Free Republic

A lawyer at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom who helped coordinate an open letter calling on the leaders of US law firms to speak out against the Trump administration's efforts “aimed at dismantling rule-of-law norms” has given her conditional notice to the firm. Rachel Cohen, a Chicago-based associate at Skadden since 2022, revealed the move on LinkedIn today (21 March). She said she had contacted "multiple trusted partners" in the firm's management after President Trump issued an executive order against Perkins Coie on 6 March, but her emails had gone unanswered or received delayed responses. The Perkins Coie order...

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s Senate passed a bill that would allow President Donald Trump and more than a dozen people to seek compensation for legal bills stemming from an attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state. The bill passed unanimously by state legislators Thursday would enable compensation from counties for attorneys’ fees and other legal costs in criminal cases in which a prosecutor has been disqualified. Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted in Fulton County in August 2023. The accusations included asking Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to find enough votes for Trump to win the battleground...

Bill O’Reilly made a stunning prediction Wednesday night on NewsNation’s Cuomo: Donald Trump is going to destroy NY Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. And Trump may just have an unlikely ally to make that goal a reality. O’Reilly claimed that New York Mayor Adams “knows where the bodies are buried” when it comes to James and Bragg, the two figures who aggressively pursued Trump in court. What he means by this is Adams may hold damaging information that could help Trump turn the tables on the prosecutors who have relentlessly targeted him. “I’m going to predict...

The Trump-led Department of Justice has dropped the Biden DOJ’s case against Eithan Haim, a Texas-based doctor who blew the whistle on gender-reassignment procedures that were being performed on minors despite state directives banning the practice. “The United States has finally agreed to drop the case against Dr. Haim, and the Court just granted dismissal,” Marcella Burke, attorney for Eithan Haim, told Fox News. “The case has been dismissed with prejudice so that the federal government can never again come after him for blowing the whistle on the secret pediatric transgender program at Texas Children’s Hospital.” “We took on the...

Republicans roasted Attorney General Merrick Garland on social media after a video of him doing a victory lap while leaving the Department of Justice became viral. In the clip, which was posted on Friday via X, a celebratory Garland walked and thanked cheering department staffers while the outgoing AG exited out of the building. But, in response, prominent critics of Garland blasted the attorney general and his record. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) ripped Garland in a fiery X post. “Merrick Garland has left @TheJusticeDept for the FINAL TIME,” Donalds said. “His DOJ attacked political opponents. His DOJ was unprecedentedly weaponized....

REDDING, Calif. - Four years after the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol, the Shasta County Election Task Force held a rally calling for those imprisoned to be released. Those in attendance took their rally to the Shasta County Courthouse steps. "We pray for Tina Peters and all the good patriot Americans who got incarcerated" one attendee said. Among those in attendance were District 5 Supervisor Chris Kelstrom and outgoing District 4 Supervisor Patrick Jones. "Fair election mean that we have voting on one day, paper ballots and no machines" Jones told supporters on Monday.

Meet Heather Shaner. She is a DC Public Defender who has represented 43 J6 defendants who couldn’t afford real representation. Shaner says it’s her job to “educate” J6ers, stating, “I mean, if you start out with a whole bunch of baloney and you don't know it's baloney, you're going to keep exercising your choices based on incorrect information”. She has referred to people who went inside the building and took pictures as “schmucks”. All of her J6 clients pled guilty. When asked if her clients “deserve her”, she replied “They’re damn lucky if they get me,” with a laugh. This...

The two-volume report centers on the classified documents case and Trump's alleged efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election. President-elect Donald Trump on Monday night made a last-ditch effort to block the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith's closing report on two criminal cases that have since been dismissed. Trump's legal team was allowed to review the two-volume report, which would present Smith's narrative of the evidence he gathered in the cases. It centers on the classified documents case and Trump's alleged efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election. The former president's team asked Attorney General...

President-elect Trump raged Saturday against the Manhattan judge who oversaw his criminal trial, calling the jurist “corrupt” in a Truth Social post. “I never falsified business records. It is a fake, made up charge by a corrupt judge who is just doing the work of the Biden/Harris Injustice Department, an attack on their political opponent,” Trump began in a post first targeting Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan. “A legal expense was called, on the books, a legal expense. There was nothing else it could have been called. This was the so-called falsifying of records. I was hiding nothing, everything...

