Free Republic

Tennessee state Sen. Brian Kelsey (R) was indicted on Monday in connection to an alleged campaign finance scheme that sought to funnel money into his 2016 campaign for U.S. Congress. The Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that Kelsey, 43, along with Nashville social club owner Joshua Smith, 44, conspired to illegally transfer “soft money” — which refers to contributions that are made to political parties and political action committees, and thus have fewer limits — from Kelsey’s Tennessee state Senate campaign committee to his federal campaign committee.

A veteran Cleveland councilman was busted Tuesday on charges of bilking the city out of more than $127,000 over an eight-year span, federal prosecutors said. Democrat Kenneth Johnson, who was elected in 1980, was arrested by FBI agents in Cleveland after a federal grand jury named him in a 15-count indictment with violations related to federal program theft, the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio announced Tuesday.

Sidney Powell: Georgia’s probably gonna be the first state I’m going to blow up and Mr. Kemp and the Secretary of State need to go with it because they’re in on the Dominion scam what with their last minute purchase or award of a contract at Dominion of 100 million dollars. The state Bureau of Investigation for Georgia ought to be looking into financial benefits received by Mr Kemp and the Secretary of State’s family at that time, and the Secretary of State family about that time. And another benefit Dominion was created to award is what I would call...

A Colorado resident was sentenced to 83 months in prison on Friday for his role in a biodiesel tax credit fraud scheme, announced Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E. Zuckerman of the Justice Department’s Tax Division. According to court documents and statements made in court, Matthew Taylor and his coconspirators defrauded the United States by filing false claims for tax credits under a federal program that encourages production and use of renewable fuels. They created a fake company, Shintan Inc. (Shintan), that purported to be in the business of creating renewable fuels. From 2010 to 2013, the coconspirators then...

In plain language the “Trump Project” was a joint 2016 FBI & DOJ counterintelligence operation to conduct wiretaps and surveillance upon the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Operatives within the FBI and DOJ who were politically aligned with the Hillary Clinton campaign, weaponized the DOJ and FBI to undermine her political opposition. Those who have been walking the deep weeds have a pretty strong understanding of Deputy FBI Director Andrew “Andy” McCabe’s risk profile and his role in the 2016 “Trump Project”. The Rosen report earlier today -based on investigators within the House Intelligence Committee- states McCabe has lost his...

Donald Trump Jr. declared Tuesday that there are high-level forces in the U.S. government working against his father, President Trump. Speaking at a conservative conference in West Palm Beach, Fla., Trump's oldest child said there is a movement to not let "America be America." "There is, and there are, people at the highest levels of government that don't want to let America be America," he said at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit. Trump Jr. also said that special counsel Robert Mueller's federal Russia inquiry is indicative of the sort of "rigged system" that his father complained about during...

Social Security's unfunded liabilities total $12.5 trillion in present-dollar terms over a 75-year timeframe, the administration's trustees reported Thursday, an increase of $1.2 trillion from last year's estimate. The trustees report showed that Social Security's combined trust fund can only pay scheduled benefits through 2034, a projected date that is unchanged from a year ago. Medicare's trust fund, though, is in better shape than previously estimated and will run out a year later than previously anticipated, in 2029. At those dates, beneficiaries would face the prospect of an immediate cut in benefits unless policy were changed in some way to...

Berkshire Hathaway Inc has been sued by a New York bicycle courier company over an alleged illegal scheme to cheat employers buying workers' compensation policies. The complaint, filed late Friday by Breakaway Courier Systems, came as Berkshire's Applied Underwriters unit faces scrutiny over its workers' compensation policies, including some that have been banned by California, Vermont and Wisconsin. Breakaway, with about 300 employees, accused Berkshire and Applied of "siphoning" premiums through a web of illegal shell companies, with diverted premiums going to unlicensed out-of-state insurers. The plan amounted to a "reverse Ponzi scheme" where unsuspecting employers expecting to buy affordable...

How online auctioneer EnergyNet helps bring liquidity, and recovery, to America’s busted oil patch. In the first 18 months of the oil bust, 70 companies have gone bankrupt, defaulting on $40 billion in debt. A trillion dollars of oil company equity has been wiped out. Layoffs top 200,000. With oil holding at around $45 a barrel, more liquidations are on the way. Already the old guys swear this bust is worse than in 1986, when oil dropped below $25 in today’s dollars. At least one thing is better now: Thanks to the magic of the Internet, it’s easier for cash-strapped...

