Free Republic

Save America, the political action committee financing former President Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, spent over $40 million on legal fees in the first half of 2023. These expenses reflect the ballooning costs of defending the embattled former president as he faces a growing list of legal challenges. (snip) Even where the charges against Trump are contrived (Alvin Bragg Slowly Realizes His Trump Indictment Is Going to Backfire, and He’s Getting Desperate), he has to spend a lot of money protecting his interests until the case is closed. Should he prevail in all the cases, the final legal bill will dwarf...

On Friday night, a judge dismissed former President Donald Trump's lawsuit against CNN in which the current 2024 front-runner for the Republican nomination claimed CNN’s coverage of his election lies equated him to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Judge Raag Singhal, a Trump-appointed judge, ruled that CNN referring to Trump’s claims about the election being stolen as “The Big Lie” did not meet the criteria for defamation despite Trump’s belief to the contrary. "There is no question that the statements made by CNN meet the publication requirement for defamation under Florida law," Singhal wrote. "The next question is whether the...

WASHINGTON — A Trump supporter who stormed the Capitol wearing a “Make Space Great Again” hat had two guns and 400 rounds of ammunition in his van when he was arrested Thursday near former President Barack Obama’s home, federal authorities said Friday. A federal prosecutor said in court Friday that Taylor Taranto, a 37-year-old man first identified by online sleuths in August 2021, also had a machete in the van he appeared to be living in. Taranto's van has been parked near the D.C. jail in recent weeks and he has appeared at protests in support of other Jan. 6...

Washington — A California man who prosecutors described as "one of the most violent defendants on January 6, 2021" was sentenced to 151 months — about 12 ½ years — in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to violent and obstructive conduct during the Capitol riot. Daniel "DJ" Rodriguez admitted as part of a plea agreement in February that he attacked former Washington, D.C. police officer Michael Fanone with a taser, causing him to lose consciousness, and that he worked to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Rodriguez will also have to pay $96,000 to cover...

John Eastman, the Trump-allied lawyer who created a memo arguing that then-Vice President Mike Pence could overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, is set to face disciplinary hearings starting Tuesday in Los Angeles. The counsel for the State Bar of California is asking a court to revoke Eastman’s license to practice law in the state. Eastman faces 11 disciplinary charges for allegations that he engaged in a plot to push a far-fetched legal strategy for Pence to overturn Biden’s electoral victory during the certification of Electoral College votes by a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. Prosecutors alleged...

Eight of the so-called "fake electors" in Georgia who were allegedly involved in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state have accepted immunity in the Fulton County probe into the matter, according to their lawyer. In a court filing in the case on Friday, an attorney who represents 10 of the fake electors said the Fulton County district attorney's office reached out in April to provide an immunity offer for eight of her clients. "After reviewing the actual, written offers of immunity, each of those eight electors accepted their immunity offer," the filing by the...

WASHINGTON — At least four members of the far-right Proud Boys organization were found guilty Thursday of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl each faced nine counts, and were found guilty on the rare charge of seditious conspiracy under a Civil War-era statute. They were also found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The jury has only reached a partial verdict, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly said Thursday, and the verdicts on other charges are still being read.

A New York judge tossed Donald Trump’s $100 million lawsuit against the New York Times and ordered him to pay all of the paper’s legal fees, according to a ruling Wednesday. The former president’s claims that the Gray Lady and three of its reporters hatched an “insidious plot” to get his private tax records “fail as a matter of constitutional law,” New York Supreme Court Justice Robert Reed wrote in the decision. In the 2021 suit, the embattled 45th president alleged that Times reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner schemed with Trump’s niece, Mary, to disclose his 20-year-old...

A federal judge in New York on Monday denied former President Donald Trump's bid for a mistrial in writer E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit alleging that Trump raped her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. In an 18-page filing hours ahead of his second day of cross-examining Carroll, Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina accused U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing the case, of making “pervasive unfair and prejudicial rulings” against his client. Barring a mistrial ruling, Tacopina requested that Kaplan “correct the record for each and every instance in which the Court has mischaracterized the facts of this...

A second firm hired by the Trump campaign to investigate fraud in the 2020 election said all of Trump’s fraud claims were false, the firm’s founder told The Washington Post The Trump campaign hired Simpatico Software Systems and its founder Ken Block to investigate fraud claims all over the country after the 2020 election. “No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at,” he told the Post. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was...