Matthew Graves, the now-resigned U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, leaves behind a legacy of corruption, partisanship, and a weaponized Department of Justice (DOJ). His tenure, marked by the targeting of President Trump, his allies, and everyday conservatives, has drawn widespread condemnation. Graves’ resignation comes as the incoming Trump administration, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, prepares to hold rogue officials accountable for their abuses of power. Graves is not stepping aside with dignity—he’s running from the justice he knows awaits him

On Monday, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves announced his resignation. In a statement, Graves outlined that he will step down from his position at the Justice Department on January 16, just days before President-elect Trump takes office, and is expected to issue pardons for many January 6 defendants. For many conservatives, this decision couldn’t have come soon enough. Graves, a key figure in the DOJ's aggressive prosecutions of the January 6 defendants, leaves behind a controversial legacy that many conservatives argue epitomizes the weaponization of the DOJ against political dissent.

The election is over, Trump has been reelected, but the lawfare continues nonetheless. On Monday, a federal appeals court that must have been under the influence of some psychotropic drug upheld Trump’s liability for supposedly sexually abusing the partisan fantasist E. Jean Carroll in a Bloomingdale’s dressing room sometime in the 1990s. Carroll’s story has more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese that has been used for target practice, but despite lacking any evidence, she keeps winning in court — believe all women, doncha know, even the crazy mendacious ones. Trump’s team is going to keep on appealing, and...

For someone who has so strongly objected in recent weeks to the idea that he’s an authoritarian or a threat to democracy, Donald Trump has a funny way of showing it. At a rally Monday in Pennsylvania, the former president said for at least the fourth time that criticizing judges and justices either is or should be illegal. And for what may be the first time, he directly said people who do so should go to jail. This was not only a stunning comment about restricting free speech, but it suggests a standard that most likely would have landed Trump...

In an 82-page court filing made public Tuesday, Manhattan prosecutors say Donald Trump's "history of malicious conduct" is too serious for his hush-money case to be dismissed. The filing, signed by DA Alvin Bragg, also fights Trump's claim that he enjoys something called presidential-elect immunity — above and beyond the presidential immunity bestowed on him by the US Supreme Court in June. "There are no grounds for such relief now, prior to inauguration," Bragg wrote in opposing Trump's 11th-hour motion to dismiss, "because President-elect immunity does not exist." With just six weeks left before his January 20 inauguration — and...

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis finds herself at the center of a growing legal storm after a Georgia judge ruled in favor of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, in a lawsuit over access to her office’s communications with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6 Committee.The decision, issued by Judge Robert McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court, comes after Willis’s office failed to respond in a timely manner to Judicial Watch’s open records request. The court granted a default judgment against Willis, ordering her to comply with state open records laws and produce the requested...

Criminal law should be clear so that those covered by it can understand what is permitted and what is prohibited. It’s not the place for creative interpretations by the judiciary or partisan prosecutors. Jack Smith has now dropped his cases against president-elect Donald Trump on the grounds that a president cannot be criminally prosecuted, but there is much more that made these prosecutions untenable: They were never grounded in any fair reading of the law that Smith relied upon. The two cases involved Trump’s handling of classified material and his purported efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election....

As the Biden era comes to an end, one image will come to define the immigration lawlessness of this era.After an illegal alien linked to the Venezuelan transnational gang Tren de Aragua was arrested for allegedly performing a lewd act after breaking into the home of a New York City prosecutor, a photo went viral on the internet and social media of the alien giving a wry smirk during a court appearance.Image: Screen shot from Eyewitness News ABC7NY video, via YouTubeWhile the illegal alien, 25-year-old Brandon Simosa, is now being held without bail, he had previously had several run-ins with...

The case brought by the district attorney of Fulton County could stretch past Trump’s inauguration, auguring a constitutional clash. When President-elect Trump takes the oath of office on January 20, the Constitution ordains that he “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.” That has been taken to cover federal crimes, but not state ones — like the ones brought by the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis. She charged Trump and 18 others with racketeering and other crimes against the Peach State in connection to efforts to reverse the result of the...

As the national tide turns in President-elect Donald Trump’s favor, Fulton County DA Fani Willis is the last woman standing in his way — but she isn’t likely to last long. Willis is prosecuting the only court case left against Trump before he returns to office in January, over alleged election interference in Georgia. Federal cases into the returning president’s involvement in the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington DC and his alleged hoarding of classified documents were both dropped after he won the presidential election. A lot has changed from one year ago when Willis, 53 — the first...

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s mark on the Justice Department could come down to one case – Donald Trump’s election subversion prosecution that collapsed today under the weight of a long-standing DOJ policy against hauling a sitting president into criminal court. The development will likely hurt Garland’s legacy, according to two political analysts who concluded on Monday that the attorney general’s failure to timely appoint special counsel Jack Smith to investigate Trump’s criminal matter wound up sullying the prosecution. “I also think we need to take a look at how long it took Merrick Garland to appoint Jack Smith,” said CNN...