Free Republic

A well-known community and social justice activist who founded a Boston nonprofit to reduce violence and who was once was lauded as "Bostonian of the Year" avoided jail time in a federal fraud case, the Justice Department said Thursday. Monica Cannon-Grant, 44, pleaded guilty September 2025 to 18 of the 27 counts, including wire fraud, mail fraud and failing to file tax returns, related to a scheme in which Cannon-Grant and her late husband, Clark Grant, pocketed thousands of dollars in donations to their nonprofit.

A highly acclaimed Nigerian professor at Aquinas College is facing two decades in prison after she admitted to swindling more than $1 million from taxpayers and poor minority children in West Michigan. Nkechy Ezeh, founder and CEO of the Early Learning Neighborhood Collaborative, pleaded guilty last week to wire fraud and tax evasion in a scheme that forced the nonprofit to shut down after a dozen years preparing about 8,000 preschoolers for kindergarten in Kent County, Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, WOOD reports. Ezeh worked with ELNC bookkeeper Sharon Killebrew to create nearly $500,000 in fake invoices, as well as created...

Ames, a 31-year CIA veteran, admitted being paid $2.5 million by Moscow for US secrets from 1985 until his arrest in 1994. WASHINGTON: CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, who betrayed Western intelligence assets to the Soviet Union and Russia in one of the most damaging intelligence breaches in US history, has died in a Maryland prison. He was 84. A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons confirmed Ames died Monday. Ames, a 31-year CIA veteran, admitted being paid $2.5 million by Moscow for US secrets from 1985 until his arrest in 1994. His disclosures included the identities of 10 Russian officials...

President Donald Trump has approved a pardon for baseball legend Darryl Strawberry, according to a White House official. Strawberry is a three-time World Series champion and eight-time MLB All-Star who “served time and paid back taxes after pleading guilty to one count of tax evasion,” the official said. “Following his career, Mr. Strawberry found faith in Christianity and has been sober for over a decade — he has become active in ministry and started a recovery center which still operates today,” the White House official said. Strawberry thanked the president in a post on Instagram. “Thank you, President @realdonaldtrump for...

One of President Trump’s biggest political adversaries stunned the political world after revealing that he won an unusual amount of money gambling in Las Vegas last year. As The New York Times reported, Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker released his 2024 tax returns on Wednesday as rumors circulate about him as a 2028 presidential candidate.The returns revealed that Pritzker and his wife reported $10.7 million in adjusted gross income. But the biggest shock was the fact that he won $1.4 million playing blackjack in Las Vegas in just one trip. Such an amount is surprising, especially considering Pritzker is not...

A company owned by Tim Mynett, the multimillionaire husband of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), failed to pay its fair share of taxes in 2021, according to a tax lien obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Mynett's company, EStreetCo, accumulated nearly $206,000 in unpaid income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes in 2021, the IRS charged in a tax lien filed against the company in Sonoma County, Calif., in January 2023. Omar, who introduced legislation in February to "make corporations pay their fair share," was married to Mynett when the IRS says the company failed to pay its taxes. In her...

Vegas was better when the Mafia ran it. There, we said it. Back then, the city wasn’t a soulless corporate cash machine; it was a destination built for working-class Americans to have a good time, blow off some steam, and feel like high-rollers for a weekend. The Mafia understood their customers because they were their customers. They knew you didn’t nickel-and-dime a guy on his way to the blackjack table. You gave him cheap rooms, free drinks, affordable and abundant buffets, and enough glitz to make him feel like a big shot for a few days. The real money came...

Federal agents descended upon a California home connected to the “TikTok Cult” pastor who was the subject of a recent Netflix documentary series Friday — as part of an investigation into sex trafficking and other criminal claims. Several people were detained after a Tujunga home partially owned by Pastor Robert Shinn was raided by agents from the FBI, IRS, US Postal Service and Department of Labor, the Los Angeles Times reported. Officials served warrants related to allegations of sex trafficking, money laundering, mail fraud, tax evasion and COVID-19-related fraud, according to the outlet. The identities of those detained were not...

Bill Gates pledged on Thursday (May 8) to give away $200 billion (S$260 billion) via his charitable foundation by 2045 and lashed out at Elon Musk, accusing the world's richest man of "killing the world's poorest children" through huge cuts to the US foreign aid budget. The 69-year-old billionaire co-founder of Microsoft said he was speeding up his plans to divest almost all of his fortune and would close the foundation on Dec 31, 2045, years earlier than previously planned. Gates said he believed the money would help achieve several of his goals, such as eradicating diseases like polio and...

Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign spent thousands of dollars after the election on childcare expenses for the California Democrat, raising potential ethics concerns for a lawmaker who has been accused in the past of using his campaign war chest as a "personal piggybank." According to campaign finance records, the Swalwell campaign spent at least $20,000 on "childcare" from Nov. 8, three days after the election, to March 31. The payments went to two of the Swalwell family’s longtime babysitters as well as a Washington, D.C.-area Spanish language immersion preschool where tuition is around $3,000 per month. The payments raise potential ethics...

