Free Republic

WASHINGTON (CN) — A federal judge imposed a prison sentence plus house arrest and probation on a Tennessee man who stormed the Capitol, saying the government wants to keep an eye on people like him as the 2024 presidential election approaches. U.S. District Chief Judge Beryl Howell spoke at the Thursday hearing about the “conundrum” many sentencing judges are facing as they decide how to sentence a nonviolent Capitol riot defendant like Blake Reed, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building. There’s a trade-off in punishment, she said, with jail time on...

US District Court Judge Reggie Walton said Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Walton made the comments Thursday following the conviction of a January 6 defendant. Walton was appointed by former President George W. Bush. A federal judge on Thursday called Donald Trump a threat to democracy, accusing the former president of instigating a mob of "weak-minded" followers to attack the US Capitol on January 6, Politico reported. "I think our democracy is in trouble," US District Judge Reggie Walton said, "because, unfortunately, we have charlatans like our former president who doesn't, in my view, really care about democracy...

WASHINGTON, April 12 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Tuesday declined to jail two men accused of impersonating federal agents and supplying Secret Service personnel with gifts, dealing a blow to prosecutors who had argued that the defendants pose a danger and should be detained. "There's been no showing that national security information has been compromised," U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Harvey said. Harvey ordered both men to remain in home confinement, subject to GPS monitoring, with their parents and that they surrender their passports and stay away from airports and embassies. Harvey agreed to stay his order until Wednesday morning...

Steve Bannon suffered a setback ahead of his criminal trial when a judge on Wednesday ordered that he could not tell jurors he relied on advice from lawyers when he defied a subpoena to answer questions about the January 6 violence before Congress. He was charged with two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to provide documents and testimony to lawmakers investigating the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. Bannon's lawyers argued in a February filing that he had acted in good faith, based on the advice of veteran defense attorney Robert Costello, that he could not give...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will be nominated for the Supreme Court, worked for seven years as a judge on the federal trial court in Washington, D.C., before Biden appointed her to the appeals court that meets in the same courthouse. Here are excerpts from some notable opinions: PRESIDENTIAL POWER In 2019, Jackson ruled on a dispute between Democrats who control the House of Representatives and the Trump administration over lawmakers’ efforts to subpoena former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify to Congress. The administration appealed, and the case bounced around the D.C. Circuit through the...

A federal judge on March 18 blocked a Washington, D.C., law that allowed children in the nation’s capital to receive a vaccine without parental consent.The parents who sued over the law appear likely to succeed in proving claims that the law violates federal statutes and will be irreparably harmed if a preliminary injunction weren’t entered, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden wrote in a 38-page opinion.The D.C. Council passed the District’s Minor Consent for Vaccinations Amendment Act in 2020. It lets children as young as 11 get a vaccine without permission from their parents.But the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of...

The Justice Department has been ordered to provide internal documents associated with its decision to prosecute former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. This is a victory for Bannon, who maintains that he had a valid legal basis for refusing to obey a subpoena from the House’s Jan. 6 special panel. U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols ordered the Justice Department to provide Bannon’s team with “statements or writings” that demonstrate how the decision to charge Bannon with contempt of Congress square with longstanding legal opinions of the Justice Department that hold that former presidential advisers are generally exempt from congressional subpoenas....

Pro-life Sen. Josh Hawley expressed alarm Wednesday about U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “soft” record on child sex offenders amid growing concerns about protecting children from abuse. Jackson, President Joe Biden’s nominee to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, also has a pro-abortion record that includes working with abortion activists on a case about suppressing pro-life advocates’ free speech. Her record on unborn babies’ rights has pro-life advocates opposing her nomination. Now, Hawley’s findings are raising additional concerns about other vulnerable children. “Judge Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes,...

A federal judge has dismissed a felony obstruction charge alleging a participant in Jan. 6 Capitol riot attempted to prevent the certification of the 2020 Electoral College results. The ruling Tuesday by U.S. District Judge for the D.C. Circuit Carl J. Nichols, a Trump administration appointee, marks the second time in eight days the judge has issued such a dismissal. Nichols ruled in the case against Joseph Fischer, who works for the North Cornwall Township Police Department in Pennsylvania, that the obstruction charge does not stand. "Nothing in Count Three (or the superseding indictment generally) alleges, let alone implies, that...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Wednesday ordered the Justice Department to provide former President Donald Trump's adviser Steve Bannon access to certain sensitive internal legal opinions or other related records that could potentially help bolster his defense against criminal contempt of Congress charges. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols told prosecutors they must produce "statements or writings reflecting official DOJ policy," including nonpublic opinions, that relate to "the department's policy on prosecuting or not prosecuting government or former government officials raising executive privilege claims or defenses of immunity."..... As part of his reasoning, Costello cited a number of prior...

