Free Republic

In yet another state – this time Arizona – Democrats in power have doubled down on the use of lawfare (the tyrannical abuse of the criminal justice system to harass political opponents), by indicting 18 prominent Republicans for alleged crimes in 2020. In this case, it was a classic example of Sol Wachtler’s famous 1985 statement: “If a district attorney wanted, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.” A grand jury is assembled of regular citizens, usually non-experts, non-lawyers, who don’t need to even try to determine guilt; their job is just to believe a prosecutor’s claim that there...

President Joe Biden joked at the Gridiron Dinner this past weekend about former President Donald Trump’s struggle to pay nearly half a billion dollars in fines resulting from a controversial civil fraud judgement against him in New York. New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) — who ran for office specifically promising to use the law to pursue Trump for unspecified sins — declared that “everyone must play by the same rules,” though the Trump case was unprecedented. Trump was sued for allegedly inflating his net worth under a New York law that does not require the state to show...

Maybe they never even questioned their own narrative,' Lee wrote on social media of former GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee is calling for an investigation into the now-defunct House January 6 committee, accusing former and current lawmakers who served on the committee of "deliberately" hiding some of the footage from the Capitol riots. Lee's comments came after House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., began releasing more than 40,000 hours of footage taken at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, when protesters angry about the 2020 election results entered the halls of Congress. Highlighting...

With liberals, it often seems that it's opposite day. When they say they want to prevent the spread of misinformation, what they really mean is they want to spread propaganda and suppress truth. When they say they simply want people to be tolerant of other cultures and beliefs, they work to implement the most intolerant institutions imaginable. When they say they want to fortify an election, it means they want to ensure a pre-determined outcome. Since January 6 they've been shouting that they need to protect democracy and taking action on multiple fronts to do the opposite, as Tucker Carlson...

UPDATE: Primed for immediate nullification. The indictment was briefly unsealed before the grand jury voted. This is clear and demonstrable evidence of a prejudicial and malicious prosecution. Divine providence.The Fulton County DA Fani Willis has been preparing a malicious prosecution against Donald Trump for over a year.The novel theories around the prosecutorial approach have been widely discussed and the grand jury foreperson previously gave rather odd public statements during gleeful interviews about the evidence the jury had received. It is and was ridiculous in the extreme; however, that’s how lawfare works.Today Reuters and other media noticed the court filings against...

A two page docket report was posted, then removed, from the Fulton County, Georgia court website today concerning the impending indictment of former President Donald Trump. The incident led to corporate media outlets and news wires originally reporting that an indictment has been handed down Monday. It had not. The briefly public docket report revealed that District Attorney Willis will be seeking a range of charges against Trump including racketeering, conspiracy, and making false statements – it is not currently known if additional charges will be included. The apparent errant posting of charges is just the latest in controversies that...

Dr. Simone Gold, who enjoyed a reputation as an esteemed and respected medical doctor before being targeted by the government and pharmaceutical interests, has reported to jail to serve a 60 day term of imprisonment. It is believed to be the first time that a medical doctor targeted by the federal government amid the Covid controversy has been sent to jail. Gold also has a law degree. Experts say it's extremely unusual, if not unprecedented, for a "first time offender" to be sentenced to jail for "misdemeanor trespassing." At the same time, critics note that across the US, violent and...

WASHINGTON (CN) — A federal judge imposed a prison sentence plus house arrest and probation on a Tennessee man who stormed the Capitol, saying the government wants to keep an eye on people like him as the 2024 presidential election approaches. U.S. District Chief Judge Beryl Howell spoke at the Thursday hearing about the “conundrum” many sentencing judges are facing as they decide how to sentence a nonviolent Capitol riot defendant like Blake Reed, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building. There’s a trade-off in punishment, she said, with jail time on...

A man who engaged in non-violent protest at the Capitol on January 6 was sentenced to eight months in prison for obstructing an official proceeding, while hundreds charged in violent riots last summer have seen their cases dropped. Paul Allard Hodgkins, 38, of Tampa, Florida, was sentenced Monday after he pleaded guilty to a single felony count of obstructing an official proceeding, after he was identified in videos and photos inside the Senate chamber carrying a Trump 2020 flag. While the count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and prosecutors asked for 18 months, Hodgkins — who...

Last month, former Dean of Students Lee Burdette Williams wrote a piece on her own Medium page about a weekend that changed her life back in 2016. Williams says she was invited to a weekend gathering by a group she had never heard of before called FACE. Essentially it was a group composed of parents whose sons had been accused of sexual assault on a college campus. But these parents believed their kids were being badly abused by a system that didn’t seem to have any place for the kind of rights of the accused found in our justice system....

