Free Republic

Fred Burton, the incumbent mayor of Arcola, was arrested and booked into Fort Bend County Jail on five felony charges around 10:30 p.m Tuesday, according to court records. Burton is facing various charges, including two counts of illegal voting, one count of misuse of official information, one count of tampering with government records with intent to defraud or harm, and one count of fraudulently securing the execution of a document. The illegal voting charges come from two different elections — the Arcola Municipal Runoff Election on June 7, 2025, and the April 23, 2026, City of Arcola General, Joint, and...

ARCOLA, Texas — The mayor of a small Texas town is facing several felonies, according to Fort Bend County court records. Mayor Fred A. Burton, 68, is charged with two counts of illegal voting, one count of misuse of official information, one count of fraud and one count of tampering with government records, all of which are felonies. He was arrested Tuesday night, according to the Fort Bend County District Attorney's Office. In the illegal voting charges, Burton is accused of telling at least three people to vote in a runoff election while knowing they weren't eligible to do so....

The body of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was not buried at sea, according to leaked emails of intelligence firm Stratfor, as revealed by WikiLeaks. Stratfor’s vice-president for intelligence, Fred Burton, believes the body was “bound for Dover, [Delaware] on [a] CIA plane” and then “onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda [Maryland],” an email says. The official version is that the body of Al-Qaeda’s top man, who was killed by a US raid in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, was buried at an undisclosed location at sea in a proper Muslim ceremony. "If body dumped at...

A new book contains additional confirmation of what we already know about the Obama administration's response to Benghazi attacks. Namely, that pretty much everyone up and down the chain of command understood the raid to be a terrorist attack: Just minutes after 35 jihadists crashed through the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, nearly one year ago, the facility got word to the State Department, FBI and Pentagon that terrorists were attacking, according to a forthcoming book that provides the fullest review of the assault to date. In “Under Fire, the Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi,” it is...

Chapter One: The Buried Bodies 0500 February 10, 1986 Bethesda, Maryland On my morning run through February’s chilly darkness, my chocolate Lab, Tyler Beauregard, sets the pace. This is our routine together, though we always vary our route now. At agent training, which I just completed, they drilled into us the notion that in our new lives, routines will get us killed. When you join the Dark World, you must become unpredictable. Erratic. We must strip away all the conventions of our old lives and fade into the background. We’ve been trained. We’ve practiced. Today, I begin my life as...