Free Republic

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit challenging a District of Columbia law allowing “noncitizen residents” to vote in local elections. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, found that a group of seven citizen plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the legislation. Their lawsuit against the D.C. Board of Elections, filed on March 14, aimed to block the 2022 law passed by the Council of the District of Columbia. They argued that “noncitizens” do not have a fundamental right to vote in the United States and that allowing them to cast ballots and hold office in...

A federal appeals court on Friday ruled that an enhancement charge used against Jan. 6 defendants to lengthen their sentences couldn’t apply to the Capitol protest. In a unanimous opinion from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee, said prosecutors’ use of a “substantial interference with the administration of justice” charge to enhance the prison sentence of Larry Brock was too broad. “We hold that the ‘administration of justice’ enhancement does not apply to interference with the legislative process of certifying electoral votes,” wrote Judge Millett.... The ruling could affect other Jan. 6 defendants who...

WASHINGTON — At least four members of the far-right Proud Boys organization were found guilty Thursday of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl each faced nine counts, and were found guilty on the rare charge of seditious conspiracy under a Civil War-era statute. They were also found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The jury has only reached a partial verdict, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly said Thursday, and the verdicts on other charges are still being read.

The Supreme Court on Monday announced it will hear a case that could significantly scale back federal agencies’ authority, with major implications for the future of environmental and other regulations. The justices next term will consider whether to overturn a decades-old precedent that grants agencies deference when Congress left ambiguity in a statute. Named for the court’s decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Chevron deference has become one of the most frequently cited precedents in administrative law since the decision was first handed down in 1984. It involves a two-step test: First, judges decide if Congress...

December 10, 2022 - WASHINGTON – A Florida man was found guilty in the District of Columbia yesterday of felony and misdemeanor charges for his actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. His actions and the actions of others disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the presidential election. Bradley Weeks, 44, of Macclenny, Florida was found guilty of five charges in total, including one felony. The verdict followed a bench trial before U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan. Weeks was found guilty of obstruction of an official...

WASHINGTON — A Jan. 6 rioter who dragged former D.C. Police Officer Michael Fanone into the crowd on the steps of the U.S. Capitol was sentenced to 7.5 years in federal prison on Thursday. Albuquerque Head, a 43-year-old from Tennessee, was sentenced to 90 months in federal prison, a bit shy of the 96 months that prosecutors had requested, but still one of the longest sentences to date in the Capitol riot cases. Head will get credit for the roughly 18 months he's spent locked up already. Fanone urged Judge Amy Berman Jackson to sentence Head to the maximum, saying...

Notable Trump-supporting attorney Sidney Powell lost a key court battle on Wednesday when a federal judge in Washington, D.C., dismissed her suit against Dominion Voting Systems. The ruling opens the door for Dominion to continue pursuing its $1.3 billion defamation suit against Powell. In his three-page ruling, Judge Carl Nichols granted Dominion’s request to dismiss the case, noting that Powell failed to show that Dominion’s actions “constituted an abuse of justice.” An excerpt from the ruling reads: “Powell’s complaint fails to link her abuse-of-process claim to any act that Dominion has taken other than filing and pursuing its lawsuit. She...

A court has rejected a lawsuit seeking to force the public disclosure of federal records about a 2018 episode in which a gun belonging to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was allegedly thrown in a trash can. In a ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras found that the public interest in the handling of any investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into the episode was “significant,” but that the importance of Hunter Biden’s privacy as a private citizen outweighed the value of releasing any such records to the public. “The privacy interest here is...

For carrying a “large wooden stick” on January 6 -- and for things the ex-officer said and believed.. Former police officer Thomas Robertson, who according to CBS News, “stormed the U.S. Capitol” on January 6, 2021, will spend more than seven years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Robertson, 49, was charged with interfering with police officers and “entering a restricted area with a dangerous weapon, a large wooden stick.” The seven-year sentence, handed down last Thursday, matches the longest prison term among the Jan. 6 cases to date. Its severity was not entirely the result of...

A man who attacked police officers with poles during the riot at the U.S. Capitol was sentenced on Tuesday to more than five years in prison, matching the longest term of imprisonment so far among hundreds of Capitol riot prosecutions. Mark Ponder, a 56-year-old resident of Washington, D.C., said he “got caught up” in the chaos that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021, and “didn’t mean for any of this to happen.” “I wasn’t thinking that day,” Ponder told U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, asking her for mercy before she sentenced him to five years and three months in prison. That...

Trump White House aide’s bid to delay case due to Jan. 6 panel hearings is denied. A federal judge on Monday eviscerated nearly all of Steve Bannon’s defenses against a charge that he criminally defied a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee, leaving the longtime Donald Trump ally with few options to fight the contempt of Congress case against him. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols also denied Bannon’s bid to postpone for three months the jury trial set to open next Monday, rejecting defense arguments that such a delay was warranted due to intense media coverage around the ongoing...

It has been fifty years since that momentous break-in at the Watergate office complex, and it seems a good time to revisit that episode, especially in light of the current abuses of power that seem so ubiquitous. Geoff Shepard's book, The Real Watergate Scandal and the just published book by Garrett Graff, Watergate, a New History, offer different perspectives. Shepard is more interested in the legal process and its abuse, while Graff's book relies more on the infamous White House tapes. It is the more comprehensive of the two. Here are some of observations based on these histories. *** Most...

The Astonishing Implications of Schedule F Two weeks before the 2020 general election, on October 21, 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order (E.O. 13957) on “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.” It sounds boring. Actually, it would have fundamentally changed, in the best possible way, the entire functioning of the administrative bureaucracy that rules this country in a way that bypasses both the legislative and judicial process, and has ruined the checks and balances inherent in the US Constitution. The administrative state for the better part of a century, and really dating back to the Pendleton Act of...

<p>A former West Virginia lawmaker who livestreamed himself on Facebook storming the U.S. Capitol and cheering on what he described as a "revolution" was sentenced Wednesday to three months in prison.</p><p>Derrick Evans, 37, who pleaded guilty to a felony civil disorder charge, told the judge that he regrets his actions every day and is a "good person who unfortunately was caught up in a moment."</p>

Dr. Simone Gold, a Beverly Hills woman known for spreading debunked claims about Covid-19 was sentenced on Thursday to 60 days in prison for illegally entering and remaining in the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. Gold, founder of the group America’s Frontline Doctors, was also ordered to pay a $9,500 fine – the largest fine imposed to date among the almost 200 rioters who have been sentenced. “Your organization is leaving people with the misimpression that this is a political prosecution or that it’s about free speech,” district Judge Christopher Cooper said as he imposed the sentence, slamming...

The Department of Justice has asked a federal judge to prevent former presidential adviser Peter Navarro from discussing publicly his recent arrest and litigating his legal case "through the media," it was reported. Navarro, a former aide to then-President Donald Trump, was arrested and indicted Friday on contempt charges after defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The DOJ filed a protective order request Wednesday with Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "DOJ is asking Judge Mehta to quickly enter a protective...

The FBI might not have found any Civil War-era gold at a remote woodland site in Pennsylvania - but it's definitely got records of the agency's 2018 dig, and will soon have to turn them over to a father-son pair of treasure hunters. A federal judge has ordered the FBI to speed up the release of records about the search for the legendary gold, ruling Monday in favor of Finders Keepers, the treasure hunting outfit that led FBI agents to the remote site. The group accuses the Justice Department of slow-walking their request for information. The FBI must turn over...

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...