Free Republic

The Supreme Court just issued a unanimous ruling, and the case behind it has everything: Twitter, Saudi dissidents, federal prosecutors, and a fake invoice. The decision came down June 11, 2026, in Abouammo v. United States, No. 25-5146. Justice Elena Kagan wrote for a 9-0 Court, reversing the Ninth Circuit and sending the case back. Legal reporter Katie Buehler summed up the ruling this way: The defendant is Ahmad Abouammo, a former Twitter employee accused of giving confidential information about Saudi dissidents to a high-level Saudi official. According to the Court, the Saudi official wired Abouammo $300,000. Later, after Abouammo...

The Supreme Court will be releasing Opinions from the October 2025 this morning at 10:00.Scotusblog will be liveblogging the release and we will be following along.There are 23 decisions pending for this term and we expect all opinions will be released by June 30th. You can find a list of the cases at October 2025 cases. Note: The word "held" after the case name indicates the Opinion has already been released. The word "Issues" indicates the questions to be resolved by the Court.You can find the Opinions on this term's previously decided cases at October 2025 Opinions. Today's opinions will...

The US fired nearly 50 Tomahawk missiles at the country on Wednesday night. Iranian state media has reported that explosions were heard around Minab and Sirik in the southern part of the country, near the Strait of Hormuz. Air defense systems in Asaluyah were also activated - though no attacks have occurred thus far in the key energy hub that houses refineries and petrochemical complexes, CNN reports. As the strikes then continued, Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya military command headquarters warned that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed to all marine traffic - and all ships seen passing through the waterway...

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel released an opinion Tuesday concluding the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidelines prohibiting policies that unintentionally harm minority groups, known as disparate impact liability, are unconstitutional. The Office of Legal Counsel issued the opinion in response to the Supreme Court’s June 2 decision in Allen v. Milligan. There, the justices blocked a lower court order prohibiting the use of Alabama’s 2023 electoral maps after finding the court failed to consider if Republican lawmakers were acting with good faith when leaving Black voters in the minority in all but one congressional...

The US House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to pass the reconciliation bill to fund ICE and CBP, more than a week after President Trump’s June 1 deadline. The $70 billion bill will fund the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration functions for the remainder of Trump’s term. This comes after a contentious vote in the Senate amid tensions over Trump’s $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund and White House Ballroom funding. Some Republicans reportedly expressed concerns because the bill does not prevent Trump from restoring his anti-weaponization fund to compensate victims of Biden-era lawfare. Other attempts were made to block the construction...

The First Amendment forbids the government from forcing you to disclose the groups or organizations that you support. That is because the First Amendment guarantees our right to associate with others, and associational privacy is fundamental to that freedom. Nevertheless, in complete disregard for these associational rights, the Securities and Exchange Commission currently requires investors to disclose the businesses they support financially. No government agency has the authority to compel Americans to disclose the companies in which they invest. Yet for several years, the SEC has done exactly that through a surveillance program called the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT). The...

A federal judge on Monday vacated President Donald Trump’s policy imposing a $100,000 fee for employers’ H-1B visa applications. The visa payment policy violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution, Judge Leo Sorokin declared in the ruling in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. The H-1B policy was created in 1990 and is heavily used by U.S. tech giants to bring in high-skilled workers from overseas. The program allows U.S. employers to seek government permission to hire a nonimmigrant workers in specialty occupations for up to six years. Trump implemented the $100,000 fee in a presidential proclamation last September...

Utah's Online Age Verification Amendments, formally Senate Bill 73, take effect on May 6, making the state the first in the U.S. to explicitly target VPN use as part of age verification legislation. Signed by Governor Spencer Cox on March 19, the controversial law establishes that a user is considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically located there, regardless of whether they use a VPN or proxy to mask their IP address. It also prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks. NordVPN has called the law...

Karen Bass and Nithya Raman are now the projected winners in the primary for the Los Angeles mayoral race and will likely face each other in November’s runoff as reality television star Spencer Pratt falls to third place. Decision Desk HQ called the race for Nithya Raman to secure the number two spot behind incumbent Karen Bass on Sunday, with roughly 87 percent of the votes in. Bass earned 34.68 percent while Raman won 27.12 percent. Spencer Pratt earned 26.69 percent of the vote and had been in the lead ahead of Nithya Raman since election night; his lead over...

Five US states reject LGBT ‘pride’ month, reclaim June for marriage, family, GodThe governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, and Utah issued proclamations that follow in the footsteps of Tennessee, which passed a resolution in April recognizing June as ‘Nuclear Family Month.’ Five U.S. states have now chosen to disregard homosexual and transgender “pride month,” casting aside the rainbow flag and reclaiming June for marriage, family, and God. The governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, and Utah issued proclamations that follow in the footsteps of Tennessee, which passed a resolution in April recognizing the month of June as “Nuclear Family Month.”Tennessee’s resolution...

