Free Republic

One of the reasons the 1st Amendment gives protection to the free press is because they are supposed to be one of the most important checks against a tyrannical government. Independence and protection for journalists can be argued as one of the biggest reasons the United States has flourished for a quarter millenium. Project Veritas has been targeted by our government on multiple occasions they do not abide by the standing orders given to journalists that they must be supportive of progressive ideologies. While most major news outlets pander to the left willingly, offering cover for corrupt Democrats while seeking...

James O’Keefe on Tuesday revealed the Biden DOJ spied on Project Veritas journalists with sealed search warrants then concealed the communications from a federal judge. Project Veritas obtained legal documents from Microsoft Corporation revealing the DOJ obtained an extension on two sealed search warrants after a federal judge denied the Department’s efforts to “unsupervised and unfettered access to privileged emails and contacts of eight PV journalists.” According to O’Keefe, Judge Torres ruled that federal prosecutors must be supervised by a Special Master to protect the journalists’ First Amendment rights. The documents obtained by Project Veritas prove the DOJ went behind...

NEW YORK, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Former U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin asked a U.S. court on Monday for a new trial after losing her defamation case against the New York Times (NYT.N) earlier this month, and requested that the judge overseeing the case be disqualified. Palin's attorneys said last week they would take those steps because several jurors received push notifications on their cellphones before deliberations were over about U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff's decision to dismiss the case regardless of their verdict.

NEW YORK, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate, plans to seek a new trial and have the judge disqualified after losing her defamation case against the New York Times. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan discussed Palin's plan at a hearing on Wednesday, and said he will issue a written opinion by March 1 explaining why he dismissed her case while jurors were deliberating. He said he would speed up the opinion because of the "fracas" surrounding the dismissal. The unusual hearing came eight days after jurors rejected...

Legal experts have slammed the Clinton-appointed New York judge who tossed Sarah Palin's libel lawsuit against The New York Times while jurors are still deliberating the case and say he's effectively hobbled the jury. 'I would have expected the judge to wait for the jury to return its verdict before ruling on the motion for judgment as a matter of law, because there was no urgency to issuing that ruling,' attorney Mitchell Epner, of Rottenberg Lipman Rich PC, told Law & Crime on Monday. 'Nothing would have changed if he had waited for the verdict to have been announced, or...

A federal judge said on Monday that he will dismiss Sarah Palin’s libel case against The New York Times, concluding that Palin’s lawyers had failed to show the publication acted with actual malice.

After several days of bad news on the redistricting front, including a bad decision in North Carolina for the GOP-drawn map there, a big win has been delivered to Republicans. The US Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 to halt a lower court order in Alabama that it must redraw its previously passed Congressional map.That means a 6-1 Republican to Democrat map will now go into effect in 2022, and given the makeup of the Supreme Court, there’s no reason to believe it gets struck down at any point past that.BREAKING: By a 5–4 vote, with Roberts joining the liberals in...

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring, NBC News reported Wednesday, giving President Joe Biden a crucial opportunity to replace the liberal justice.

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin tested positive for COVID-19, which may delay her civil suit against the New York Times that was scheduled to go to trial Monday, one of her attorneys said. Palin is scheduled to take another test Monday morning and if that yields a negative result, her trial could resume with jury selection later in the day. If she tests positive again, however, Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff will delay the trial until Feb. 3, attorney Shane Vogt said. “She is, of course, unvaccinated,” Rakoff said in court Monday morning while discussing the logistics.

Former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has tested positive for Covid, and is unvaccinated, a federal judge told a courtroom Monday just as a civil defamation trial involving the one-time-Alaska governor and the New York Times was set to begin. Palin, who disclosed in March that she had been diagnosed then with the coronavirus, said last month that she will get a Covid-19 vaccine “over my dead body.”

The trial will begin this week in former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R) defamation case against The New York Times over a corrected editorial linking her to "political incitement." Palin’s case is set to be heard in a Manhattan federal court beginning Monday, where the former vice presidential candidate will try and convince jurors that the newspaper and its former editorial page editor James Bennet defamed her in an opinion piece, according to Reuters.

