Free Republic

ATLANTA - Former Stonecrest Mayor Jason Lary was sentenced to 57 months in prison Wednesday after he stole more than $650,000 in COVID-19 relief funds meant for the recovery of businesses, churches and the people of the city. “Lary betrayed the trust placed in him by the citizens of Stonecrest by stealing the very funds meant to help his constituents weather the COVID-19 pandemic,” U.S. Attorney Ryan Buchanan said. “The people of Stonecrest deserved better, and corrupt officials can expect severe consequences for using their offices to commit crimes.” In January, Lary pleaded guilty to wire fraud, conspiracy to commit...

On Saturday, April 26, 2020, Robert Stewart Jr., a 33-year-old contractor from Virginia, invited an investigative reporter to take a trip on his private jet. “I’m talking with you against the advice of my attorney,” Stewart laughed, before bringing J. David McSwane aboard a luxury Legacy 450 Flexjet, which he’d rented to deliver six million N95 masks during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Target worker put customers who leave stuff in aisles on blast in a viral TikTok video. The worker, known as Kaitlin Sonday (@kaitlinsondae) on TikTok, often posts about her job as a Target employee and has about 19,000 followers. In the video, Sonday shows a pair of frozen pizzas that a customer left in an aisle next to the bath bombs. As of Sunday, the video received about 290,000 views on TikTok.

CHICAGO — A former U.S. Postal Service employee based in Chicago has been indicted on federal charges for allegedly stealing stimulus checks from the mail. Olivia Bryant, 33, of Chicago, has been charged with three counts of theft from the U.S. mail. During her arraignment, Bryant pleaded not guilty.

The former public school teacher and principal has been pushed out of her education policy roleNEW YORK CITY (LifeSiteNews) — New York City Mayor Eric Adams fired a recently appointed education advisor after the New York Daily News reported her views on homosexuality. Mayor Adams named Kathlyn Barrett-Layne on Tuesday to the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), along with eight other appointees. PEP is the governing body for the city’s education department. His administration asked her to resign hours after the announcement. The Daily News took credit for getting her removed from the board after it reported on several books...

It’s a pump-and-dumps scheme. Four Florida men were busted for installing devices inside gas pumps that dropped prices down to nearly nothing — an alarming trend that officials said will only spread with fuel costs soaring. The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services said the suspects installed sophisticated “pulsators” inside pumps that regulate price and fuel flow. The devices sent per-gallon costs plunging down to just pennies and allowed pumpers to fill up almost for free. The fraudsters allegedly pulled off the scheme at two separate Circle K stations in Lakeland and Lutz. Rogelio Llerena and Yulier Garcia-Martinez were...

Community “charity” fundraising company GoFundMe demonstrated they’re woke and fascist at the same time by canceling the Freedom Convoy campaign and promising to send the $9+ million raised to “approved charities.” Now, they’re scrambling to fix the PR nightmare that ensued by moving to refund all donations. The company had hoped that by dropping the news late on a Friday that they’d avoid some of the backlash. But it was quickly seized by conservatives across social media as an example of the totalitarian nature of the left. We didn’t let them oppose freedom without voicing our opinions and pushing to...

The founder of a national charter school network who once served as a White House adviser under President Barack Obama has pleaded guilty to a charge alleging he stole $218,000 from the network to get a lower interest rate on a multimillion-dollar luxury Manhattan apartment. Seth Andrew, 42, a founder of Democracy Prep, on Friday entered the plea in Manhattan federal court to wire fraud, admitting that he moved money in 2019 from the charter school network to other bank accounts without authorization. 'I am truly sorry for what I have done,' Andrew told Judge John P. Cronan. 'What I...

On Sunday, a Facebook post from the Dallas Police Department went viral. It depicts a police dog, Ballentine, who is a member of the department's interdiction unit, operating out of Dallas' Love Field Airport. The caption praises Ballentine for sniffing out more than $100,000 in cash from a traveler's bag. What is left out of the description is what, if anything, the traveler did wrong. When contacted by Reason, Dallas police declined to give any specifics. The only comment provided was a statement that the squad "seized $106,829.00, from a 25-year-old female who is a resident of Chicago, IL., but...

