Free Republic

The legal system has utterly failed to disqualify former President Trump from office. Whether he becomes the next president is now anybody’s guess. Much of the fault may be laid at the feet of special counsel Jack Smith, who has pursued Trump with the zeal of Inspector Javert, but has thus far come up empty handed. The open-and-shut case involving Trump’s mishandling of the classified Mar-a-Lago documents has been dismissed on unprecedented legal grounds involving Smith’s standing to prosecute him. The Washington case involving Trump’s conspiracy against democracy is back to the start, with Smith losing on immunity in the...

CBS broke the bombshell news that President Biden had stored a trove of government documents, including some two-dozen classified documents, in a private office in Washington that Biden used as part of his think tank relationship with the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an honorary professor from 2017 to 2019. “The documents were discovered when the President’s personal attorneys were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space,” Richard Sauber, special counsel to President Biden, said in a statement, adding, “The President periodically used this space from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020...

Merrick Garland is supposed to be a pretty good lawyer. Harvard Law School, federal prosecutor, federal judge, Supreme Court nominee, attorney general presiding over the Department of Justice (DOJ) — all the cake, most of the icing, without the cherry. But some of my former prosecutor friends tell me that he may have overlooked a key procedural point in his current joust with former President Trump over the Mar-a-Lago documents. On Sept. 8, Garland filed a notice of appeal to the 11th circuit Court of Appeals from the special master order of Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon. Simultaneously, he moved...

The average price of gasoline at the pump in the U.S. last week was $4.58 a gallon. It will doubtless spike up to $5.00 before too long as it is already above $6 in California. U.S. gas prices are cheap compared to Europe. If you fancy traveling to London for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, the price is $5.79; if you love Paris in the springtime, it’s $5.54; and if you want to see the pope, Rome is $5.96. Some countries you might like to visit are even higher.

The media have been quick to rubbish Attorney General Merrick Garland for his failure so far to indict former President Trump over the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. They have tarred him with epithets worthy of Trump himself, such as "Merrick the Mild" and "Merrick the Meek." And a host of former prosecutors and law professors have criticized his inaction, saying that Garland needs to indict Trump to vindicate the rule of law. We don't know for certain, but it appears that Garland's Justice Department has yet to convene a grand jury to investigate the affair. Were they...

The unimaginable has occurred. Kyle Rittenhouse, the admitted killer of two men and maimer of a third, has been acquitted on all counts. On Aug. 25, 2020, Rittenhouse armed himself with a borrowed AR-15-style assault rifle loaded with full metal jacket armor-penetrating ammunition and marched into downtown Kenosha, Wis., during a third night of protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man. Blake was left partly paralyzed after a white police officer shot him seven times in the back outside an apartment complex in Kenosha two days before.