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The developers of Mountain Valley Pipeline have asked the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency intervention to allow the project’s construction to progress. The pipeline developers made their application late Friday to vacate the stays of the Fourth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Such applications represent a request for emergency action addressed to a specific justice, in this case Chief Justice John Roberts. Each justice is assigned to circuits to handle such applications, and Roberts has the Fourth Circuit, which includes the region where the pipeline is being developed. The 35-page filing is in...

Autokeycard.com Seized By the ATF, Owner Arrested For Selling A Drawing In the Autokey Card case, a jury found Matthew Hoover, better known as CRS Firearms on YouTube, and Justin Ervin guilty. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) charged the men with violating the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934 for selling machineguns and conspiracy. Ervin faced an additional charge of structuring. The case stems from Mr. Ervin selling a metal card with an image inspired by a lightning link etched into it. Ervin sold the cards as a novelty and contracted with Mr. Hoover to promote...

A federal appeals court on Monday vacated a water permit needed by developers to restart construction on the Mountain Valley pipeline in West Virginia, marking the latest setback for the $6.2 billion project. The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found several defects in the review the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection conducted before issuing the permit.

In Ciraci v. J.M. Smucker Company, (6th Cir., March 14, 2023), the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals held that employees of a company that sells food products to the federal government may not assert a 1st Amendment free-exercise claim against the company for denying them a religious exemption from a COVID vaccine mandate imposed by the company after the federal government required government contractors to do so. The court said in part: Constitutional guarantees conventionally apply only to entities that exercise sovereign power, such as federal, state, or local governments.... Smucker’s may be a big company. But it is...

By any standard, the treatment of January 6 defendants has been a disgrace to the Department of Justice, the DC federal bench, and the Constitution. Scores of people have been held in inhumane conditions in the DC Gulag, denied their constitutional right to speedy trial, and denied access to exculpatory evidence. The blanket media coverage excoriating them as “violent insurrectionists” has prevented these constitutional outrages from becoming a national scandal. But there is a chance, a small chance, that the release of CCTV Capitol video by Speaker McCarthy may change the national consensus (other than in conservative media) that there...

A federal judge in Chicago has denied a motion seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to block Illinois’ assault weapons ban and a similar ordinance in Naperville. U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall ruled Friday that the Illinois and Naperville bans on selling assault weapons are “constitutionally sound.” Lawyers for the National Association for Gun Rights and Robert Bevis, who owns a gun store in Naperville, had sought the court orders in a lawsuit to stop the bans. As is now common in such cases, they argued that it’s “impossible” for the new state gun law and a similar...

Wearing a MAGA hat represents a person exercising his or her right to free speech, a U.S. appeals court has ruled. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a federal judge and ruled in favor of a Washington middle school teacher who claimed that a principal violated his free-speech rights by threatening discipline if he continued to wear a "Make America Great Again" hat to training sessions. "That some may not like the political message being conveyed is par for the course and cannot itself be a basis for finding disruption of a kind that...

@julie_kelly2 Judge: “This is what law enforcement is supposed to do. I don’t see anything on the entrapment front. In my mind, law enforcement deserves a pat on the back.” He claimed the FBI informants “pulled the plug early” and commended the agency for its “careful monitoring.” 🙄 This same judge has aided DOJ in this bogus case from the start, denying defense motions to present damning evidence at trial and refusing to compel testimony from FBI informants, agents for defense. His conduct in retrial was a disgrace

... At least a dozen FBI informants working with FBI handlers and undercover agents out of numerous FBI field offices engineered the hoax in 2020. Dan Chappel, a contract truck driver for the Postal Service, was hired as the key informant in March 2020; he primarily led the effort to stitch the random group of outliers together. The FBI compensated Chappel roughly $60,000 in cash and personal items, a sum Chappel admitted at trial had exceeded his annual salary. Chappel particularly fixated on Fox, who lived alone at the time in the dilapidated cellar of a vacuum repair shop without...

A federal appeals court on Thursday halted Judge Aileen Cannon’s special master review in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents case. In September, Judge Cannon appointed a special master to review the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago. Biden’s corrupt Justice Department argued that a special master didn’t have a right to filter out the seized documents. The court blasted Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, and said she erred in appointing Raymond Dearie as a special master to review documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. “The law is clear,” the judges wrote. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to...