Former president Trump’s campaign quietly commissioned a second firm to study election fraud claims in the weeks after the 2020 election, and the founder of the firm was recently questioned by the Justice Department about his work disproving the claims.Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside...

Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday granted a request from the Justice Department to leave in place the Food and Drug Administration's approval of a widely used abortion pill, preserving access to the drug and reinstating a number of steps by the agency that made it easier to obtain while legal proceedings continue. The decision from the conservative court came in the most significant case involving abortion since it overturned Roe v. Wade less than one year ago, a ruling that threw the legal landscape into chaos and led to near-total bans on abortion in more than 12 states....

Washington — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito extended a temporary pause on a lower court order that imposed limitations on the widely used abortion pill mifepristone to Friday at 11:59 p.m. The brief order issued by Alito preserves broad access to mifepristone for two more days.

The Fulton County District Attorney’s office has offered immunity deals to some of the alternate GOP electors who met at the Georgia Capitol and cast phony Electoral College votes for Donald Trump following the 2020 election. In a court motion filed Tuesday, the DA’s office also disclosed that it has been interviewing several of those Republicans in recent weeks, and that some of them accused a fellow elector of committing “acts that are violations of Georgia law,” the motion stated, without revealing specifics. The DA’s office filed the motion in an attempt to disqualify from the case attorney Kimberly Burroughs...

A top lawyer for former President Donald Trump reportedly recused himself from the Mar-a-Lago classified files case after appearing before a grand jury. Despite his recusal, Evan Corcoran is still working for Trump on special counsel Jack Smith's inquiry into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the Washington Post reported. Corcoran was recently ordered to answer questions about a subpoena against Trump's team for sensitive documents that were issued last May, Typically, legal ethics rules stipulate that lawyers shouldn't work for clients in cases where they could become key witnesses. Corcoran’s recusal could be temporary as the rule is not yet...

NEW YORK -- The digital media conglomerate Starboard said Friday it purchased the conservative social media site Parler and will temporarily take down the app as it undergoes a “strategic assessment.” The deal came months after another acquisition agreement with rapper Kanye West, legally known as Ye, collapsed in November. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed by either company. Parler said the deal was concluded on April 7. Parler caters to right-wing, far right and libertarian voices and fashions itself as a platform with fewer rules in support of free speech. It was briefly booted off the internet...

An outside review of ballot printing mishaps in Maricopa County during the 2022 midterm elections that caused long lines and vote tabulation delays in critical Arizona races blamed the headaches on printer failures and paper ballot thickness. Maricopa County, which includes the Phoenix area, contains 60% of Arizona’s voters and has been a hotbed for election denialism in the last two cycles. Former President Donald Trump alleged widespread fraud in Maricopa County tipped the state to President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, while failed 2022 GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has cited Maricopa County election woes in her...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — He may have been expelled Thursday evening, but Justin Jones is back in the Tennessee House of Representatives. The ousted legislator was reappointed to his former seat in the 52nd District in Nashville by the Metro Council Monday afternoon, two business days after he was officially expelled from the House for breaking decorum rules on the House floor March 30. Jones faced expulsion along with fellow Democrats Gloria Johnson of Knoxville and Justin Pearson of Memphis. Johnson survived the expulsion vote by one, but Pearson was ousted as well Thursday. The move was met with national...

WASHINGTON, April 9 (Reuters) - Fox News said on Sunday it has reached a settlement with a Venezuelan businessman Majed Khalil, ending a defamation case in which Khalil said he was falsely accused on air of helping to rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election against Donald Trump. Khalil had filed a defamation suit against the news outlet and former host Lou Dobbs, arguing in filings that they had fabricated claims he and other Venezuelans were involved in "orchestrating a non-existent scheme to rig or fix the election" against the former Republican president. A short letter sent to U.S. District Judge...

WILMINGTON, Del, April 5 (Reuters) - Fox Corp executives Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch can be called to testify at this month’s defamation trial over a $1.6 billion lawsuit claiming the media company lied about voter fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a judge said on Wednesday. Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old chair of Fox Corp, and his son, Lachlan Murdoch, its CEO, were not on the list of witnesses that Fox intends to make available for the trial, in a case brought by Dominion Voting Systems. “If Dominion wants to bring them live, they need to do a trial subpoena...