Free Republic

In an expose written by senior fellow Christopher Rufo at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research for the Institute's City Journal he wrote "experts and Health & Human Services officials estimated that fraud has consumed between $180 billion and $280 billion of public funds meant to provide heath care, unemployment benefits and general welfare payments." "While the state's indifferent and careless administration of these programs is the primary culprit, the lax enforcement of the federal government under Biden, and now Trump, bears a share of the blame," Rufo asserted. "Thousands of reports from whistleblowers led to fewer than 100 prosecutions."...

It used to be understood, before we started rewarding lawbreakers with goodies like birthplace citizenship, that punishing bad guys was the most effective way to stop bad actions. The best way to drop the murder rate, for example, is to swiftly and justly execute murderers. For the same reason, the best way to end the political weaponization of the bureaucracy is to punish the weaponizers. As long as the architects of the most infamous abuses — from the Russia collusion hoax to the Biden DOJ effort to throw its political opposition in prison — escape accountability, new partisans will be...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminal trial is set to resume on Sunday after weeks in which Israel’s court system operated under emergency restrictions because of the war with Iran. The pause was not unique to Netanyahu’s case. Following the outbreak of the war on February 28, the Justice Ministry placed the courts under a “special emergency” format that sharply curtailed regular proceedings and left only urgent matters moving. That framework was extended several times, with the latest official notice stating that the emergency regime remained in place through Thursday. In the last hearings before the break, prosecutors were pressing him...

Let us be precise about what is happening here. A war is being fought in the Middle East. Another war is being fought in the pages of newspapers, on the panels of cable networks, and in the faculty lounges of institutions that have confused sophistication with a reflex. The second war has a declared winner: Iran. It just has nothing to do with what is actually happening in the first one. The claim, repeated with the solemnity of established fact, is made by smart and credentialed people, who know and want you to know they know. However, they are wrong....

A key whistle-blower, and one of the first to draw attention to what he believed was widespread fraud in the Minnesota welfare system, says that state officials hampered probes into the allegations over concerns about pressure from the state’s Somali immigrant community. That community has been at the center of recent welfare fraud accusations, including the Feeding Our Future fraud case, in which prosecutors say more than 70 defendants — most of them part of Minneapolis’ Somali community — were charged in connection to a $250 million pandemic-era fraud on a state-funded meals program for children. [snip] But, concerns about...

A former San Francisco human rights boss accused of squandering city funds to pay for personal projects and her son’s tuition is still collecting a taxpayer-backed check as she faces a battery of criminal charges in court. Sheryl Davis — 57-year-old former head of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission who resigned in September 2024 after she was accused of conflicts of interest — is receiving a retirement benefit of $4,952.23 per month, according to the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement system. Davis was hired in 2018 to lead the troubled Human Rights Commission and earned close to $340,000 in total...

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s approval rating stands at 47 percent two months into the Democrat’s term, with 46 percent of voters disapproving and 7 percent expressing no opinion in a Washington Post-Schar School poll. Spanberger won in a 15-point landslide last year after touting her reputation for bipartisanship built on three terms representing a conservative-leaning district in Congress. But her current ratings reflect sharp polarization among Virginia voters in their views of the state’s first female governor.

California's delayed, over-budget high-speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco is running fast in only one direction: Rising costs to even get rolling, which are now estimated to be $126 billion. "Today, we estimate with the right optimization just over $125 billion," California High Speed Rail Authority board member Anthony Williams told CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday. "I think $126 billion is the current estimate for that." Snip "We’re now in 2026: There are no trains; there’s no track laid; it was a complete bait and switch," Rep. Vince Fong, R-Calif., told "60 Minutes," saying the project "needs to...

Los Angeles funded and enabled a massive population of drug addicts to set up tent camps and banned effective ways of killing vermin. Medieval diseases returned. What’s to blame? Global warming! The county health department’s report indicates that California also had the highest number of flea-borne typhus cases in the modern era at 277. Number 1 in the modern era. Or perhaps California is going medieval. Shannon Bennett, the chief of science and a microbiology curator at the California Academy of Sciences, said the disease has been around for centuries and is “as old as the plague.” “It’s always a...

Energy affordability is on the ballot this year. Unfortunately, extremists in Trenton are once again pushing a bill in the New Jersey State House that will hurt consumers wallets with no tangible benefit—except to line their own pockets. New Jerseyans must see through the smokescreen and realize this burdensome and disruptive legislative policy will chase companies out of the state and cost New Jersey families high-paying jobs, tax revenues and an affordable and reliable energy supply.

