Free Republic

My late Friday night involved hitting refresh on PACER every so often, incurring the $0.10 charge for each search result as I waited on Special Counsel John Durham’s latest filing in the Michael Sussmann case. (Exciting, I know.) The motion exceeded expectations, discussing CIA conclusions that Sussmann was providing implausible data to federal authorities, providing CIA notes regarding their meeting with Sussmann, and confirmation that they essentially spied on President-Elect Trump. The motion can be found here. It was filed as part of the government’s efforts to convince the court that the evidence it seeks to admit in Sussmann’s trial...

The "Tech Executive-1" in John Durham's indictment of a Democratic cybersecurity lawyer testified in a lawsuit that he had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights when asked to testify by the special counsel. Rodney Joffe, former senior vice president at Neustar, coordinated in 2016 with Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was indicted last year for allegedly concealing his clients, including Hillary Clinton's campaign and Joffe, from the FBI in September 2016 when he pushed debunked claims of a secret back channel between the Trump Organization and Russia's Alfa Bank. Alfa Bank filed a "John Doe" lawsuit and deposed Joffe in...

Set aside for now the troubling changes in the Obama administration’s position on whether former Bush officials should be prosecuted for suggesting tough interrogation tactics against terrorists. Set aside the manifest unfairness of prosecuting lawyers merely for doing their job of giving legal advice. Set aside the raft of other reasonable objections to the proposed prosecutions, including a justifiable aversion to witch-hunts. Instead, consider how flagrantly President Barack Obama violated his repeated promises that he would run a transparent and honorable administration. His administration’s selective and highly prejudicial release of only partial information about CIA interrogations clearly was designed to...

In recent days we've learned some new things about the CIA interrogation of terrorism suspects after September 11. We've learned that it was a lot more than just waterboarding. It was also threats. Like the time they put the drill upside the suspect's head and told him that if he didn't tell what he knew they were going to give him the Black and Decker treatment. Or when they told the man who blew up the sleeping sailors aboard the USS Cole that if he didn't cooperate they were going to make him watch while Israeli commandos raped his mother....

‘We’re going to follow the evidence wherever it takes us, follow the law wherever that takes us.” So decreed Attorney General Eric Holder in April when asked whether government officials would face prosecution over coercive interrogation tactics used against terrorist detainees. After all, he elaborated, “no one is above the law.” Tell that to the voters in Philadelphia who were threatened by nightstick-wielding Obama supporters from the New Black Panther Party. The Panthers got a pass even after they contemptuously ignored court process and even after the government already had prevailed in the case because of their default. For the...

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Eric Holder says he won't play "hide and seek" with secret memos about harsh interrogations of terror suspects and their effectiveness. Holder is testifying before the House Appropriations Committee and says he's willing to release as much information as possible about the interrogations. He was asked about the fierce debate that has erupted since the Justice Department released four memos last week detailing the harsh techniques used on some detainees during the Bush administration. Republicans have urged President Barack Obama to release other classified reports detailing what intelligence information was gained from such questioning. Holder said...