Free Republic

In the wake of the massive raid at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, politicians and pundits are hectoring Americans to blindly trust the FBI. “The men and women of the FBI,” Attorney General Merrick Garland proclaimed, “are dedicated, patriotic public servants.” But the FBI would be more credible if it didn’t claim a right to secretly wield almost unlimited power. Most Americans (53%) view the FBI as “Joe Biden‘s personal Gestapo,” a recent Rasmussen poll found. FBI actions 30 years ago at Ruby Ridge help explain the G-men’s fall from grace. Randy Weaver and his family lived in an isolated cabin...

Outgoing Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that former President Donald Trump “could end up being indicted” for the documents that were removed from his Florida estate by the FBI during a raid earlier this month. Mitchell said, “Talk about your reaction to The New York Times reporting that the former President Donald Trump had more than 300 documents stored at Mar-a-Lago over the months and months of trying to get cooperation.”

Judge Bruce Reinhart said he is not inclined to accept the federal government’s argument to keep the affidavit that provided the Justice Department with probable cause to raid Mar-a-Lago sealed. Still, he also said he would probably not release much to the public. Reinhart is the judge who signed off on the search warrant and has some shady ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a good pal of the Democratic Party. And yes, without even having to say anything, the judge is viciously anti-Trump. Leah added that some of the judge’s reasoning for keeping most of the affidavit...

Judge Bruce Reinhart on Monday admitted the FBI's raid on former President Trump's Mar-a-Lago home was "unprecedented" and formally rejected the Justice Department's argument to keep the affidavit leading to the search under seal, citing the "intense public and historical interest." Reinhart, in a filing Monday morning, said he rejects "the Government’s argument that the present record justifies keeping the entire Affidavit under seal." "The Government argues that even requiring it to redact portions of the Affidavit that could not reveal agent identities or investigative sources and methods imposes an undue burden on its resources and sets a precedent that...

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he was “confident” Attorney General Merrick Garland took every precaution and acted appropriately in the investigation resulting in a raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Anchor Jake Tapper said, “You asked for a damage assessment and a classified briefing from the intelligence community last week regarding the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the search warrant on Mar-a-Lago. Have you heard back from the intelligence community? And do you have any concerns about the potential for this precedent, a search of a president’s house, to be abused?”

Democratic consultant and political commentator James Carville said in an interview with The Hill TV that former President Trump’s alleged mishandling of top secret documents could be the biggest story since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Carville said, “This Mar-a-Lago story which might be the biggest story since 9/11. That’s not going anywhere. It’s not going anywhere. So if you are a Democrat, you are going to get asked about inflation. If you are a Republican, you are going to get asked about Trump. We can say inflation is bad. They can’t say Trump is bad.”

Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Sunday defended the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, saying critics in the GOP need to “pull back on casting judgment.” “The FBI is simply carrying out their responsibilities under the law, a lawful search warrant that a magistrate signed off on. And they didn’t go in there with FBI raid jackets. They tried to constrain their behavior carrying out that warrant,” Hutchinson said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” calling on fellow Republicans to “stand with” law enforcement. “If the GOP is going to be the party...

UPDATE: (Aug. 12, 2022, 3:13 p.m. ET): NBC News on Friday obtained a copy of the warrant used in the FBI's search of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, as well as the related property receipt. The FBI recovered 11 sets of classified documents in the search, according to the documents. This week, in addition to having his private residence searched by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, former President Donald Trump was deposed in an investigation by the New York Attorney General’s office. There he apparently didn’t say much other than that he was asserting his Fifth Amendment...

A report published at the end of May by NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, notes that the official statistics bureau of Norway will soon track most grocery store purchases made in the Scandinavian country, a development that should serve as a warning to Americans about the growing trend in Western nations to expand surveillance and tracking of everyday citizens. In an article titled “Statistics Norway demands to know exactly what Norwegians buy in the grocery store,” reporter Martin Gundersen wrote that Statistics Norway has “ordered the grocery chains NorgesGruppen, Coop, Bunnpris and Rema 1000 to share all their receipt data...

NEW ORLEANS -- President Joe Biden’s requirement that all federal employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 was upheld Thursday by a federal appeals court. In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court and ordered dismissal of a lawsuit challenging the mandate. The ruling, a rare win for the administration at the New Orleans-based appellate court, said that the federal judge didn’t have jurisdiction in the case and those challenging the requirement could have pursued administrative remedies under Civil Service law. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was appointed to the District Court...