This week, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing detailing how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) helped facilitate and benefited from the historic Biden-Harris border crisis, as well as how far-left NGOs are still working to help inadmissible aliens undermine federal immigration law under the Trump administration. In the hearing, witnesses laid out in detail how NGOs received more than $6 billion from the Biden-Harris administration, including through grants from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and others. They also testified about how the Biden-Harris administration handed over unaccompanied alien children (UACs)...

The U.S. attorney for the Central District of California said Friday that his office has "multiple fraud investigations underway" in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The prosecutor, Bill Essayli, also said in the announcement that he's working with Harmeet Dhillon, U.S. assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, to conduct a comprehensive audit of the state's voter rolls. Essayli didn't comment on any specific investigation, but he said he'd "follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent." "The state has stonewalled every effort to verify...

A federal judge in Rhode Island has struck down a Trump administration executive order that suspended all asylum decisions and stopped visa issuance to people from Afghanistan, alongside an additional 38 other countries. The order came shortly after an Afghan national shot two National Guard members just blocks from the White House, killing one.

HELENA — Tuesday’s primary election was the climax of a bitter battle between factions of the Republican Party in the Montana Legislature, which led to millions of dollars in spending. After the dust settled, the more moderate and more conservative sides could each claim some victories. Eight lawmakers, all Republicans, lost their primary races. It’s the most incumbent legislators to lose renomination in a single Montana election in at least 20 years. The overall picture remains mixed. Six of the defeated incumbents were supported by the committee Conservatives4MT, aligned with the more centrist faction. The other two were part of...

When you are passing judgments on individuals regarding their character, it is not right to judge them based on their immutable characteristics as part of a group. We judge individuals based on who they are and what they do. On the other hand, when you are evaluating a group, it's just as wrong to disaggregate it into individual atoms and claim that there are no group characteristics that are relevant to making a judgment. That's why it is simultaneously true that individuals who are part of some group may be good, and the group as a whole is still harmful....

President Trump sounded the alarm on California on Thursday, telling reporters, “They’re rigging the election,” as counting continues across the state and key races for California governor and Los Angeles mayor remain undecided. As The Gateway Pundit reported, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt had surged on election night, taking an early lead over Democratic Councilwoman Nithya Raman and trailing incumbent Democrat Mayor Karen Bass by a slim margin. The two top vote-getters will advance to a runoff if no candidate receives over 50% of the vote. However, the late-arriving mail-in votes, which are expected to be roughly a third...

Lynchburgh, Virginia Circuit Court Judge F. Patrick Yeatts has sided with Gun Owners of America and Virginia Citizens Defense League and rejected the attempt by Gov. Abigail Spanberger and Attorney General Jay Jones to resume requiring background checks on the private transfers of firearms. In a ruling delivered from the bench after a hearing on Thursday, Yeatts declared that his previously-issued injunction on Virginia's universal background check scheme is still intact, despite Democrats' efforts to do an end-run around the injunction. [.....] Yeatts has been dealing with this issue for several years now, and has previously ruled that adults under...

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser-turned-adversary, is expected to plead guilty over mishandling classified documents, according to three sources familiar with the matter. He intends to plead guilty to one count of illegal retention of sensitive national security documents, according to one of the sources. He has also agreed to pay a more than $2 million fine, according to one of the sources. A conviction on one count of illegal retention comes with a sentence between 0 and 60 months in prison. The plea deal comes months after the top Trump foe was charged by prosecutors in...

The Supreme Court will be releasing Opinions from the October 2025 this morning at 10:00.Scotusblog will be liveblogging the release and we will be following along.There are 26 decisions pending for this term and we expect all opinions will be released by June 30th. You can find a list of the cases at October 2025 cases. Note: The word "held" after the case name indicates the Opinion has already been released. The word "Issues" indicates the questions to be resolved by the Court.You can find the Opinions on this term's previously decided cases at October 2025 Opinions. Today's opinions will...

Just when President Trump removed one thumb from the eye of Senate Republicans — scrapping his $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund" — he put another right back in with his choice of Bill Pulte as director of national intelligence. Why it matters: This time, the stakes are even higher: Democrats are threatening to let the government's spy powers lapse next week unless Trump yanks the appointment. State of play: Democratic outrage over Trump's latest moves usually doesn't amount to much. But Republicans need at least eight Democratic votes in the Senate to prevent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 from...