Free Republic

A federal appeals court on Friday ruled that an enhancement charge used against Jan. 6 defendants to lengthen their sentences couldn’t apply to the Capitol protest. In a unanimous opinion from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee, said prosecutors’ use of a “substantial interference with the administration of justice” charge to enhance the prison sentence of Larry Brock was too broad. “We hold that the ‘administration of justice’ enhancement does not apply to interference with the legislative process of certifying electoral votes,” wrote Judge Millett.... The ruling could affect other Jan. 6 defendants who...

Demonstrators who were arrested and charged for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, claimed a spot at the Conservative Political Action Conference and railed against federal prosecutors, Republican lawmakers and CPAC itself for mistreating them.They said they have been shut out of the banking system, de-platformed from social media, blacklisted from flying on commercial airlines — wrecked financially and socially — and, worse of all, forgotten by most conservative leaders in Washington. At a panel discussion titled “True Stories of January 6: The Prosecuted Speak,” they described a saga of persecution and abandonment: • They were ignored or...

An FBI whistleblower has accused bureau officials of cooking the books to conceal the number of work hours devoted to the Jan. 6 investigation and inflate time spent on other cases.According to the anonymous whistleblower, the subterfuge is intended to bolster the bureau’s budget requests to Congress when House Republicans control the purse strings next year.According to a whistleblower disclosure submitted to Congress, a top official in the FBI’s counterterrorism unit at the Washington headquarters pressured the bureau’s field offices to stop agents from clocking hours when they are working on investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on...

What’s clear is that Kevin McCarthy’s math for becoming speaker is looking quite difficult. What’s less clear is who could fill the vacuum and take over if McCarthy (R-Calif.) can’t get the votes. Five House Republicans have come out firmly against the House minority leader — a number that could be enough to defeat his candidacy in the narrowly GOP-controlled House. But there’s been very little in the way of putting forward an alternative. Part of that could be they simply don’t know who it is, while part of it could be that they want to avoid drawing attention to...

An FBI whistleblower has told the House Judiciary Committee that he witnessed the bureau’s deputy director violating security policies and putting classified information at risk. The special agent told lawmakers that Paul Abbate, who oversees all FBI domestic and international investigative and intelligence activities, used his smartphone in an FBI sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, which is a violation of bureau security protocols. Just bringing a phone into the SCIF is a security breach. The senior agent accused Mr. Abbate of walking around in the SCIF while talking on the smartphone and sending text messages and emails. Another FBI...

WASHINGTON—House Judiciary Committee ranking member Doug Collins on Friday accused Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler of scheduling a “mock impeachment inquiry” of the president for Monday as opposed to a legitimate congressional oversight hearing. The upcoming hearing titled “Lessons from the Mueller Report: Presidential Obstruction and Other Crimes” is expected to include testimony from Watergate key witness John Dean along with other legal experts to drive the obstruction narrative for Democrats. However, former special counsel Robert Mueller will not be a witness. According to Collins, House Judiciary Democrats scheduled what appears to be an impeachment inquiry without officially launching an impeachment...

America knows Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students through mainly a handful of pro-gun control activist students, but according to a faculty member of the school where the deadly shooting took place, many other students say the most visible activists do not represent them. “I’ve had some students approach me privately to talk to me about it, but I should note that those student activists none of them were ever in any danger during this whole thing…none of them except for the one girl Samantha Fuentes,” the faculty member said during an interview with NRATV on the condition of anonymity....

A white Zimbabwean farmer previously kicked off his land by the former Robert Mugabe regime received a hero’s welcome from his community Thursday following the new government’s return of his land, the Associated Press reported. Guided by military escort, Robert Smart became the first white farmer who came back to the land he once owned before it was seized nearly two decades ago by Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party. In 2000, Mugabe ordered land seizures and evictions of white farmers and their families. According to the Telegraph, of the estimated 4,500 white farmers prior the seizures, only several hundred remain. Zimbabwe’s...

During his nearly 41 years in office, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch has seen seven presidents in the White House. Donald Trump, he said Wednesday, is “one of the best I’ve served under.” “He’s not afraid to make decisions,” Hatch said during an interview broadcast by MSNBC. “He’s not afraid to take on the big mouths around here.” The Republican senator later clarified online that Trump is “the best president I’ve served ‘under’ in terms of line of succession.” Hatch, 83, is third in the line for the presidency as Senate president pro tem, and apparently wanted to dispel any implication...

State electors meet Monday in their respective state capitols to cast their ballots for president of the United States amid talk of pressuring electors to be “faithless.” Here is how some numbers related to the College break down. There are 538 Electoral College members who represent each electoral vote that was cast for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. The number of state electors is based on the state’s number of U.S. House of Representatives plus two, their U.S. senators — for example, Texas has 36 House members plus two U.S. senators, which equals 38 electors. The Electoral College system...

