Free Republic

The Trump administration on Monday repeatedly stonewalled a federal judge seeking answers about whether the government had violated his order barring the deportation of more than 200 noncitizens without due process, escalating a conflict that threatened to become a constitutional crisis. At a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, a Justice Department lawyer refused to answer any detailed questions about the deportation flights to El Salvador that took place over the weekend, arguing that President Trump had broad authority to remove the immigrants from the United States under an obscure wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act. The...

When Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia, appeared in court in 2023 to be sentenced on sedition charges stemming from the storming of the Capitol, he angrily declared himself a “political prisoner,” echoing language that President Trump has also used to describe those involved with the events of Jan. 6, 2021. And on Monday, when Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Rhodes’ 18-year prison term to time served, he effectively validated the far-right leader’s belief that his criminal prosecution was a kind of political persecution, as he had defiantly claimed. Mr. Rhodes, who spent more than a decade running...

The president-elect and his allies have spent four years reinventing the Capitol attack — spreading conspiracy theories and weaving a tale of martyrdom to their ultimate political gain. In two weeks, Donald J. Trump is to emerge from an arched portal of the United States Capitol to once again take the presidential oath of office. As the Inauguration Day ritual conveying the peaceful transfer of power unfolds, he will stand where the worst of the mayhem of Jan. 6, 2021, took place, largely in his name. Directly behind Mr. Trump will be the metal-and-glass doors where protesters, inflamed by his...

With less than two weeks until Election Day, law enforcement officials are confronting a rising wave of threats to election workers and political activists in a presidential contest hurtling toward a bitterly contentious coda and a potentially unsettled aftermath. On Monday, the Justice Department unsealed a complaint against a man in Philadelphia who had vowed to skin alive and kill a party official recruiting volunteer poll watchers. On Tuesday, the police in Tempe, Ariz., arrested a man in connection with shootings at a Democratic campaign office, which resulted in no injuries, and other acts of political vandalism. On Wednesday, prosecutors...

New ads running in legal journals are warning lawyers: “Don’t lose your law license because of Trump.” After the 2020 election, legal watchdogs, outraged at some of their colleagues, filed scores of ethics complaints against lawyers who used their skills in questionable ways to help former President Donald J. Trump stay in power. And in the past few years, the groups have had some notable successes, securing judgments that have led to pro-Trump lawyers like John Eastman and Rudolph W. Giuliani having their law licenses deactivated. Now, one of these groups — the 65 Project — is taking a more...

Donald J. Trump has made his revisionist account of the Capitol attack the foundation of this campaign, even when there is little political advantage.When a moderator asked Donald J. Trump about Jan. 6, 2021, at the presidential debate, the former president slipped immediately into a now-familiar revisionist history of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He falsely claimed that he had nothing to do with the assault, blaming it on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the police officers who protected the building that day against a mob of his supporters. But then Mr. Trump made a brief but telling...

After nearly eight months in limbo, former President Donald J. Trump’s federal election interference case sprang back to life on Saturday as the judge overseeing it scheduled a hearing in Washington for Aug. 16 to discuss next steps.At the hearing, the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, will discuss with Mr. Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, how each side would like to proceed with a complicated fact-finding mission the Supreme Court ordered last month. The order was part of its landmark ruling granting Mr. Trump broad immunity against criminal prosecution for acts arising from...

Shortly after Judge Aileen M. Cannon drew the assignment in June 2023 to oversee former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, two more experienced colleagues on the federal bench in Florida urged her to pass it up and hand it off to another jurist, according to two people briefed on the conversations.The judges who approached Judge Cannon — including the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga — each asked her to consider whether it would be better if she were to decline the high-profile case, allowing it to go to another judge, the two...

When Judge Aileen M. Cannon presides over a hearing on Friday in former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, she will spend the day considering well-trod arguments about an arcane legal issue in an unorthodox manner.It will be the latest example of how her unusual handling of the case has now become business as usual.Over the past several months, Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in his final days in office, has made a number of decisions that have prompted second-guessing and criticism among legal scholars following the case. Many of her rulings, on a wide array...

Of all the distortions and paranoia that Tucker Carlson promoted on his since-canceled Fox News program, one looms large: a conspiracy theory that an Arizona man working as a covert government agent incited the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol to sabotage and discredit former President Donald Trump and his political movement. What’s known about the man — a two-time Trump voter named Ray Epps — is that he took part in demonstrations in Washington that day and the night before. He was captured on camera urging a crowd to march with him and enter the Capitol. But at...

During President Donald J. Trump’s years in the White House, his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the “beautiful mind” material. It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack. The phrase had a specific connotation. The aides employed it to capture a type of...

Overclassification ensures the public won’t get a full view into the government’s behind-the-scenes machinations leading up to the events of January 6. The public is gradually learning how, despite repeated denials and non-answers, top government officials were well aware of the potential for violence on January 6, 2021. A chief investigator on the January 6 select committee told NBC News last week that law enforcement was privy to a trove of intelligence indicating problems could arise during the election certification process but, for some unexplained reason, chose to ignore the warning signs. “The Intel in advance was pretty specific, and...

The F.B.I. arrested Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right militia, in a major step forward in the investigation into the attack on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump.

The House committee examining the Jan. 6 attack disclosed on Tuesday that it had interviewed the man at the center of a right-wing conspiracy theory about who provoked the violence, noting that he had denied reports he urged protesters into the Capitol at the behest of federal law enforcement agencies. The committee said its investigators spoke in November with the man, Ray Epps, who was seen on video urging people to march into the Capitol. Some Republican members of Congress and other supporters of former President Donald J. Trump have promoted a theory that Mr. Epps was working for the...

Mary L. Trump, President Trump’s niece, plans to publish a tell-all family memoir next week, describing how a decades long history of darkness, dysfunction and brutality turned her uncle into a reckless leader who, according to her publisher, Simon & Schuster, “now threatens the world’s health, economic security and social fabric.” The book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” depicts a multigenerational saga of greed, betrayal and internecine tension and seeks to explain how President Trump’s position in one of New York’s wealthiest and most infamous real-estate empires helped him acquire what...

New York Times reporter Alan Feuer, seen last May giving respectable coverage to a convention of "Bush-caused-9-11" conspiracy nuts, went to enormous (and erroneous) pains Monday to soft-pedal the Muslim beliefs of the Fort Dix terrorist plotters in "Two Mosques Are Shaken by Ties to a Terror Plot." "It is unclear what role, if any, religion played in the attack Mr. Shnewer and the five other men are charged with planning. (The sixth suspect, Agron Abdullahu, had no apparent connection with Al-Aqsa or the South Jersey Islamic Center.) The authorities have described the suspects as Islamic extremists, but the lengthy...