Free Republic

Emails also show effort to exclude conservative causes Former President Obama's Department of Justice sought to route settlement money to organizations of their "choosing" while seeking to exclude conservative groups, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. The practice in question began in August 2014 when the Justice Department entered into a $17-billion settlement with Bank of America for selling residential mortgage-backed securities leading up to the 2008 financial collapse. Similar arrangements were made with J.P Morgan Chase and Citigroup that brought the total amount to $36.65 billion. The DOJ settlement program has come under fire by a number...

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee claims he obtained a “smoking gun” email that proves the Obama Justice Department prevented settlement payouts from going to conservative-leaning organizations, even as liberal groups were awarded money and DOJ officials denied “picking and choosing” recipients. “It is not every day in congressional investigations that we find a smoking gun,” Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said Tuesday. “Here, we have it.” While Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general, the Justice Department allowed prosecutors to strike agreements compelling big companies to give money to outside groups not connected to their cases to meet settlement burdens....

Extortion: Just when we thought its post-crisis probe of banks couldn't get more corrupt, the Obama administration has cut radical Democrat groups in on the record $13 billion JPMorgan Chase subprime loan deal. On Page 5 of "Annex 2" of the recently released consent order, you'll find this little gem: The Justice Department mandates that JPMorgan fork over any unclaimed or unpaid consumer damages to a nonprofit group that finances Acorn clones and other shakedown groups. They stand to reap millions. The "consumer relief" portion of the deal by itself totals $4 billion. If the government "determines that a shortfall...

When the G8 summit met in Belfast earlier in the summer, one overriding ambition drove the grand panjandrums of international order: the imperative of squeezing more money out of people and corporations. Sure, these international Fagins—that’s the famed “receiver of stolen goods” in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist—didn't quite frame the issue that way. Instead, these officials, high-living if not entirely high-minded, spoke in more mundane terms of going after “tax havens” or the need to target “aggressive tax planning.” But the real theme of the meeting was best summed up by the lyrics of Joel Gray’s famous song in Cabaret:...