Free Republic

The Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee told the Supreme Court it needs the grand jury materials redacted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to decide whether to impeach Trump over his alleged obstruction of the Russia investigation. Douglas Letter, the Democratic committee's top lawyer, filed a 33-page motion on Monday opposing a Justice Department effort that seeks to have the nation's highest court block the release of the documents. Democrats insist they need the information quickly because the House Judiciary Committee’s “impeachment investigation related to obstruction of justice pertaining to the Russia investigation is ongoing.” “The Mueller Report grand-jury material remains...

YouTube Video of press conference

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney on Saturday denounced President Donald Trump's firings of internal government oversight officials, calling it a "threat to accountable democracy." Romney's comments came in response to Trump's Friday firing of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick -- the latest in a series of dismissals of independent government watchdogs that have come in the wake of the President's acquittal on two articles of impeachment earlier this year. "The firings of multiple Inspectors General is unprecedented; doing so without good cause chills the independence essential to their purpose. It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in...

You can say goodbye to the #MeToo movement. It had a good three-year run, but inevitably, hypocrisy and political expediency caught up with it.

Hillary Clinton and the DNC both claimed they knew nothing about the Trump-Russia dossier when it was published by Buzzfeed in January 2017. The New York Times — famous for their fake news — reported that Hillary and the DNC were unaware that their law firm Perkins Coie was working on the dossier. Officials from the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. have said they were unaware that Perkins Coie facilitated the research on their behalf, even though the law firm was using their money to pay for it. Even Mrs. Clinton only found about Mr. Steele’s research after Buzzfeed published...

The graphic video of Ahmaud Arbery being shot on a residential Georgia street was fed to the media by a lawyer who was friends with the men who have been charged with the killing, according to a report. Arbery, a black man, was jogging when he was fatally shot Feb. 23, according to police. Gregory McMichael, 64, and Travis McMichael, 34, who are white, were charged Thursday with murder and aggravated assault. The release of the video this week sparked public outrage and led to the arrests by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which took over the case from local...

Simple arithmetic seems to be lost on the politicians, and that error is perpetuating a needless and counterproductive policy destroying our country. Politicians like Mitt Romney don’t seem to understand that the fact that there are so many infections actually makes the fatality rate of the virus remarkably low – a fact that should guide our policies going forward. The politicians keep referring to widespread outbreaks in prisons, meatpacking plants, and other semi- or fully confined areas with predominantly young populations. Then they refer to a relatively small number of fatalities anecdotally, as if this is the bubonic plague or...

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee demanded answers from Attorney General William Barr over the Justice Department’s decision to drop criminal charges against President Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said the “outrageous” move called for an “immediate explanation.” He added the House Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, would summon Barr to the Capitol as soon as possible, after a March hearing with the attorney general was postponed due to the pandemic. “Rest assured, we are going to reschedule that hearing, ASAP, and demand answers!” Nadler said on Twitter. The Department of Justice...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Thursday said it is dropping the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, abandoning a prosecution that became a rallying cry for Trump and his supporters in attacking the FBI’s Russia investigation.

After a month with much of the country locked down, sheltered in place, and healthy at home, some states have begun lifting restrictions put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Georgia has gotten the most attention, and for good reason. No governor has thrown open the doors to his state’s businesses as aggressively as Brian Kemp, whose decision to reopen the state first drew praise, and then criticism, from President Trump. But many other states have either started or announced plans to allow previously shuttered businesses to operate once again, despite the warnings of some public-health experts....

US deaths from the novel coronavirus topped 60,000 on Wednesday and the outbreak will soon be deadlier than any flu season since 1967. America's worst flu season in recent years was in 2017-2018, when more than 61,000 people died, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The only deadlier flu seasons were in 1967 when about 100,000 Americans died, 1957 when 116,000 died and the Spanish flu of 1918 when 675,000 died, according to the CDC. The United States has the world's highest coronavirus death toll and a daily average of 2,000 people died in April of...

Mark Zuckerberg is worried the economy could “reopen” too soon. The Facebook founder and CEO said returning life to normal in areas where the coronavirus is still too prevalent could “almost guarantee future outbreaks” and cause the economic downturn to last even longer.

Gov. Jay Inslee announced today that Colorado Governor Jared Polis and Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak are joining Washington, Oregon and California in the Western States Pact -- a working group of Western state governors with a shared vision for modifying stay at home orders and fighting COVID-19.

NY Governor Andrew Cuomo said his state had been "bailing out" other states for years and attacked Trump's relief measures as not enough. Earlier in the day, the President asked why the federal government should be bailing out democrat-run states asking for help while many others were not making similar pleas ...

Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt defended reopening his state Sunday saying the state has passed its peak of hospitalizations and built up its health care capacity to adequately deal with the case load.“You have to go back and think about why we closed down in the first place,” Stitt told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” I’ve issued 15 executive orders since March 15 when I first declared a state of emergency, but it was to build capacity in our hospitals to make sure we didn’t overrun our health care system. It was to build supply for [Personal Protective...

... "There was a lot of pressure in pretty much all of these American cities to reopen," said Navarro, whose research was done in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "When they removed those restrictions too soon, then many cities saw a resurgence in cases." The center's research found that cities that used "early, sustained and layered" practices such as social distancing, closing public events and stay-at-home orders "fared better than those that did not." ...

Just as highly important information on antibody testing has started to come in, Governor JB Pritzker announced Friday that he will de-prioritize that testing. He is withholding results collected so far in Illinois. His full comments are reproduced below. That’s indefensible and opposite of what other states are doing. It’s another case of Pritzker’s stage managing the facts and expecting the public to trust him blindly. Why would Pritzker want to cover up the data? Maybe he thinks it’s his place to take in upon himself to protect individuals from their own misuse of the testing. On the other hand,...

Dr. Deborah Birx said the media’s continuing focus on President Trump’s comments about people being injected with disinfectant as a coronavirus treatment “bothers” her and jeopardizes the administration’s ability to get information to people about the pandemic. “It bothers me that this is still in the news cycle,” Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday “I worry that we don’t get the information to the American people that they need when we continue to bring up something that was from Thursday night.” “Because I think we’re missing the bigger pieces of what...

A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now killed over 200,000 people worldwide. More than 2.89 million people across the globe have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new respiratory virus, according to data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The actual numbers are believed to be much higher due to testing shortages, many unreported cases and suspicions that some governments are hiding the scope of their nations' outbreaks.

New York (CNN Business) Dozens of grocery store workers have died from the coronavirus, despite masks, temperature checks and capacity restrictions to keep them safe. So far, supermarkets have resisted the most draconian policy: banning customers from coming inside. However, some worker experts, union leaders and small grocery owners believe it has become too dangerous to let customers browse aisles, coming into close range with workers. Grocery stores are still flooded with customers, and experts say it's time for large chains to go "dark" to the public and convert to curbside pickup and home delivery for food and other essential...