It is a well-known fact that the corporate world is powered by high-end coffees. With pithy corporate executives forced to work early morning hours to keep their companies competitive, they must find a good source of status-quot coffee to start their day and show they are in charge. Powerful liberals understand this fact and have thus encouraged young lesbians to start ‘exciting careers’ in the barista industry. By working at local Starbucks nationwide, lesbians have...

Computer automated hedge fund strategies weren't the only winners amid recent volatility. Hedge funds also appear to have timed oil’s recent slump and rebound. That's according to Bloomberg's Moming Zhou, who reports  that hedge fund significantly curbed their bearish positions in crude oil just after it fell to a 12-year low last week -- and then rebounded in its biggest jump since 2008. While oil had a brutal start to 2016 after a disappointing 2015 showing, many are coming around to the idea of a recovery in prices, as Citi argued it could be the trade of the year, some...

Mama needs a brand-new bag! According to a recent study by Baghunter, the legendary Hermès Birkin bag is a better investment than both gold and stocks. The luxury site compared the returns on the three investments over a 35-year period, and, as it turns out, the value of the Birkin, which starts at $11,000 on Baghunter, has never decreased. In fact, while the values of gold and the stocks have fluctuated, the top-handle tote's value has steadily increased more than 500 percent in the last three and a half decades. That makes for an average annual increase of 14.2 percent,...

ISLAMABAD: Eight “high value terrorists” wanted by Pakistan and other countries are holed up inside Lal Masjid, while another was killed by security forces in the ongoing operation, Religious Affairs Minister Ejazul Haq said on Sunday. “Nine suspected terrorists said to be far more dangerous and harmful than Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives were hiding inside the mosque compound,” Haq told a press conference here. Haq said that the militants and not Abdul Rashid Ghazi, Lal Masjid’s deputy chief cleric, were controlling the mosque. “The militants are holding children and Ghazi hostage,” he said. He said that about 500 male...

Sophie Cruz's encounter with the pope during a parade in Washington this week looked to be one of those spontaneous, once-in-a-lifetime-moments Francis has become known for. But for 5-year-old Sophie, the chance to wrap her arm around the pope's neck as he offered a hug, kiss and a blessing unfolded as perfectly as it was scripted by members of a coalition of Los Angeles-based immigration rights groups. For nearly a year the group had been preparing the young girl from suburban Los Angeles to make a dash for the popemobile to deliver a message about the plight of immigrant parents...

Solar scientists predict that the Earth will enter a "mini ice age" around 2030 due to decreased activity by the sun, which will bring with it frigid cold winters. The last time the Earth experienced a similar situation occurred between 1645 and 1715.

No TV nor radio news will cover this. CNN Reports Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Extremely Secretive Two copies of the biggest free trade deal in history are sitting in reading rooms -- one at each end of the Capitol. The document is classified. Only members of Congress and staffers with security clearance can access it. And they can't make copies or even carry their own handwritten notes out the door. This is how trade negotiations work. Fearful that they'll undercut their own negotiators, leaders of the countries involved don't want the details of what they're hashing out revealed until the...

Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange MyCoin has allegedly shut its doors and stolen HKD 3 billion ($386.9 million) in the process. The South China Morning Post reported Monday that 30 MyCoin clients approached a local lawmaker with complaints that the company had fled with funds from up to 3,000 investors. The reports coming out of Hong Kong would seem to indicate that there may have been a Ponzi scheme at play. "No one seems to know who is behind this," a woman surnamed Lau, who said she lost HKD 1.3 million, told the paper. "Everyone says they, too, are victims ......

Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here's why you're unemployed, crushed by debt -- and no one is helping The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation...

<p>Those big, ugly early birds began circling over the corporate headquarters of the revenue-camera industry last week when federal prosecutors announced that felony corruption charges had been filed against the Chicago city official in charge of one of the world’s largest red-light camera operations. More dominoes are expected to fall as FBI agents take the investigation to other cities.</p>