The 8th Circuit US Appeals Court blocked Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program on Friday afternoon. The court granted an emergency stay barring the discharge of any student debt until the court decides on a request for a longer-term injunction. Reuters reported: A U.S. appeals court on Friday temporarily blocked President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel billions of dollars in college student debt, one day after a judge dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit by six states challenging the loan-forgiveness program. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency stay barring the discharge of any student debt under the program...

A judge ruled on September 29 that federal agents who raided 1,400 safe-deposit boxes in March 2021 at a private vault company did not violate search and seizure laws, court documents shared with Insider show. A lawsuit filed in August alleged the FBI and the US attorney's office in Los Angeles obtained warrants against US Private Vaults in Beverly Hills, California, by concealing critical details from the judge who approved them. In his ruling, District Court Judge R. Gary Klausner found no impropriety in the way the government got or executed the warrants for the raid. He dismissed the class-action...

A federal court on Tuesday canceled a hearing over Trump election lawyer John Eastman’s attempt to reclaim his seized phone. The court canceled the hearing after the corrupt Justice Department obtained a second search warrant which undermined Eastman’s case. The judge continued, “The undersigned will take the Government at its word that the warrant was issued, and the Court’s decision will be based in part on that representation.” “With this in mind, the Court will vacate the hearing currently set for September 6, 2022, and will decide Eastman’s motion on the written submissions of parties,” the judge wrote. The hearing...

The alleged masterminds of an extremist plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and start a civil war ahead of the 2020 presidential election will be re-tried after a jury failed to reach a verdict in their cases earlier this year. A federal judge set a trial date in August for Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. Thursday after declining their lawyer’s request to clear them of conspiracy and weapons charges. “We don’t know what the jury was thinking. … There’s enough here to say that a rational jury could still go against Mr. Fox, go against Mr. Croft, even...

Feeling irrationally angry after an argument with his wife in 2015, the police were called on firearm owner Edward Caniglia to perform a welfare check. He agreed to undergo a psychiatric evaluation at the hospital to determine suicidality on the condition that police not confiscate his guns. Upon returning to his home, however, Caniglia found that the police had unconstitutionally searched his house and seized his firearms. For the first time in 13 years, the Court upheld both privacy and gun rights, this time unanimously. Caniglia v. Strom’s 9-0 decision has the potential to create lasting effects and set precedent...

A federal judge in Missouri on Monday pushed a lawsuit filed by two Georgia election workers against The Gateway Pundit back to a Missouri circuit court for additional proceedings. Plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss filed the case against James Hoft, Joseph Hoft, and TGP Communications LLC (the business which operates The Gateway Pundit) in December 2021. The suit alleges two counts of defamation (one involving Freeman, the other involving Moss) and one count of intentional infliction of emotional distress. It seeks nominal damages, compensatory damages (including general, actual, consequential, and special damages), punitive damages, attorneys’ fees, and costs, but...

US District Court Judge Reggie Walton said Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Walton made the comments Thursday following the conviction of a January 6 defendant. Walton was appointed by former President George W. Bush. A federal judge on Thursday called Donald Trump a threat to democracy, accusing the former president of instigating a mob of "weak-minded" followers to attack the US Capitol on January 6, Politico reported. "I think our democracy is in trouble," US District Judge Reggie Walton said, "because, unfortunately, we have charlatans like our former president who doesn't, in my view, really care about democracy...

WASHINGTON — A Florida man who bragged he "broke the internet" when he was photographed carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's podium during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was sentenced to 75 days in prison on Friday. Adam Johnson, a stay-at-home father of five boys, traveled to D.C. in support of former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to President Joe Biden. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton sentenced Johnson to prison on Friday, saying Johnson made "a mockery" of the events by grabbing Pelosi's lectern and...

Mariposa Castro, also known as Imelda Acosta, was sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton. She also received a $5,000 fine from the judge, who said the January 6 attack had "totally undermined" the peaceful transfer of presidential power, NBC News reported. Throughout the day, Castro posted videos on her Facebook account showing the riot from inside the building and outside on restricted grounds. One video shows her climbing through a broken window, using the platform located at the lower west terrace of the Capitol, according to court records. As she was entering the Capitol, she could be heard...

Gray wolves will regain federal protection across most of the lower 48 United States following a court ruling Thursday that struck down a Trump Administration decision to take the animals off the endangered species list. Senior District Judge Jeffrey S. White, of United States District Court for the Northern District of California, found that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, in declaring wolf conservation a success and removing the species from federal protection, did not adequately consider threats to wolves outside of the Great Lakes and Northern Rocky Mountains where they have rebounded most significantly. Although the decision to...