Free Republic

A federal agency worked with the Trump transition team to send two pallets of “document boxes” relating to former President Donald Trump’s presidency to his Mar-a-Lago home — one year before Special Counsel Jack Smith then raided the residence to look for classified documents. Smith indicted Trump in June of 2023 for allegedly mishandling classified documents, one year after armed federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago in search of such documents. The General Services Administration (GSA) was in talks with Trump’s team both during and after his term regarding “pallets” of items from the president’s tenure, emails show. The GSA informed Trump’s...

Several Republican-led states said that they are banning U.S. Department of Justice election monitors from entering polling sites in the November general election after the agency sent observers to various states in the 2022 midterms. When the DOJ announced that it was sending election monitors to polling sites in multiple states for the 2022 midterm elections, Florida and Missouri said that the department employees would not be permitted to observe the polls. Now, eight other states have said that they will also not allow DOJ election monitors to enter polling sites during the election this November, with some saying that...

On Saturday, 69 people were arrested at the Arizona State University trying to establish a Gaza Camp to demand the university divest itself from Israeli companies. An official with the university told 12 News, that most of the individuals that were attempting to set up the encampment were not part of ASU's student body, nor were they faculty. ASU began clearing the tents around midnight, and by 1:45 AM the last of the group had left. Three of the protesters arrested and charged with criminal trespassing were Michael Clancy, 20, Harry Smith, 19, and William Whitmire, 59.

(LifeSiteNews) — On Tuesday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the ‘Baby Olivia Act’ into law, requiring public schools to show school children a “high-quality, computer-generated animation or high-definition ultrasound” of unborn babies developing in the womb. The law cites Live Action’s computer-animated “Baby Olivia” video depicting fertilization and fetal development from conception as an example of an animation that would meet the law’s requirements, which include the depiction of “the development of the brain, heart, and other vital organs in early fetal development.” Family life curriculum is required by Tennessee law in all counties where the teen birth rate exceeds...

DECATUR, Ga. (AP) — A judge upheld the disqualification of a candidate who had had planned to run against the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s 2020 Georgia election interference case. Tiffani Johnson is one of two people who filed paperwork to challenge Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee. An administrative law judge earlier this month found that she was not qualified to run for the seat after she failed to appear at a hearing on a challenge to her eligibility, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger adopted that decision. Johnson last week filed a petition for review...

Former Rep. Peter Meijer, R-Mich., announced Friday evening that he had dropped out of the race to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate. "I got into this race because I believed I had the strongest chance of winning in November to work to right this ship and reverse trendlines that have only gotten worse over these past months," Meijer, whose family founded the Meijer supermarket chain, said in a statement posted on X. "The hard reality is the fundamentals of the race have changed significantly since we launched this campaign," he continued. "After prayerful consideration, today I withdrew my name...

U.S. regulators have seized Republic First Bancorp and agreed to sell it to Fulton Bank, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp said on Friday, underscoring the challenges facing regional banks a year after the collapse of three peers. The Philadelphia-based bank, which had abandoned funding talks with a group of investors, was seized by the Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities. The FDIC, appointed as a receiver, said Fulton Bank, a unit of Fulton Financial Corp, will assume substantially all deposits and purchase all the assets of Republic Bank to "protect depositors". Republic Bank had about $6 billion in total assets...

FULTON COUNTY, Ga. - A new lawsuit has been filed against several prominent figures in Fulton County, including Commissioner Marvin Arrington, District Attorney Fani Willis, the Fulton County Ethics Board, and Fulton County itself. Georgia Rep. Mesha Mainor, the victim in a criminal case involving stalking, filed the lawsuit. She alleges mishandling of the case by Commissioner Arrington initially and later by DA Willis. [snip] The lawsuit provides a timeline dating back to January 2019 when Mainor hired businessman Corwin Monson as a campaign volunteer. Despite their prior association, Mainor dismissed Monson in February 2019 due to his disruptive behavior,...

Ford announced Wednesday losses of $1.32 billion on its Ford Model-e sector, which represents the company’s electric vehicle business. With 10,000 units sold, the company lost $132,000 on each EV it sold. In the fourth quarter of 2023, the company sold 34,000 units in its Model-e business, which produced $1.57 billion in losses, or roughly $46,176 on each EV sold. “The company expects EV costs to improve going forward, but be offset by top-line pressure,” the company said in a press release. The company’s other sectors, which includes its Ford Pro fleet business and Ford Blue gas-powered and hybrid vehicle...

In the final argument scheduled for its 2023-2024 term, the Supreme Court will hear argument on Thursday in former President Donald Trump’s historic bid for criminal immunity. The question before the justices is whether Trump can be tried on criminal charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The court’s answer will determine not only whether Trump’s trial in Washington, D.C., before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, originally scheduled for March 4 but now on hold, can go forward, but also whether the former president’s trials in Florida and Georgia can proceed. Jury selection is currently...

