Free Republic

RAND PAUL KENTUCKY United States Senate WASHINGTON, DC 20510 January 21, 2025 The Honorable Donald J. Trump President of the United States The White House Dear Mr. President: I write to urge you to follow through on your stated intention to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht. Mr. Ulbricht is serving two life sentences plus forty years without parole for nonviolent offenses related to the website he launched in early 2011. Like so many others, I am shocked by the harsh sentence imposed on this first-time offender. Mr. Ulbricht's sentence is vastly disproportionate to his crimes. He was condemned to...

Gallego presses for stay of lower court ruling that would unseal his divorce records... Arizona Senate candidate Ruben Gallego on Tuesday sought the intervention of the state’s Supreme Court to prevent the unsealing of his divorce records. Lawyers for Gallego filed a motion to stay an appellate court decision that ordered the unsealing of the documents, arguing that "sensitive details about the Gallegos’ and their minor child’s life stand to be published if Free Beacon succeeds" and that the press and the public lose "nothing" by further delay, including a delay beyond the "upcoming general election." Tuesday’s filing marks a...

Arizona Democrat Representative and Senate candidate Ruben Gallego, whose father is a convicted Mexican drug trafficker, continues to come under fire over his ties to the cartels as newly discovered arrest records and details about his father come to surface. The Gateway Pundit reported that the Democrat Senate hopeful’s scandalous family ties were rehashed by a reporter during a press conference last week. While admitting that his father is a convicted drug trafficker, Gallego did not deny his “connection to drug cartels” when asked by a reporter. ... In 2008, Gallego changed his name from MarineLarena to Gallego to hide...

BELLINGHAM, Wash. — A Mexican drug trafficker faces the potential of decades in federal prison after the Drug Enforcement Agency arrested him for peddling fentanyl from a homeless encampment in Bellingham. Prosecutors say Rigoberto Vasquez-Martinez, 32, had a "fortified compound" inside the encampment, which included armed security around the structure where he stayed. The city of Bellingham is in the process of trying to clear the encampment behind the Walmart on Stuart Road after years of shootings, explosions, overdoses, and drug crimes. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle, Vasquez-Martinez was a significant supplier of drugs in Bellingham and...

The Fusion GPS news-for-hire scandal has not only led to the public identification of the source of the “Trump Dossier”—a for-profit company that provides opposition research to whoever could write big checks, which is staffed by four former Wall Street Journal reporters led by Glenn Simpson. The scandal has also lifted the lid off a sewer of corporate information warfare and opposition research that the flailing institutions of the mainstream press now regularly re-package as news, without ever saying where it came from—or who paid for it. While the idea that the products of paid opposition research are being main-lined...

Drug Enforcement Administration agents have raided an Oklahoma car dealership that the government suspects may be one of about 30 such businesses in the U.S. involved in funding the terrorist group Hezbollah. DEA agents say the car lot of Ace Auto Leasing in Tulsa is part of a huge network that is selling cars and drugs -- and then using the money to support terrorism against the U.S., myfoxphoenix.com reports. During Friday's raid, agents could be seen carryout out filing cabinets and other items. They also questioned employees and took inventory. "They're making big time money and it's going right...

COURTHOUSE — A Norristown man, who was found guilty of drug trafficking and recklessly endangering another person, has undergone cancer treatment while incarcerated at Montgomery County Correctional Facility during the past year. A former standout athlete at Norristown High School and Temple University, Lofton Thompson, 32, was arrested in December 2009, while a Montgomery County District Attorney’s Drug Task Force officer searched his house on Astor Street and found marijuana, drug packaging material and about $2,110 in cash, according to court papers. Thompson reportedly agreed to secure his “large pit bull” dog before the search, and the officer agreed to...

The chemicals were stored in vats in the basement of an Egyptian restaurant in downtown Brussels. The suicide bomber, a former soccer player who had fallen into drug use and petty crime, had been selected. The target, the American Embassy in Paris, had been scouted. All that remained was the signal from Osama bin Laden's operatives in Afghanistan to strike. The nod was to come from a Frenchman of Algerian origin who was on his way back from training in Afghanistan. But he was arrested in transit, and he talked, spilling to French interrogators details of what could have been ...

October 22, 2009 Note: The following text is a quote: http://milwaukee.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel09/mw102209.htm Forty-One Defendants Federally Indicted in Racine Gang Case United States Attorney Michelle L. Jacobs announced today that two indictments were unsealed in federal court charging 41 defendants with various drug-trafficking offenses. The defendants, many of whom are alleged to be members of the Vice Lords and North Side Gangster Disciples street gangs, are charged with, among other things, conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, in violation of Title 21, United States Code, Sections 841(a)(1), 841(b)(1)(A) and 846. The defendants are identified as: Starsius T. Barnes, a.k.a. “Star” (32), Brian T....