Free Republic

A judge Monday barred former President Donald Trump from making public evidence and other material related to a pending criminal case against him in New York, where he is charged with falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Judge Juan Merchan also barred Trump from viewing evidence in the case other than in the presence of his lawyers. The ex-president is not allowed to copy the material. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office sought the protective order due to concerns Trump would “inappropriately” use the material or post the information on social media...

A super PAC supporting Ron DeSantis has a suggestion for Donald Trump.NEVER BACK DOWN is telling the former President that if he doesn’t love Florida, he ought to get as far away as possible.“Donald Trump has so deeply disparaged the state of Florida by calling it the ‘worst state,’ we at Never Back Down will help him leave by offering financial assistance to help him move to his beloved California, so he can be close to his good buddy Gavin Newsom, whom he loves so intensely and gets along with so well.”“The good news is that since so many people...

Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson says the Chinese-American financial institution Cathay Bank has given Senate Republicans records showing millions of dollars going from Chinese companies to President Biden's son Hunter Biden. Republicans and others started raising concerns during President Biden's successful 2020 White House campaign, if not earlier, that Hunter Biden used the family name and influence while his father was vice president to make millions in overseas business deals, which also could have compromised U.S. national security. Johnson told The Washington Times the records show the Biden family involved with the now-defunct CEFC China Energy, which had connections to...

Documents reveal that the federal government and insurers incentivized healthcare providers in Kentucky and California to vaccinate Medicaid patients against COVID-19 by offering bonuses based on the percentage of patients successfully vaccinated. ... The federal government and insurers incentivized healthcare providers in Kentucky and California to vaccinate Medicaid patients against COVID-19 by offering bonuses based on the percentage of patients successfully vaccinated. “[This is] truly sickening and I am embarrassed for my profession by this,” Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist and biological warfare epidemiologist, wrote on her Substack, where she posted several documents relating to the COVID-19 vaccine provider incentive...

If Republicans step back and look beyond the legal and social-media spectacle of Donald J. Trump, they'll see screaming political sirens everywhere they gaze. Why it matters: The GOP's political trouble has been unfolding slowly but unmistakably, starting even before Trump's loss to Joe Biden in 2020. First, the 2018 House elections were a disaster for Republicans: Democrats had a net gain of 40 seats to take over the House — their largest gain since the post-Watergate election of 1974. Then Trump lost the presidency. Next, Republicans blew two runoff elections in Georgia and lost control of the U.S. Senate....

Former President Donald Trump is facing multiple charges of falsifying business records, including at least one felony offense, in the indictment handed down by a Manhattan grand jury, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Friday. …

The White House refuses to comment or provide clarity on President Joe Biden’s remark to a Salvation Army official in El Paso this past weekend — that he spent time with the Secret Service in Poland and Ukraine. The White House did not respond to Breitbart News’s request for comment about what specifically Biden was referencing. A hot mic moment unearthed by the Republican National Committee’s research team revealed Biden told the Salvation Army official that he spent time with the Secret Service in Poland and Ukraine.

The Iraqi supreme court has issued an arrest warrant for former U.S. President Donald Trump for the assassination on Iraqi soil of Iran’s Quds Force commander, Qasem Soleimani, IraqiNews reports, citing a Baghdad news agency. The warrant was issued on Thursday in connection both with the killing of Soleimani and of another Iraqi militia leader, chief of staff of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq–both of whom were killed in a drone strike in January 2020 near the Baghdad airport. That assassination operation led to Iranian strikes on the Aia Al-Assad U.S. base in Iraq. The arrest warrant charges...

The Department of Justice has allegedly attempted to thwart the release of 400 pages of documents on Hunter and Jim Biden's dealings with China, Russia, and Ukraine, says a lawyer seeking their release under the Freedom of Information Act. Kevin Evans, a lawyer suing the DOJ, has contended that the agency did not comply with his FOIA request, but that it had admitted in court that the documents he sought existed and is now trying to deny that fact, according to the Daily Mail. Evans had sought documents addressing "any relationship, communication, gift(s), and/or remuneration in any form" between either...