For all his lightweight intellect and vanity-oriented preoccupations, Rep. Eric Swalwell is a very angry man.He's put out this threat to FBI agents who investigated his romance with a communist Chinese honeypot trapper and those who would release those files to the public as he runs for governor of California, saying he's got friends in Congress who will come to get them if they don't "come forward" as if they were guilty culprits:Swalwell is now threatening to haul FBI agents who don’t “come forward right now” before congress if Democrats retake the House: “To the FBI agents who are being...

This article is based on internal legal memos, emails, resignation letters, Slack messages and interviews with current and former ActBlue employees. In early 2025, a law firm working for ActBlue, the Democratic fund-raising behemoth, delivered the organization a startling warning. The firm concluded that ActBlue’s chief executive had given a potentially misleading response to congressional Republican investigators in a 2023 letter explaining how the organization vetted donations to ensure that they were not illegally coming from foreign citizens. The letter from the chief executive, Regina Wallace-Jones, said ActBlue carried out “multilayered” screenings of contributions that helped “root out” those from...

Top White House aide Stephen Miller joined Vice President JD Vance to launch the White House anti-fraud task force Friday, pledging to "demolish" the kind of corruption that unfairly burdens taxpayers and gives a free ride to bad actors. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump launched the task force via executive order, saying the administration will "use all available resources and authorities to fight fraud, close loopholes, enforce eligibility rules, and protect benefits for eligible Americans, while ensuring States administering Federal benefits programs do the same." Vance serves as its chairman and kicked off the White House event Friday, while...

Immerse yourself in 19th-century writings, and you will discover that Democrat slaveholders and segregationists considered themselves the “Negro’s best friend.” That supposed friendship, of course, required that the “Negro” play a role as grateful recipient of the condescending Democrat’s beneficence. That attitude continues to this day. For instance, in a clip posted to the social media platform X, Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures of Alabama, a black man, asked a group of nearly 100 attendees at a town hall meeting, most of them black, to raise their hands if they did not have an ID, only to discover that not one...

Jane Sullivan Roberts, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts, generated $10.3 million in commissions as a legal recruiter over an eight-year period, according to internal records cited by Business Insider. Roberts, who worked at legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, generated the commissions from the years 2007 to 2014, according to the Business Insider story, which was noted by How Appealing. “Roberts’ apparent $10.3 million in compensation puts her toward the top of the pay scale for legal headhunters,” according to the article. Her “attributed revenue” to Major Lindsey was $13.3 million during that time. The commissions were...

The FBI arrested a married couple Thursday accused of fraudulently billing Medicare for $7.45 million while running a hospice with a survival rate reported to be more than 97% after five years. They were the first in a series of arrests planned Thursday, federal officials told CBS News. A high survival rate at a hospice provider is one of a series of red flags identified by state auditors for fraud because most people enter hospice care in the final stages of a terminal illness. In past cases of fraud, operators were found to be using false or stolen identities to...

Guest Post by Matt Van Swol I think I know why everything sucks… …and it’s because everything is fake We are getting fake college degrees that cost 4 years and six figures that teach you fake education and get you fake jobs. We are eating fake food, with fake ingredients, funded by fake research. We are scrolling through fake lives, with fake relationships, who take fake, curated vacations to promote brands that make fake products. We are voting for fake candidates, who run on fake promises, inside a fake system that was never designed to fix anything. We are raising...

MJTruthUltra @MJTruthUltra John Solomon Name Drops Samantha Power, (Obama, Hillary, and Biden Ally) as a Person of Interest who was running USAID when they discussed funneling hundreds of millions back into Democrat coffers. Don Jr. Who on the American side was coordinating this scheme? Solomon: We don’t know that yet.. the NSA intercepted only high level Ukrainian Officials discussing it with USAID people working in Kyiv. https://rumble.com/v77uk1s-john-solomon-name-drops-samantha-power.html 3/30/2026 ransomnote: Samantha Power was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017,[1] and the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2021 to 2025....

A Brooklyn Council member, her sister — an aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul — and the husband of a Democratic state Assembly member are being investigated by federal prosecutors looking into whether they took bribes to help a migrant shelter provider that has received $200 million in city contracts, according to a report. Democratic Councilwoman Farah Louis and her sister, Debbie Louis, who served as Hochul’s assistant secretary of New York City intergovernmental affairs, were named in a search warrant obtained by the Associated Press seeking evidence for possible criminal violations. Edu Hermelyn, the husband of state Assembly Member and...

The University of Southern California (USC) and Los Angeles television station KABC tried to have a gubernatorial debate on March 24. The qualifying criteria for being invited included polling numbers and fundraising thresholds. Six candidates made the cut: four Democrats: Katie Porter, Tom Steyer, Eric Swalwell and Matt Mahan, and two Republicans: Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton. Democrat Xavier Becerra, who didn't make the cut, called the qualifying criteria "biased. Every one of those who were invited is white. They should all withdraw from this racist so-called debate." His reasoning was so powerful that USC decided to cancel the debate...