A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Thursday to lying about a $10 million bribe that a Ukrainian businessman paid to then-vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter to “protect” his firm from a looming corruption investigation. Alexander Smirnov, 43, entered into a plea agreement with special counsel David Weiss and confessed to having created “a false and fictitious record” as part of a multi-year federal probe into the Bidens. The falsehoods included the bribery allegation, which was memorialized in an FBI FD-1023 form in 2020 and released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) last year, and other aspects of...

It was Christmas 2011, a year after Roman Abramovich had taken delivery of his new superyacht, Eclipse. But it seemed the oligarch would not be using it over the festive period - records show it had been chartered by a company based in the British Virgin Islands. And yet photographs from Christmas Day that year show Mr Abramovich in the Caribbean sunshine, standing on the swim platform at the rear of the yacht, with Eclipse's large letter-E logo behind him. Charter records such as this were part of a decade-long scheme to mislead tax authorities, now uncovered in an investigation...

Kamala Harris has strong ties to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves and his activist wife. Which is why a Harris Department of Justice could be more dangerous than Biden's DOJ. Democrats ended their four-day convention on Thursday with a vacuous speech by the party’s installed candidate, Kamala Harris. Her short stint on the main stage made the regime media, which has blessed her with 84 percent positive news coverage since the Pelosi coup according to one analysis, drunk with joy. Harris, like the roster of speakers before her, spent most of the speech demonizing her general...

EXCLUSIVE — Over 800 Internal Revenue Service employees still owe millions in back taxes despite heavy criticism from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who is hoping the level of tax waste will be squashed by billionaire Elon Musk, the newly tapped co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. In a letter to the Iowa senator sent on Nov. 8 and shared exclusively with the Washington Examiner, the IRS noted that of the 2,044 employees who reported having balances totaling more than $12 million, 860 employees still have not paid overdue taxes. Only 20 of the 70 employees who “willfully evaded” paying...

When does a government bureaucracy move quickly? When it's threatened by a whistleblower, among other things. IRS-CI Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley, one of the two whistleblowers in the Hunter Biden tax evasion case, had already experienced the speed with which his agency could move in retaliation, but was reminded of it once again when he received a "be demoted or resign" letter less than an hour after his latest interview with journalist Catherine Herridge dropped. Tristan Leavitt of Empowr Oversight, which represents Shapley and Ziegler, shared the letter, which was dated October 15 (emphasis added): Less than an hour...

DETROIT - A former federal agent who pleaded guilty to faking a marriage to gain U.S. citizenship and improperly searching FBI databases was sentenced Tuesday to pay $975 in fines and other fees, but will serve no prison time. U.S. District Court Judge Avern Cohn said Nada Nadim Prouty, 38, "erred in judgment" 19 years ago when she lied to enter the U.S. in 1989 from her native Lebanon, but has provided "exemplary service to the country" as a federal agent. Cohn also signed an order revoking Prouty's citizenship, but Prouty's attorney Thomas Cranmer said after the hearing she will...

Senate candidate Angela Alsobrooks (D) will pay back taxes after improperly claiming homestead and senior property tax credits for homes in D.C. and Prince George’s County. Her campaign said Alsobrooks, who is running for an open Senate seat in Maryland and is currently the chief executive of Prince George’s County, was not aware of the errors. The improperly applied tax credits were first reported by CNN and confirmed by the Alsobrooks campaign. It is not clear how much money Alsobrooks owes the District or Prince George’s, but in letters to both jurisdictions, her lawyer said Alsobrooks intends to pay any...

Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, will go on trial for gun-related charges on June 3, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. If it holds, the early-June trial date could pit the president’s son in back-to-back trials in the two cases brought by Weiss. In addition to the gun case, Hunter Biden faces nine tax-related charges in California over an alleged conspiracy across several years to avoid paying over $1 million in taxes and is set to go to trial in the case on June 20.

John Anthony Castro, a Texas man known for his legal efforts to challenge former President Donald Trump’s eligibility for the 2024 presidential ballot, has been arrested on charges related to filing false tax documents. Castro, who filed challenges in 27 states against Trump’s ballot placement, was indicted last week on 33 counts of aiding the preparation of false tax returns. Castro operated a virtual tax preparation business that deceitfully inflated tax refunds for clients, The Hill reported. Castro was the proprietor of Castro & Company LLC, a digital tax preparation firm with establishments in Orlando, Mansfield, and Washington, D.C., per...

The Linux Foundation has released their 2023 Annual Report... and it is an absolute doozy. The first big headline? As of 2023, The Linux Foundation now spends just 2% -- that's two percent -- of their revenue on their namesake: The Linux Kernel. "Ask yourself this: If there is a foundation named after a specific thing... what percentage of that foundation's revenue would you expect to be spent on said thing? Let's say... "Save the Orange Trees Foundation". How much of their revenue should be spent on, you know, orange trees? 100%? 50%? 10%? If "Save the Orange Trees" only...