Hollywood elites including Leonardo DiCaprio, Steven Spielberg, and Tom Hanks are helping to bankroll Stacey Abrams’ latest bid to unseat Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R). Her efforts have also received sizable donations from an organization affiliated with George Soros. Other Hollywood celebrities who have donated to Stacey Abrams’ One Georgia Inc., PAC include Barbra Streisand, Bryan Cranston, Ed Helms, and Lance Bass. The donations were disclosed in a recent public filing for One Georgia, which reported more than $12 million in fundraising for the two-month period ending June 30

So many times we were left shaking our heads during the Trump Administration, wondering who in his Cabinet could be trusted. We saw many of their deeds as unpatriotic or deeply questionable. We were shocked to learn earlier this week that Gen Mark Milley, JCOS chairman, has admitted in an upcoming book titled “Peril,” that he had back channels with his Chinese counterpart in case President Trump pulled some rogue maneuver following the stolen 2020 election. Today, Trump’s former Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, rode to Milley’s defense, tweeting that the “White Rage Woke” Milley is a “person of impeccable integrity...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) parried accusations of corruption in her stock market dealings by claiming "it's all part of a free market. Members of Congress are as free as anybody else to buy and sell stocks. The only extra requirement we have is periodically reporting these transactions." Scrutiny of Pelosi's transaction reports showed a remarkable record of timely purchases of stocks that rose in value after certain pieces of legislation were enacted. In spirit, at least, such transactions seem to violate insider-trading regulations—something that Martha Stewart ran afoul of and spent five months in jail for in 2004. Pelosi...

resident Biden plans to install a point-person in charge of infrastructure to ensure his administration properly implements its trillion-dollar legislation, two sources familiar with the plans tell Axios. Why it matters: Biden and his top aides know they need to flawlessly execute on their mammoth plan. It may be Biden's best - and, perhaps, only remaining - opportunity to show voters Democrats can deliver major changes to improve people's lives. The White House press office did not have an immediate comment. **SNIP** The goal is to streamline the grant-and-spending process and prevent fraud as the $1.2 trillion in funding is...

The lucrative $50,000-per-year journalist tax break that Democrats have tucked within President Biden’s multi-trillion dollar social welfare bill is estimated to cost taxpayers more than $1.6 billion over the next decade. A new analysis of the legislation by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a special congressional panel made up of 10 senior lawmakers from both chambers of Congress, found that taxpayers would be on the hook for more than $1.6 billion if the tax credit becomes law. The credit would allow “local news” outlets to receive a quarterly tax credit, “equal to 50%” of a journalist’s wages up to a...

A rough estimate of the price tag is $1 billion the first year. Days after it was dropped from the House version of the budget bill, a tax credit to help pay the salaries of local journalists is back in. The measure still needs to win inclusion in the Senate’s version and survive any further reduction of the $1.75 trillion target total. Still, the move represents a big improvement in prospects for the subsidy. Steven Waldman, president and co-founder of Report for America, and Dean Ridings, CEO of industry association America’s Newspapers, both credited the turnaround to publishers and owners...

Preet Bharara knew about FBI leaks two years before his office denied them. No one has been punished Preet Bharara is often mentioned as a possible U.S. attorney general in a Joe Biden administration after building a reputation as a hard-charging federal prosecutor and self-proclaimed ethicist teaching law school and dispensing morality on Twitter. But one of the last cases he handled as the chief federal prosecutor in New York City cuts against the grain of his carefully manicured image, exposing widespread leaking by the FBI — and knowledge of it by the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office — during the...

Newly filed lobbying records show Venezuela’s socialist government previously hired a longtime Democratic Party donor for $6 million at the same time it was lobbying to discourage the U.S. from imposing sanctions on the oil-rich nation. The documents, which were disclosed Thursday, show a U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil giant PDVSA agreed to hire Marcia Wiss’ Washington law firm in March 2017. That’s the same month it signed a consulting deal for $50 million with scandal-tainted former Congressman David Rivera. Wiss, an international trade lawyer with a history of donations to the Democratic Party, including a $1,500 contribution to...

You saw this right @FBI https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1325294917695000577 

Jill Biden was allowed to brush off The Post’s bombshell reporting on son Hunter Biden’s business dealings as “smears” and “distractions” in a softball interview on “The View” — even as evidence mounted that her husband, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, was heavily involved. In an interview on the ABC daytime talk show on Wednesday, the former second lady did not deny the allegations that her scandal-scarred stepson tried to leverage his family connections to land lucrative deals with overseas executives. But she also insisted the American people didn’t care about the Biden family’s murky deals with energy companies in Ukraine...

On Obama Adviser’s Disclosure Form: ‘Bermuda’ A lot of attention has been focused lately on Mitt Romney’s offshore finances in places like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. But the word Bermuda pops up on the financial disclosure forms of one of President Obama’s top advisers too. Valerie Jarrett’s financial disclosure form filed May 4 lists a line of credit from a Bermuda insurance company valued between $100,000 and $250,000. We’ve asked the White House what exactly this mark is, and we’re waiting to hear back. In the meantime we’ve spoken to tax experts who have said that the filing could...