The New York Times doesn’t often defend its journalistic practices before a jury. But later this month, the “Gray Lady” will indeed do so as the influential newspaper has a trial date with Sarah Palin. Very much under the radar, jury selection in the four-year-old case begins on Jan. 24. The former vice presidential candidate alleges being defamed by a 2017 editorial linking one of her political action committee ads to a 2011 mass shooting that severely wounded then-Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. James Bennet, the author of the editorial, picked up on the use of crosshairs in the advertisement and...

A federal judge on Tuesday approved a plan to restructure Puerto Rico's bond debt, which had plunged the U.S. territory into the country's largest municipal bankruptcy in history. Judge Laura Taylor Swain ruled in favor of the Plan of Adjustment that was years in the making, through arduous negotiations between the island's Fiscal Oversight Board, debtors and the government. According to Board officials, the plan will reduce Puerto Rico's debt by 80 percent and save the island more than $50 billion in debt payments. Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said the approval of the plan "represents a great step for...

The seditious conspiracy charges brought by the Justice Department on Thursday against the leader of the Oath Keepers and other members of the right-wing group signal the government is prepared to take on an ambitious fight to show that they joined the Jan. 6, 2021, attack as part of a coordinated effort to deny President Biden the White House. The indictment contains the first sedition charges that have been brought following the riot and mark a significant escalation in prosecutors’ efforts by drawing a connection between the physical acts of mayhem that day and the broader effort by former President...

Jan. 14 (UPI) -- A federal judge on Friday ordered former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli to pay $64.6 million for illegally ballooning the price of a drug to treat parasitic diseases. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York also barred Shkreli from the pharmaceutical industry for life. "Banning an individual from an entire industry and limiting his future capacity to make a living in that field is a serious remedy and must be done with care and only if equity demands," she wrote in her ruling. "Shkreli's egregious, deliberate, repetitive, long-running and ultimately dangerous illegal...

Sarah Palin wants jurors to be barred from seeing footage of her appearance on “The Masked Singer” in her defamation case against the New York Times that may go to trial in the coming weeks.

The Obama administration targeted sole proprietors and small businesses in the real estate industry after the crash of 2008, while letting the big banks off the hook with bailouts. One of most horrific cases involved Republican real estate broker Tony Viola, who served nine and a half years in prison as a juicy target of Ohio Democratic prosecutor Dan Kasaris. He was convicted of supposedly tricking banks into offering mortgages with no money down. But in reality, the banks were knowingly offering those loans — evidence the prosecution withheld from him. Viola only got out of prison due to an...

A woman who brought her 14-year-old son to the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year will serve three months in jail for illegally parading in the complex during the insurrection, CNN reported Friday.Why it matters: Virginia Spencer and her husband entered a hallway of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's offices while inside the Capitol, later joining a crowd that attempted to enter the House chamber as lawmakers were still trapped inside, per court documents. Worth noting: It's one of the longer sentences handed to Jan. 6 defendants who face charges for non-violent misdemeanors, CNN notes.Spencer will also be on probation for...

A federal appeals court upheld a decision to temporarily block the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors in three states.A judge in Louisville, Kentucky, issued a ruling blocking the mandate for Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee in November. And on Wednesday, the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the injunction in a 2–1 ruling.The Sixth Appeals Court majority wrote in its Wednesday order that the injunction was upheld “because the government has established none of the showings required to obtain a stay.”States are “imminently threatened in their proprietary capacities should they renew those existing contracts (thus triggering the...

This afternoon a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected the Biden Administration's request for a stay of a lower court injunction barring enforcement of a COVID-19 vaccination requirement for employees of federal contractors in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. Judge Bush wrote for the court in Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Biden, joined by Judge Suhrenreich. Judge Cole (who recently announced his intent to take senior status upon the confirmation of his successor) dissented.Here is how Judge Bush summarizes his opinion:In 1949, Congress passed a statute called the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act ("Property...