Free Republic

On Tuesday's CNN This Morning, host Audie Cornish turned to retired Brigadier General Steven M. Anderson to assess President Trump’s potential expansion of military strikes on Iran. Anderson repeatedly warned that targeting infrastructure such as bridges, power plants, and water facilities could amount to “war crimes,” even suggesting U.S. troops could be put in the position of refusing “illegal” orders. Cornish failed to disclose that Anderson sits on the board of VoteVets, a progressive PAC that backs Democrat candidates. Nor did she note his record of sweeping, alarmist claims, including warning in a Washington Post op-ed of a potential military...

Colorado attorneys are starting to push back after a certification prompt began appearing when they log into the state’s court e-filing system. The requirement traces back to Senate Bill 25-276 and related statutes, including C.R.S. § 24-74-105, which deal with how the state handles nonpublic personal identifying information. Under that law, access to certain data comes with a certification—made under penalty of perjury—about how it will be used. On paper, the statute applies broadly to third parties accessing protected data. In practice, though, the certification has now been built into Colorado Courts E-Filing (CCE), meaning attorneys are being asked to...

The assassinations of Iran’s senior leaders by Israel and the United States have triggered unprecedented churn within Tehran’s political and military establishment, eliminating the supreme leader and some of the most powerful men in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but have left in place a hard-line government and little hope of a diplomatic breakthrough, according to regional and Western officials. Rather than usher in what President Donald Trump has called “more reasonable” leadership, the surviving Iranian regime is newly emboldened to inflict economic pain, pushing Tehran and Washington further apart in negotiations, according to the officials who spoke on the...

WASHINGTON — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s top aide Ricky Buria told colleagues last year that he and his boss donned disguises and went out drinking together — a juicy bit of gossip that’s widely believed to be a lie and recklessly planted to sniff out leakers, The Post has learned. Two sources said that Buria, 44, told them separately in early 2025 that he and Hegseth, 45, slipped past the secretary’s security detail while he was staying at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pentagon City. There’s no proof that the great escape actually happened, but the tale has reverberated within...

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated the legal status of thousands of migrants who had been allowed to temporarily live in the U.S. after using an app expanded by the Biden administration to schedule appointments with immigration officials. U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston ordered the administration to reverse its move last year to revoke the legal status of migrants who used the CBP One app. The app was used under former President Joe Biden starting in 2023 to address the crisis at the border by allowing some migrants to make appointments to...

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to suspend its construction of a $400 million ballroom where it demolished the East Wing of the White House, barring construction work from proceeding without congressional approval. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington granted a preservationist group’s request for a preliminary injunction that temporarily halts President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project. Leon, who was nominated to the bench by Republican President George W. Bush, concluded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation is likely to succeed on the merits of its claims because “no statute comes close to giving...

Citing the First Amendment, a federal judge on Tuesday agreed to permanently block the Trump administration from implementing a presidential directive to end federal funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, two media entities that the White House has said are counterproductive to American priorities. The operational impact of U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss’ decision was not immediately clear — both because it will likely be appealed and because too much damage to the public-broadcasting system has already been done, both by the president and Congress. Moss ruled that President Donald Trump’s executive order to cease funding...

Both Ayn Rand and George Orwell would have recognized what is going on—and, in fact, they warned us about it. A form of torture I endure for my research is reading the New York Times morning emails. The phrase “alternate universe” aptly describes its sly, misleading story titles, which demonstrate a built-in bias even before the report itself begins. A good example was a heading marked “Territorial Adventurism” used the other day in reference to Trump’s geopolitical strategy in Iran and elsewhere. Adventurism is defined as “Involvement in risky enterprises, especially in foreign affairs, while disregarding established principles or...

Hello Senator Thune, At 3 AM on Friday, March 27th, in a near-empty chamber, you passed a bill by voice vote that excludes all funding for ICE and CBP. Let me repeat that: voice vote. No roll call. No record of who was there. No accountability. Just you, Barrasso, and a handful of senators shuffling paper in the dead of night while America slept. You could have demanded a recorded vote. You chose not to. You could have held the line for five more days until the House returned. You chose not to. You could have used the same procedural...

California sued the Trump administration Monday to block what it says is an unprecedented power grab: using emergency authority to force the restart of an offshore oil operation shut down more than a decade ago. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, argues a March 13 order by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright oversteps his authority under the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era law. “No matter how much President Trump may claim there’s a so-called national energy emergency — it’s just not true,” Attorney General Rob Bonta told reporters. “The U.S. already produces significantly more oil and...

