News. Shih said one man told her that he believed having a vasectomy was an “act of love.” Others apparently never want to have children. “Men are interested in learning about contraception and learning about a vasectomy. I think the change in our...

The U.S. government must launch a probe into the Chinese overseas law enforcement operation in New York City, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation, as other countries raise the alarm over reports of police stations on their soil. “How in God’s name could they openly have these communist police stations in our country?” Beau Dietl, retired NYPD detective, told the DCNF. “This shows the Chinese Communist Party is not afraid to exert its will outside of China, and we should do all that we can to counter this behavior,” Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Jim Risch of Idaho...

A large group of U.S. House Republicans sent a letter on Friday questioning Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the presence of a Chinese Fuzhou police service station in New York City.“We are writing to express our grave concern over reports of the law enforcement presence of the People’s Republic of China in New York City,” begins the letter from 21 lawmakers, including Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.).The letter states, “The Public Security (Police) Bureau of Fuzhou, China, announced in January 2022 that...

The Biden administration announced it would again reduce payments to Medicare physicians, this time by 8.42 percent. According to a recent survey, 92 percent of medical group practices report that Medicare payments do not cover the cost of providing care. The federal government can stay in business when it takes in less revenue than it expends. Why? Because it can print money and no one else can. To stay in business, physicians will have to reject Medicare patients; access will decrease once again. And with Democrats pushing legislation like the wrongly named Inflation Reduction Act, things will only get worse....

When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, its authors cited three overarching goals: to improve access to health care, to slow rising medical costs and to improve health outcomes. One of the main vehicles for achieving all three missions was a requirement that health insurers provide preventive health care services at no cost to patients. If there were no financial barriers, backers argued, patients would be more likely to get preventive services, from colonoscopies to vaccines to heart disease screenings, which would help keep people healthier and out of the hospital and, consequently, lower health care costs. (snip)...

Build Back Better is the next step in the increasing institutionalization of small children.The massive and historic entitlement-and-spending bill, Build Back Better (H.R. 5376), includes the “largest expansion” of government education since public high schools were established by the states more than “100 years ago,” according to President Biden. The bill was passed by the House at the end of November and is now the intense focus of the Democrat Senate and the Biden administration for passage before Christmas. Under the proposed legislation, the federal government would expand and then regulate not just public education but a good portion of...

A body modification enthusiast who dreams of becoming a 'black alien' has had two of his fingers cut off so that his hand looks like a claw in his latest shocking transformation. Anthony Loffredo, 33, has already covered his body - including his eyeballs - in tattoos and removed his nose and top lip in his bid to look like a 'black alien'. The Frenchman, who documents his dramatic physical alterations for his 730,000 followers on Instagram, has now gone one step further and had surgery in Mexico to cut off his two fingers.

By this year’s standards, the process that led to Obamacare seems like a veritable exercise in transparency and open government.How quickly Democrats forget. A dozen years ago, President Barack Obama faced strong and justified criticism for backtracking on his promise, made numerous times during the 2008 presidential campaign, to televise health-care negotiations on C-SPAN:By this year’s standards, however, the process that led to Obamacare—the law that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said we had to pass in order to find out what’s in it—seems like a veritable exercise in transparency and open government. It’s gotten so bad that press reports...

President Joe Biden celebrated the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Obamacare on Thursday, promising to expand the law in the future. “Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision is a major victory for all Americans benefitting from this groundbreaking and life-changing law,” Biden wrote in a statement.