Free Republic

Good news for millionaires and billionaires: They are currently eligible for unemployment benefits, whether they need it or not. That has been true since 1964 when the Department of Labor determined unemployment is for all eligible workers no matter their income level. In 2022, The Biden Administration paid unemployment compensation to 5,773 people earning $1 million or more, with nearly $58 million going to out-of-work millionaires. It is an average of nearly $10,000 per person. In 2021, a COVID quarantine year with extra dough baked into unemployment, 14,972 people earning $1 million or more received unemployment compensation. The Biden Administration...

The European Commission was wrong to refuse to release text messages sent by Ursula von der Leyen to the head of Pfizer during negotiations to secure Covid-19 vaccines, the EU's top court has ruled. The General Court said the commission had not given a plausible explanation as to why the exchanges between its president and Pfizer's Albert Bourla could not be made public when an investigative journalist requested them in 2021. That year, Pfizer signed billions of euros in vaccine contracts with the EU, including a deal for 1.8bn extra doses. The content of the messages between von der Leyen...

VIDEOWith the aid of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the animation magic of Al Barry we find out the reason why Bernie Sanders gets so outraged by allegations of Big Pharma corruption. So give the poor guy a break. He has beach houses to buy and Gulfstream jets to fly.LEAVE BERNIE ALONE!!!

Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom is under new federal scrutiny as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) opens an investigation into whether the state improperly funneled taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal aliens. The DHS probe, led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in Los Angeles, focuses on the state’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI) — a 100 percent state-funded program designed to provide monthly benefits to non-citizens ineligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) due to their immigration status. According to a Title 8 subpoena issued by HSI Los Angeles, federal officials are demanding records from the Los...

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “News Central,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) claimed President Donald Trump accepting a $400 million jet from Qatar’s royal family was “brazen corruption.” Host John Berman said, “Congressman, apparently the U.S. and Qatar are working out the final details of a gift, a big gift, a giant luxury 747 aircraft that President Trump is reportedly going to accept and the military is going to convert into being able to use as Air Force One. And then it may end up at the Trump presidential library after he leaves office. How do you feel about this gift?”...

A photograph with a prominent drug cartel figure may be behind the Trump administration's refusal to grant a top Mexican politician a visa to enter the United States. The picture showed Baja California governor Marina del Pilar Avila hugging Emmanuel 'El Botas' Serrano while she was campaigning for mayor of the border town of Mexicali in 2019. Serrano allegedly reports directly to Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada, who leads half of the infamously brutal Sinaloa Cartel. The photo first emerged in September 2022, with the governor's office disputing allegations that she had any ties to the so-called El Botas. 'It's a...

In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar -- a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News. The gift is expected to be announced next week, when Trump...

Rahn+Bodmer Enters into Deferred Prosecution Agreement for Criminal Misconduct; Agrees to Pay $22 MillionAudrey Strauss, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Stuart M. Goldberg, Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Tax Division, and James C. Lee, Chief of the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (“IRS-CI”), announced the filing of a criminal Information against RAHN+BODMER CO. (“R+B”), a financial institution located in Zurich, Switzerland. The Information charges R+B with one count of conspiring to help U.S. accountholders evade their U.S. tax obligations, file false federal tax returns, and otherwise defraud the Internal Revenue Service...

Russia's Foreign Ministry said Saturday that it was disappointed with a U.S. court decision to sentence a former Russian diplomat to the U.N. to prison for money laundering and fraud. The ministry said in a statement that it would consider demanding Vladimir Kuznetsov be returned to Russia. The former diplomat, who once chaired the United Nations' powerful budget oversight committee, was sentenced Friday to four years and three months in prison by a U.S. district court after being found guilty in March of laundering money from foreign companies seeking U.N. contracts. He was also ordered to pay a $73,000 (€51,500)...

Nature abhors a vacuum, the saying goes. Of late, the democrat party has been in a vacuum, trying desperately to find something to justify its existence. The best they have come up recently is the to rush to aid and defend illegal alien murderers, rapists and child traffickers. Of and by itself it wasn't attracting the kind of attention they've been desirous of, so they hatched a new plan to get it. There are two ICE detention facilities in New Jersey, one in Elizabeth and one in Newark. The mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, decided he was going to storm...