In the best of times, the Internal Revenue Service is tough to deal with, and tax season is never fun. But the past few years have seen the IRS lurch from one crisis to another. And things are about to get much worse for millions of taxpayers. In 2021 Congress expanded the reporting requirements of the obscure Form 1099-K. This information-reporting form tracks business transactions done with a credit or debit card or such peer-to-peer services as Venmo and Paypal. Prior to the change, taxpayers received a 1099-K only if they processed more than 200 business transactions, amounting to more...

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), without much fanfare, announced last month that samples obtained through PCR nasal swab tests have been sent to labs for genomic sequencing. With an unassuming Tweet, the CDC stated: “Remember that #COVID19 nose swab test you took? What happened to the swab? If it was processed with a PCR test, there’s a 10% chance that it ended up in a lab for genomic sequencing analysis.” What does that mean? Some individuals responded to that admission. “Well, this is a concerning development. Was the intent provided upfront in a disclosure? I would not have agreed...

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for new transparency about bulk surveillance conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency, following the release of documents that revealed a secret bulk collection program and problems with how the agency searches and handles Americans’ information.Wyden and Heinrich requested the declassification of a report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on a CIA bulk collection program, in a letter sent April 13, 2021. The letter, which was declassified and made public today reveals that “the CIA has secretly...

Former Trump Cabinet member Dr. Ben Carson registered concern and disappointment about 80 House Republicans voting with all House Democrats to expand federal vaccine surveillance by connecting and expanding state databases. “It will secondarily be used for other things as well. We have got to be smart enough to recognize these signs when we see them and stop them, to nip them in the bud before it becomes too late,” the former Republican presidential candidate said to Fox host Maria Bartiromo. “It doesn’t take long to change a nation.” Carson’s remarks came in response to Bartiromo’s question about H.R. 550,...

The revelation is a stark example of how Big Tech corporates and government can easily collude using user data to restrict the liberties of the general public.

The Federal Trade Commission said Monday that it is investigating the causes behind ongoing supply chain disruptions and how they are "causing serious and ongoing hardships for consumers and harming competition in the U.S. economy." The FTC said it is ordering Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, other large wholesalers and suppliers including Procter & Gamble Co., Tyson Foods and Kraft Heinz Co. “to turn over information to help study causes of empty shelves and sky-high prices.”

The Biden administration in just the past year alone stockpiled the records of more than 54 million U.S. gun owners and is poised to drastically alter gun regulations to ensure that information on Americans who own firearms ultimately ends up in the federal government's hands, according to internal Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The ATF in fiscal year 2021 processed 54.7 million out-of-business records, according to an internal ATF document obtained by the Gun Owners of America, a firearms advocacy group, and provided exclusively to the Free Beacon. When a licensed gun store...

The Supreme Court on Monday sided with law enforcement in a pair of cases that implicated “qualified immunity,” the controversial legal doctrine that gives police broad protection from lawsuits. In a pair of unsigned summary rulings issued without noted dissent, the justices reversed two federal appeals courts that had permitted excessive force lawsuits to proceed against officers in separate cases arising from California and Oklahoma. The justices ruled the officers should be granted qualified immunity, which shields government officials from liability unless it is proven they violated a “clearly established” right, a difficult legal hurdle. Both lawsuits dealt with police...

The U.S. government is reportedly secretly issuing warrants for Google to provide user data on anyone typing in certain search terms, raising fears that innocent online users could get caught up in serious crime investigations at a greater frequency than previously thought. In an attempt to track down criminals, federal investigators have started using new "keyword warrants" and used them to ask Google to provide them information on anyone who searched a victim's name or their address during a particular year, an accidentally unsealed court document that Forbes found shows. Google has to respond to thousands of warrant orders each...

‘Just the psychological pressure these kids are facing, they don’t have that ability to really fight for themselves, so that’s why we, as parents, I feel like we don’t have any other choice,’ says father Mike Bell.A group of parents in northeastern Indiana has reached their breaking point with government officials turning deaf ears to their children’s suffering under irrational and scientifically unfounded COVID rules with no clear end point.After spending months trying to work with local officials to get their kids’ lives “back to normal,” only to have their school board allegedly break its own rules to mandate masks...