Free Republic

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 Thursday that the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, remains valid, rejecting a claim by a group of conservative states that a recent change to the law made it unconstitutional. Republicans have long opposed the law, former President Barack Obama's signature legislation. But more than 20 million Americans now depend on it for their health insurance, and there is broad public support for its requirement that insurance companies must cover pre-existing health conditions.

A U.S. Army soldier has been charged with giving classified information to a white supremacist group based in Europe, according to law enforcement and military officials. The soldier is accused of providing information about troops stationed overseas to the Order of Nine Angles, a satanic neo-Nazi group, the officials told NBC News. The charges are expected to be announced Monday afternoon. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the Order of Nine Angles as "an enigmatic Satanic occult group." Its most extreme adherents "promote human sacrifice, Nazism and Fascism and Aryan myths, and have been reported to praise Adolf Hitler and...

"I'm going to put it very simply: the president of the United States has the authority to do what the president has the authority to do, which is very powerful. The president of the United States calls the shots," Trump said Monday evening, pressed on his claim during a news briefing at the White House. He continued: "When somebody’s the president of the U.S., the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s gotta be." But experts — and the Constitution — say Trump is wrong. The authority to require businesses to close in a public health crisis is what...

WASHINGTON -- To his critics, Attorney General William Barr is doing all he can to undercut the conclusions of the Mueller investigation to please the White House. To his supporters, he is scrutinizing the probe of a presidential candidate that even the Justice Department's inspector general said was flawed. Those fault lines were in sharp relief after Barr directed federal prosecutors to abandon their prosecution of Michael Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser in the early days of the Trump administration. Barr's decision to abandon the Flynn case renewed criticism that he was doing the president's bidding. He...

NBC News justice correspondent Pete Williams said Monday that the motivations behind the June shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice are still unknown, and will never be known, despite widespread agreement that the targeting of the attack was political. Williams was discussing Sunday's shooting in Las Vegas, and how the gunman's motivation for the attack may never be completely known. Williams then tried to tie the Las Vegas shooting investigation to the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.). "It would not be unheard of if at the end of all this it remains a puzzle," Williams said. "For...

Russian hackers are believed to have breached the computers of the Clinton Foundation — and appear to be the same cyber spies who swiped confidential files from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton campaigns, officials familiar with the investigation told NBC News. Three private security firms have concluded the hackers are Russian, and some security experts say Russian intelligence could be behind the attacks and want to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. So what could be the hackers' end game? The Democratic National Committee said the operation was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. But some U.S. officials believe...

In a segment this morning discussing the breaking news that a panel of judges on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously ruled that some of President Obama's recess appointments had been made in an unconstitutional manner, MSNBC's Thomas Roberts turned to network contributor and former Democratic Senate staffer Jimmy Williams for his reaction. Williams conceded the the court had ruled correctly, but rather than chiding the president for violating his oath of office with unconstitutional appointments, he blamed Senate Republicans for driving Mr. Obama to do so. For his part, Roberts agreed, mumbling "mm hmm" in...

Has the Obama administration compromised national security by leaking the fact that it's obtaining actionable intelligence from Umar Mutallab? On this afternoon's Hardball, Justice Department correspondent Pete Williams reported the breaking news that Obama admin officials have told him that the Christmas Day bomber, Umar Mutallab, is providing actionable, fresh intelligence. View video here.

Paging Dr. Freud . . . On this morning's "Today," NBC's Pete Williams engaged in slip that would have made Sigmund proud, so let's bring in the father of modern psychotherapy to analyze it. After all, he's only been dead for 68 years, plenty fresh enough for purposes of punditry. Williams had scored quite a journalistic coup, an exclusive sit-down with embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Later, Williams chatted live from DC with Matt Lauer back in the New York studio. Discussing the decision by a senior aide to Gonzales to invoke the Fifth Amendment should she be called to...

by Mark Finkelstein March 15, 2006 I thought the MSM is ardently opposed to the death penalty? Aren't these the same folks who wrung their collective hands at the prospect of poor Tookie Williams getting the needle. Sure, he might have murdered four people in cold blood and joked about it, but hey! - he wrote a children's book. So you might have thought that the Today show would be celebrating the federal lawyer whose goof might very well lead to Zacarias Moussaoui dodging death and instead becoming a lifelong resident of a federal facility. But, no! The Today show...

Two college students arrested Wednesday in a string of nine rural Alabama church arsons told authorities that the first fires were set as “a joke” and later blazes were intended as a diversion, federal agents said. A third college student was arrested later Wednesday in the serial arsons, according to WVTM-TV of Birmingham. Benjamin Nathan Moseley and Russell Lee Debusk Jr., both students at Birmingham-Southern College, appeared in federal court Wednesday and were ordered held on church arson charges pending a hearing Friday. Matthew Lee Cloyd, reportedly a student at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was arrested midday, the...

by Mark Finkelstein January 9, 2006 - 08:07 What do you think the odds are that in the very first minute of its segment on Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the morning her confirmation hearings were set to begin, the Today show twice described Ginsburg - former chief counsel of the ACLU - as a "liberal" and spoke of her confirmation "moving the court to the left"? Yet Andrea Mitchell managed the precise mirror image in the first 60 seconds of her story on Samuel Alito this morning, twice referring to him as a "conservative" and adding that his confirmation would...

MSNBC's Hardball show actually delivered some interesting news for once tonight, despite Chris Matthews' anti-Bush spin and uninformed sputtering over the NSA counterterrorism program. NBC's DOJ correspondent Pete Williams corrects Matthews' assertion (borrowed from the NYTimes' report yesterday) that top Justice Department officials opposed the NSA program. In response to Matthews' fulmination that "it wasn't like the President was even getting support from his own people," Williams reported: There does appear to be something here where both deputy AG Comey and AG Ashcroft were concerned about technical aspects of it and concerned about how it was being carried out--the sort...

ABC on Tuesday night considered a lawyer's allegation that Ahmed Omar Abu Ali had been tortured just as important as the government's charge that the al-Qaeda member plotted to assassinate President Bush. Peter Jennings teased: "On World News Tonight, an Arab-American is charged with conspiring to assassinate the President. His lawyers say the U.S. let the authorities in Saudi Arabia torture him." Brian Ross began his story not with the charges but with how the suspect's "friends and family were at the courthouse in Virginia this morning, hoping for his release after 20 months in custody in Saudi Arabia" where...

Sandy Who? Two weeks ago, Republicans were filled with glee, as Democrats fell all over themselves, trying to diminish the fact that Bill Clinton’s former national security adviser, Samuel Berger, better known as Sandy, was caught stuffing classified documents and national secrets down his drawers, in his jacket, in his socks, and in a leather portfolio, in order to steal them from the National Archives, and to later destroy some of them. (Berger returned some documents, but only after he was caught, and had “accidentally” destroyed the most important ones.) Note that Berger reportedly burgled the Archives on as many...