The blue state of Hawaii is suing oil companies over climate change, but for some strange reason they have exempted one refinery that has executives who give a lot of cash to Democrats. What an odd coincidence. The entire conversation about climate change should have ended the instant that leftists began targeting Teslas and Tesla dealerships over DOGE. It proved that the left doesn’t really care about this issue, they just want what they want. The lawyers for the oil companies will surely point this out, if they’re smart. Hawaii Sues Oil Industry for Causing Climate Change—But Spares State’s Largest...

As my late mother used to say, God has a great sense of humor. About a year ago, AG Leticia James was in the courtroom watching President Trump on trial. My guess is that she was enjoying the show and imagining what her TV ads for governor were going to be like. “Vote for me because no one, not even Trump, is above the law” or something like that. Well, it didn’t turn out that way. Maybe President Trump will go to her trial. Here is the latest in the life and times of AG Letitia James: The FBI in...

A New York budget item negotiated by Albany Democrats sets aside $10 million to cover “reasonable" private legal expenses that state employees incur in defense of actions brought by President Donald Trump's administration since Jan. 1. Although the fund is for any state employee, critics say it appears to have been set up for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is the subject of a criminal investigation opened by the FBI and U.S Attorney’s Office in Albany on Thursday.

A USAID employee in charge of managing contracts for the agency created a fake company to fraudulently secure coronavirus benefits for himself, federal prosecutors said Friday. “Yusuf Akoll worked as a Senior Procurement Contract Specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development,” according to a previously unreported court document. “From at least in or around March 2021, and continuing through at least in or around August 2021, Akoll [made] materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements…that resulted in Akoll receiving two [Paycheck Protection Program] loans totaling approximately $16,666 that he was not entitled to receive.” Prosecutors said that in November 2020,...

Colorado's economic report card is in, and my beloved home state — formerly a solid A and B student — just flunked every subject. Once upon a time, Colorado was a devilishly weird purple state — home to moderate-to-conservative Republicans like Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Tom Tancredo, idiosyncratic Democrats like Gary Hart and Richard Lamm, and (outside the Denver-Boulder Axis) a healthy libertarian streak. It was such a swirl that one of those famous Republicans, Campbell, was originally a Democrat. That all began to change around 2008 when my purple state went deep blue for Barack Obama. By 2018, the...

@RepThomasMassie 🚨This wasn’t widely covered in the news, so I will tell you: Congress was scheduled to vote on rescissions THIS WEEK to cut the waste that DOGE found, but the votes were quietly canceled. USAID and other programs like PBS and NPR were to be targeted.

Letitia James’s lawyer dismissed the allegations as the Trump administration’s “latest act of improper political retribution."NEW YORK — The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into real estate transactions involving New York Attorney General Letitia James, according to a person familiar with the case — the first known criminal probe of a law enforcement official who took action against President Donald Trump.A grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia has issued subpoenas over a mortgage application in which James attested that she intended to make a single-family home in Norfolk her primary residence, said the person, who spoke...

A big problem arrived in Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s email inbox on the afternoon of Nov. 16, 2021. It was a legal notice from an attorney representing Amanda Timpson, a former member of Willis’s executive staff who had been blowing the whistle on the district attorney’s office for allegedly trying to mishandle federal grant funds. Willis, the eight-page letter stated, had violated a slew of whistleblower protection laws when she reassigned Timpson to serve as a glorified file clerk following a brief meeting in July 2021 in which the district attorney refused to hear Timpson’s allegations. Timpson believed...

For years, would-be higher-education reformers have warned that America’s higher education crisis—soaring tuition, crippling student debt, and weak learning—was rooted in a dangerous myth: every high school graduate should go to college.In 2025, the proof is glaring. Public confidence in colleges has crashed to 36%, down from 57% in 2015. The college-for-all dream, though well-intentioned, has inflated costs, buried millions in debt, and watered down education. Built on sand, its reputation is collapsing before us.But you wouldn’t know any of this from many media accounts, according to which, as in this breathless headline, “Trump’s Demands of Harvard Escalate His War...

On Friday President Trump released a budget blueprint for the next fiscal year that would take a chainsaw to social, environmental and education programs. Some of the sharpest cuts are directed at housing programs that are meant to serve the poor, housing insecure and unhoused. In California, millions are served by these funds and state and local governments depend on them to operate affordable housing, rental assistance, homeless service, planning and legal programs. In a letter to the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, the president’s budget director, Russel Vought, laid out $163 billion in annual spending cuts coupled with “unprecedented increases”...