Dairy cows cannot be moved between states without testing for the highly pathogenic avian influenza, U.S. officials announced on April 24. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued a federal order that says “prior to interstate movement, dairy cattle are required to receive a negative test for Influenza A virus.” A strain of the highly pathogenic avian influenza A, H5N1, has been spreading across the country since first being detected in cows in March. The influenza is commonly known as the bird flu. At this point, no beef cattle are known to have been infected with the virus. The order,...

Remember Eric Ciaramella? He’s the Ukraine whistleblower who lobbed a report sent to Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) office in 2019, which set off the first Trump impeachment effort. It’s where the whole drama started between Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the perfect phone call where the crux of the charge against Trump is that there was an attempted quid pro quo arrangement: Zelensky would investigate Biden’s alleged felonious activities during the Burisma investigation, where a top Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was fired, in return for the United States not cutting off military aid. [snip] Ciaramella’s role – including high-level discussions...

Just weeks after learning Joe Biden had improperly retained government documents, his administration began working with federal bureaucrats in spring and fall 2021 to increase pressure on Donald Trump for similar issues and eventually prompt a criminal prosecution of the 45th president, according to government memos newly unsealed by a federal judge. The correspondence, released this week by U.S. District Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida, provide the the most extensive accounting so far of how the Biden White House worked with federal bureaucrats to escalate pressure on Trump to return documents to the National Archives even as it slow-walked similar...

The recent wave of violent protests and arrests at elite universities like Yale and Columbia have only confirmed for Scott Katz that he made the right decision to attend Elon University. The North Carolina college, where he is currently wrapping up his sophomore year, is a long way from his hometown of Lafayette Hill, the predominantly liberal Philadelphia suburb where the average home costs $610,000. Katz, who is Jewish, says the antisemitism that’s increasingly visible at colleges nationwide—especially in the Ivy League, and other elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley—hasn’t even touched his campus. “I haven’t been affected by it...

Federal regulators on Tuesday enacted a nationwide ban on new noncompete agreements, which keep millions of Americans — from minimum-wage earners to CEOs — from changing jobs within their industries. The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday afternoon voted 3-to-2 approve the new rule, which will ban noncompetes for all workers when the regulations take effect in 120 days. For senior executives, existing noncompetes can remain in force. For all other employees, existing noncompetes are not enforceable. The FTC heard from thousands of people who said they had been harmed by noncompetes, illustrating how the agreements are "robbing people of their...

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon is concerned the US economy could be in for a repeat of the problems that hampered the country during the 1970s. "Yes, I think there’s a chance that can happen again," he said during an appearance Tuesday at the Economic Club of New York. The economy in that troubled decade was constrained by stagflation, a combination of low growth and high inflation, and Dimon said such a risk exists again. "I worry that it looks more like the seventies than we've seen before," he added during a question-and-answer session with Marie-Josee Kravis, chair of...

Though still far behind the number of cases granted for the next term this time last year, the court on Monday added two new cases to its docket for the 2024-2025 term. The justices agreed to weigh in on a challenge to a rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives regulating so-called “ghost guns” – firearms without serial numbers that virtually anyone can assemble from parts, often purchased in a kit. Garland v. VanDerStok was one of two cases granted on Monday on a list of orders from the justices’ private conference last week. The dispute over...

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a legal challenge to a Texas law that requires voters under the age of 65 to provide justification to vote by mail, meaning that the Democrat-aligned attempt to sharply expand “no-excuse” mail-in ballots in the Lone Star state has failed, with implications for other states. According to an April 22 order list, the high court denied petition for a writ of cetriorari in a case that stems from a federal lawsuit filed in 2020 on behalf of the Texas Democratic Party and several voters who requested that Texas lift its age-based limitations...

PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona judge declares a mistrial Monday in the case of a rancher accused of fatally shooting a Mexican man on his property near the U.S.-Mexico border. George Alan Kelly, 75, was charged with second-degree murder in the Jan. 30, 2023, shooting of Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea, 48, who lived just south of the border in Nogales, Mexico. Kelly recklessly fired nine shots from an AK-47 rifle toward a group of men, including Cuen-Buitimea, about 100 yards (90 meters) away on his cattle ranch, prosecutors said. Kelly has said he fired warning shots in the air, but he didn’t...

A Brooklyn man has been convicted of 13 weapons charges after having been arrested and charged in 2022 for building his own firearms. Dexter Taylor’s ordeal could become a landmark Second Amendment case in light of the Bruen ruling handed down in the same year. The jury found Taylor guilty of second-degree criminal possession of a loaded weapon, four counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, five counts of criminal possession of a firearm, second-degree criminal possession of five or more firearms, unlawful possession of pistol ammunition, violation of certificate of registration, prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers. Two...