Tens of thousands of pages detailing the case for impeachment against former President Bill Clinton have remained locked away from the public for almost 20 years. Although many believe that the report issued by then Independent Counsel Ken Starr revealed the final findings of his investigation of Clinton in the late 1990’s, around 60,000 pages of documents seen by only a few people describe the House Judiciary Committee’s case against the 42nd president. “It was a locked guarded room. The rules were only members of the committee–not their staff–nobody else–only members of the committee had access to that room. They...

Gunsmiths around the country say they were blindsided by President Obama’s latest executive order that would make their trade qualify as manufacturing and therefore eligible for all the mandated regulations and fees that go along with that classification. “When you have expanded the definition of manufacturing to include enhancements and the function of the weapon, you are basically opening the door to everything you do would make you a manufacturer,” Iowa gunsmith Mike Ware told The Daily Caller. The president’s executive order, which Obama signed on July 22 — around the beginning of the Democratic National Convention — conveys to...

WASHINGTON — A witness at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing Tuesday refused to say the Muslim community has a serious problem with radicalization. Farhana Khera, Executive Director and President of Muslim Advocates, an organization that requested the FBI purge training material they believed to be “offensive and inflammatory” to Muslims, dodged questions relating to whether radical Islam existed. When asked by several times by committee chairman Ted Cruz if she considered the term “jihad” used in the 9/11 Commission as offensive, she responded, “The use of the term in general by the 9/11 Commission report, I don’t think, is problematic...

WASHINGTON — Department of Homeland Security whistle-blower Philip Haney says he sought help from the House Homeland Security committee after he provided its members with pertinent information following the 2013 Boston bombing, but the committee refused to intervene when the Obama administration retaliated against Haney. Instead, the committee sent him to an Obama administration official who was himself under investigation for covering up alleged corruption, Haney says. He worked at DHS’s National Targeting Center from November 2011 to June 2012, identifying radicalized individuals associated with terrorist organizations entering the United States. “I identified individuals affiliated with large, but less well-known...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Donald Trump protesters swarmed and attacked Trump protesters during and after the New York businessman’s remarks at the San Jose Convention Center Thursday night. As Trump supporters streamed into and later out of the convention center they were berated with profanities by angry protesters. Some Trump supporters looked for ways to avoid the protest crowd while others walked directly into it with pro-Trump paraphernalia. One Trump supporter, a woman, was egged and punched, while another woman was hit and shoved by an anti-Trump mob. At least two men who attended Trump’s rally walked away with blood...

SOURCE DOCUMENT FEBRUARY 16--Presidential contender Donald Trump, who has vowed to stanch the flow of narcotics and criminals entering the U.S. from Mexico, once wrote to a judge urging leniency for a friend who was convicted of distributing kilos of cocaine that had been smuggled into the country from Colombia, court records show. In advance of Joseph Weichselbaum’s November 1987 sentencing by a U.S. District Court judge, Trump wrote that the drug trafficker was “conscientious, forthright, diligent and a credit to the community.” At the time Trump wrote his character reference letter, Weichselbaum, then in his mid-40s, was already a...

As billionaire developer Donald Trump became the toast of New York in the 1980s, he often attributed his rise to salesmanship and verve. “Deals are my art form,” he wrote. But there is `another aspect to his success that he doesn’t often discuss. Throughout his early career, Trump routinely gave large campaign contributions to politicians who held sway over his projects, and he worked with mob-controlled companies and unions to build them. Americans have rarely contemplated a candidate quite like Trump, 69, who has become the unlikely leader among Republican Party contenders for the White House. He is a brash,...

About 15 years ago, I said something nasty on CNN about Donald Trump’s hair. I can’t now remember the context, assuming there was one. In any case, Trump saw it and left a message the next day. “It’s true you have better hair than I do," Trump said matter-of-factly. “But I get more pussy than you do." Click. At the time, I’d never met Trump and I remember feeling amused but also surprised he’d say something like that. Now the pattern seems entirely familiar. The message had all the hallmarks of a Trump attack: shocking, vulgar and indisputably true. Not...

Donald Trump isn’t sucking up to Iowa, and it’s working. The billionaire has eschewed the traditional, door-to-door retail politics that have always been considered mandatory in the early states. Instead, Trump has preferred to hold massive rallies in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, where he brags about his poll numbers and rails against President Obama, Hillary Clinton, his GOP opponents, and, of course, the media. From there, Trump jets off to another early primary state event and kicks off the next show. And now, despite that unusual approach, political consultants are beginning to think he could win this...

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is currently the leading candidate to become the next speaker of the House — but some Republicans in his home state of California are concerned that the congressman could be more of a divider than a unifier. Those critics point to McCarthy’s curious 2010 intervention in the affairs of two youth Republican groups in the state, when the lawmaker dove in to block the merger of the California Young Republicans and the Young Republican Federation of California. That merger was supposed to be the conclusion of a longtime standoff between the two groups. Up until...