A woman who took more than $40,000 in merchandize from a San Francisco Target is out of jail as the city faces an ongoing surge in retail looting and theft. Aziza Graves is wearing an ankle bracelet and faces 120 misdemeanor counts of petty theft after she scanned dozens of items and made nominal payments before leaving incomplete transactions.

Union Pacific railroad said there was a rash of cargo container break-ins as the containers were being hauled by train near downtown Los Angeles, as officials are trying to clear the backlog of cargo at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Thousands of boxes as far as the eye could see were strewn along the railroad tracks near Valley Boulevard and North Mission Road in Lincoln Park in footage captured by NewsChopper4 Monday. Several container doors were wide open - including a FedEx container with boxes tipping over. The section of the track is bordered by homeless encampments...

A Nevada woman has been arrested, accused of burglarizing the dental office where she worked as an assistant and extracting 13 teeth from a patient - despite the fact that she is not a licensed dentist. Laurel Eich, 42, from Reno, was being held in the Washoe County jail on Friday on $20,000 bond. Eich has been charged with two counts of burglary and one count each of grand larceny, conspiracy to commit burglary, and perform surgery on another without a license. She also faces three counts of violation of probation or condition of a suspended sentence. According to the...

A California nun will plead guilty to swindling over $800,000 from the Catholic elementary school she ran to help pay for her gambling trips, federal prosecutors said. Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper, 79, was charged Tuesday with wire fraud and money laundering for ripping off St. James Catholic School for a period of 10 years ending in September 2018, according to a press release from the US Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California. Kreuper, who was the principal of the school for 28 years, agreed to plead guilty as part of a deal with prosecutors, the release said.

A group of young Brooklyn men ripped off $2 million in COVID-19 relief funds by submitting fraudulent unemployment claims — and then stupidly posted pictures of themselves with their ill-gotten cash, prosecutors said on Tuesday. Six of the eight defendants — ranging in age from 18 to 25 — were charged in Brooklyn federal court, documents show. Two of the suspects — Armani Miller, 24, and Johan Santos, 19 — are still at large.

A Girl Scout troop leader is accused of stealing about $12,500 in money from cookie sales and event fees. The Ohio Attorney General’s Office said Gauthier deposited the cookie money into personal bank accounts for about five years. Parents alerted authorities, which prompted an investigation by the attorney general’s office and the Pataskala Police Department.

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.

I've retrieved all of The New York Times' 2020 presidential datasets, which have a time-series of voting data from a company called Edison Research. Here, for instance, is Michigan's. Below is a graph depicting the shifts in votes in Michigan starting on election day. The X-axis is the date/time and the Y-axis represents the change in votes (positive values denote shifts for Trump, negative values represent shifts for Biden, in hundreds). May I call your attention to the differences between the left and the right sides of the graph? Please note that at about 6:30AM ET, a massive vote dump...

In the wake of President Donald Trump sounding the alarm on potential voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D) on Friday accused Democrats of stealing elections for a long time. Blagojevich told Newsmax TV’s “John Bachman Now” that Democratic stronghold cities changing vote counts overnight, and controlling polling places is a “time-honored tradition.” He went on to say that Democrats “stealing the presidency” is “incredibly dangerous to our democracy.”

No one believes any of these declarations now — Democrats are blatantly stealing the election right in our faces. They fear nothing. ... Calling all Americans to take back our constitutional freedoms ... In a press release, the office confirmed that as of 9:15 a.m. ET, there were approximately 61,367 outstanding mail-in absentee ballots that remain uncounted. The updated number came as a surprise to many watching the election closely, as only hours before, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger indicated that the number of uncounted ballots was under 25,000. During the press conference, when asked about the discrepancy, Georgia’s...

As of this writing, it appears that Democratic Party machines in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are trying to steal the election.As reporters and commentators went to bed early Tuesday morning, all three states were too close to call, but President Trump led former Vice President Joe Biden by comfortable margins—far beyond what had been predicted in the polls. None of the networks called these states because enough mail-in ballots remained uncounted that it could swing either way, but Trump’s position looked good.Then, something strange happened in the dead of the night. In both Michigan and Wisconsin, vote dumps early...