The Department of Justice is exploring whether to file additional charges against former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin for a 2017 incident where he allegedly beat a Black teenager so badly he needed stitches, reports ABC News. Chauvin, who was seen on video pressing his knee to Floyd's neck for more than 9 minutes, on Tuesday was found guilty of all counts he was charged with, including second-degree murder. Bodycam video of the incident shows Chauvin striking the 14-year-old’s head with a flashlight after he wouldn’t comply with officers. Chauvin then allegedly held the boy’s throat and "applied a neck...

America’s top two Trump-hating newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have now both called on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold a vote of the full House of Representatives to make the “impeachment inquiry” truly official - and to set rules like those for the inquiries targeting Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, so that the minority party and the White House weren’t totally sidelined. So far, though, Pelosi and her impeachment pointman, Rep. Adam Schiff, are moving the opposite way. President Trump and other Republicans have been complaining about Schiff’s decision to hold most hearings behind closed...

A judicial process that doesn’t allow the accused to cross-examine his accuser or reliably see the evidence against him is a civil libertarian’s nightmare. It traduces every principle of fairness and is blatantly un-American. Yet Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to get savaged for replacing just such a process with something more in keeping with our longstanding legal norms. The Education Department is preparing new rules that would roll back the monstrously unfair Obama-era requirements for how colleges handle sexual-assault and harassment allegations. The Obama rules have been receiving a battering in the courts, where due process is still...

Dumping college kangaroo courts is an idea whose day has come There is finally some good news in the fight to return rape investigations and prosecutions to the only place they belong: the real justice system. Georgia House Bill 51, sponsored by Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs), passed out of the House Appropriations Committee 35 to 10. It now moves to the Georgia Senate.

A California judge has ordered the University of Southern California to stay its expulsion of football player Bryce Dixon, who was expelled late last year for alleged sexual assault. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert H. O'Brien granted Dixon's request for a stay of the results of a disciplinary process that was "lacking in due process, with no hearing, no right to counsel, no rules of evidence, no presumption of innocence, no right to possess copies of witness statements and evidence and no right to confront witnesses against him," according to Dixon's writ of administrative mandate. Dixon's expulsion comes from...

There seems to be a full-court press on to get colleges to "do something" about rape on campus. But there seems to be remarkably little attention paid to two crucial facts: (1) rape is a crime and (2) colleges are not qualified to be law-enforcement institutions. Why are rapists not reported to the police and prosecuted in a court of law? Apparently this is because of some college women who say that they were raped and are dissatisfied with a legal system that does not automatically take their word for it against the word of someone who has been accused...

Back in November, we editorialized that to get a better idea of how credible is the conviction of Tom DeLay, "look to the sentencing phase." Well, the sentence has been rendered and it's easy to see that the conviction has virtually no credibility.

A federal agency inspector general fired last year by President Barack Obama amid claims of bizarre and incompetent behavior, Gerald Walpin, has lost the first round in his legal bid to win back his job.On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Roberts threw out a lawsuit Walpin brought in an attempt to be restored to his position at the Corporation for National and Community Service, which runs Americorps and other programs. Walpin has claimed that his firing was political retaliation for his opposition to wasteful spending by the agency and for his aggressive investigation of a friend of Obama, Sacramento Mayor and former...

The legal fight between Al Franken and Norm Coleman is headed to the desk of Gov. Tim Pawlenty — a no-win predicament for a Minnesota Republican with his eye on a White House run in 2012. Franken won big Tuesday when a three-judge panel allowed the review of no more than 400 absentee ballots in a race he currently leads by 225 votes. Coleman’s camp says an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court is coming; once that’s done, the dispute lands in Pawlenty’s lap. If Franken’s ahead at that point, Pawlenty will have a choice: sign the election certificate that...

A Christian publication already cleared by the Canadian Human Rights Commission on claims its reporting on issues involving homosexuality stem from "bigotry, discrimination and hate" will have to defend itself – again – from the same charges. Officials with Catholic Insight have confirmed homosexual activist Rob Wells, whose earlier allegations against the publication were rejected, has appealed to the Federal Court in Canada. "On Aug. 12, Toronto-based Catholic Insight and its editor Father Alphonse de Valk received notification that Wells had filed an appeal … with the Federal Court of Canada. Wells is requesting that the appeal be heard in...