A judge on Tuesday hit former White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman with a $61,585 penalty for ignoring her duty to file a financial disclosure report after she was fired from her post as a communications aide to President Donald Trump in December 2017. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon rejected Manigault Newman’s claims that her firing was so abrupt that she did not have a chance to collect her personal files, which contained financial details she said were necessary for the filing.

A federal judge has thrown out an obstruction charge against a defendant charged with breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a ruling that could reverberate across hundreds of cases stemming from the attack on Congress. In a 29-page opinion issued Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols ruled that ambiguities in the federal obstruction law required him to narrow the case against defendant Garret Miller, who is facing multiple felony charges connected to the attack. Under that narrow interpretation, Nichols ruled, defendants can be charged with obstruction only if they directly attempt to affect “a document, record, or other...

WASHINGTON — A Florida man who bragged he "broke the internet" when he was photographed carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's podium during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was sentenced to 75 days in prison on Friday. Adam Johnson, a stay-at-home father of five boys, traveled to D.C. in support of former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to President Joe Biden. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton sentenced Johnson to prison on Friday, saying Johnson made "a mockery" of the events by grabbing Pelosi's lectern and...

Mariposa Castro, also known as Imelda Acosta, was sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton. She also received a $5,000 fine from the judge, who said the January 6 attack had "totally undermined" the peaceful transfer of presidential power, NBC News reported. Throughout the day, Castro posted videos on her Facebook account showing the riot from inside the building and outside on restricted grounds. One video shows her climbing through a broken window, using the platform located at the lower west terrace of the Capitol, according to court records. As she was entering the Capitol, she could be heard...

On Friday, Federal District Judge Amita Mehta ruled that a civil suit alleging a conspiracy to foment the Jan. 6 insurrection could proceed. In an extremely thorough and detailed 112-page ruling, Mehta concluded that the plaintiffs had made a “plausible” case that former President Trump himself was at the center of a conspiracy to stop the peaceful transfer of power. While plausibility is not the same as proven, Mehta’s ruling is the first time such a finding has been made in an official proceeding.

Former President Donald Trump lost a bid Friday to toss lawsuits holding him responsible for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Federal Judge Amit Mehta rejected Trump’s attempt to dismiss the civil cases with a claim that he has absolute immunity because he was in office at the time. “To deny a President immunity from civil damages is no small step,” Mehta wrote in a 112-page ruling. “The court well understands the gravity of its decision. But the alleged facts of this case are without precedent, and the court believes that its decision is consistent with...

Mr. Sussmann will face a trial judge who appears to have background connections to the FBI‘s original Russia investigation. U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper, who is overseeing the case against Mr. Sussmann, is married to attorney Amy Jefress, who represented former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, Just The News first reported Monday. Ms. Page was a top lawyer on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in the FBI‘s Trump-Russia investigation, and became best known for anti-Trump tweets to her former paramour, now former FBI agent Peter Strzok. “It seems the two-tiered system of justice continues — how can a judge oversee...

A federal judge invalidated the results of an oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday saying the Biden administration failed to properly account for the auction's climate change impact. The decision has cast uncertainty over the future of the U.S. federal offshore drilling program, which has been a big source of public revenue for decades but also drawn the ire of activists concerned about its impact on the environment and contribution to global warming. The Gulf of Mexico accounts for 15% of existing U.S. oil production and 5% of dry natural gas output, according to...

WASHINGTON — A federal court has rejected a plan to lease millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore oil drilling, saying the Biden administration did not adequately take into account the lease sale's effect on planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, violating a bedrock environmental law.The decision Thursday by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington sends the proposed lease sale back to the Interior Department to decide next steps. The judge said it was up to Interior to decide whether to go forward with the sale after a revised review, scrap it or take other steps.Environmental groups hailed...

Washington – A South Carolina man who traveled to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021 and later assaulted officers outside the U.S. Capitol was sentenced to 44 months in jail on Wednesday. Nicholas Languerand, an avowed follower of the QAnon conspiracy, pleaded guilty in November to assaulting officers and faced a maximum of 20-years prison sentence. However, prosecutors asked the court to sentence Languerand to 51 months. While Languerand admitted he had participated in the assault on the Capitol, investigators say he showed little remorse and even indicated that he wanted to see more violence, alleging he had sent a...