EVEN BY HIS chaotic standards, Donald Trump has just presided over an unusually wild week in his misguided war on Iran. The president had threatened imminent, punitive bombing of Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure. Though Iran didn’t quail, markets did. So a U-turn followed. Mr Trump said he had become aware of secret proposals for peace talks, and held off.

LANSING – Today, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that the State of Michigan and the City of Romulus filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) challenging its plan to convert a Romulus warehouse into a mass immigration detention facility. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, seeks to declare unlawful, vacate, and set aside the agencies’ decision and requests that the Court permanently enjoin the conversion, construction, retrofitting, or operation of the commercial warehouse as an ICE detention center. “As the...

Trump-hating rocker Bruce Springsteen is allowing the American Civil Liberties Union to use his iconic, if often misunderstood, America trashing Vietnam War anthem “Born in the USA” for the ACLU’s ad campaign promoting the leftist group’s birthright citizenship case set for an April 1 Supreme Court hearing challenging President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order restricting who is eligible for birthright American citizenship. The use of Born in the USA as a patriotic song is a 180 degree reversal for Springsteen who has long downplayed the notion the song is patriotic. When Born in the USA was released in mid 1984...

Judging by Donald Trump’s outbursts of late, he can’t seem to decide whether reopening the Strait of Hormuz is easy or hard. He also can’t seem to decide whether he needs international allies to help with this urgent task or not. Iran’s blockade on oil shipments exiting the strait—done in response to Trump’s attack—is causing worsening global consequences daily. So it would be useful for Trump to settle these arguments in his own mind already. But Trump’s incoherence on the Strait of Hormuz actually reveals something else, as well: a massive political weakness. .....

🇺🇸 A judge ordered the Pentagon to restore press credentials and stop screening journalists. The Pentagon's response: comply with the ruling, close the entire correspondents' corridor, and relocate media to an external annex that's still under construction. The court said you can't control who covers the military. The military said fine, but you're covering it from across the parking lot now. This is happening during the biggest U.S. military operation in two decades, when press access to the Pentagon matters more than at any point since Iraq. Source: @SeanParnellASW @BreannaMorello

The joint American-Israeli military operation against the Iranian regime is now three weeks old, but there is another war — a more silent one — raging here on the home front. President Donald Trump's second administration is facing a highly coordinated shadow war — one waged both by some influential outside voices on the Right and, more dangerously, by their subversive allies within Trump's very own government.If this campaign is not confronted and decisively defeated, the result will be calamitous: a second Trump term that drifts into lame-duck status not due to a voter backlash but because of an insurrection...

Newly released emails reveal how the Biden administration’s Department of Education (ED) in 2022 attempted to form a secret parent advisory council to give teachers unions and left-aligned activist and parent groups power over federal education policy. Under former President Joe Biden, the department created the National Parents and Families Engagement Council ostensibly as a “partnership between parents and families, educators, district leaders, and entire school communities to support student success.” But behind the scenes, the short-lived council was composed of hand-picked activist organizations that focused on radical racial, gender and immigrant-focused ideologies. As Defending Education notes, “not a single...

A U.S. Justice Department attorney and senior supervisors for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have told a federal judge that names and biometric information about Mainers who observed and filmed federal agents carrying out an illegal immigration crackdown in January have not been entered into DHS databases.

Senate Democrats have filed legislation that would stop the U.S. from going to war with Cuba without congressional approval as President Trump has threatened a “takeover” of the country. Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine (Va.), Ruben Gallego (Ariz.) and Adam Schiff (Calif.) on Thursday filed the war powers resolution, which could receive a vote by the end of the month. The resolution comes as Trump has said the U.S. could carry out a “friendly” or “not friendly takeover” of Cuba, predicting the collapse of the 67-year communist rule under pressure from the U.S. “Only Congress has the power to declare war...

Federal lawyers cannot be held hostage by a lawfare apparatus that threatens their destruction for daring to represent GOP administrations.On Tuesday, word came that the legal disciplinary authority in Washington, D.C., was charging U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin with ethics violations, kicking off proceedings that could result in penalties up to and including disbarment.Martin himself had questioned that very Disciplinary Counsel, Hamilton P. Fox III, the former head of the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility, about whether his tribunal was operating politically in correspondence from February 2025. Martin wrote a letter to Fox then, suggesting that the Democrat-dominated panel might...