Free Republic

President Donald Trump’s attorneys made a solid case for preemptively pardoning Julian Assange in a motion to dismiss a WikiLeaks-related lawsuit against the Trump campaign. While preemptive pardons are rare — they are not unheard of. The motion, filed on December 29, was in response to a lawsuit by two Democratic Party donors who allege that the Trump campaign and former adviser Roger Stone conspired with Russians to publish the leaked Democratic National Committee emails. The outlandish lawsuit, based largely on conspiracy theories, was orchestrated by a group called Protect Democracy — which happens to be run by former attorneys...

A federal judge is demanding to see a copy of a government-wide foreign-aid-policy order President Barack Obama issued three years ago which administration lawyers have argued is protected by executive privilege. The Obama administration acknowledges that the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development the president signed in 2010 is unclassified, but officials have steadfastly refused to make any portion of it public, even after a watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the document earlier this year. (The White House has released a fact sheet about the order.) On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle ordered...