The Americans for Prosperity Foundation filed a court action Tuesday against the Biden administration, claiming they have failed to respond properly to a request for information on oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The Trump administration approved the oil and drilling leases in January 2021, shortly before the former president left office. The Biden administration canceled them last month, citing concerns about climate change.
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The New York judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial expanded his gag order Friday to include Trump’s attorneys.
Judge Arthur Engoron issued an order Friday barring Trump’s attorneys from making “any public comments about court staff” referring to “confidential communications” between him and his staff. Engoron said the attorneys on Trump’s legal team — Christopher Kise, Clifford Robert and Alina Habba — have made “on the record, repeated, inappropriate remarks” about his law clerk “falsely accusing her of bias against them and of improperly influencing the ongoing bench trial.”
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At one point during a contentious hearing in her Florida courtroom on Wednesday afternoon, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon confronted the Department of Justice about its concurrent federal indictments against Donald Trump.
Cannon pressed Jay Bratt, the chief prosecutor on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case, to name another instance when the government brought charges against the same defendant on two different matters within a few months of each other. (Smith indicted the former president last June in the southern district of Florida for unlawfully keeping national defense information at Mar-a-Lago and obstruction of justice. Seven weeks later, Smith charged Trump in the District of Columbia with four counts related to the events of January 6.)
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A Texas bill that makes it a state crime to cross the border at any location besides a port of entry could set up Texas’ next legal fight with the Biden administration.
The Texas House voted on a border security package Thursday, approving 84-60 a bill that enables local police to arrest or send back illegal migrants who cross the border. If passed by the Senate and signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, it could set up another big fight with the Biden administration over the border.
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The federal judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case signaled that she would consider postponing the coming May trial, according to Politico.
Trump’s lawyers requested in early October that the trial be delayed until “at least mid-November 2024,” after the 2024 election, citing scheduling conflicts with other trials along with delays in record production by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon did not issue a ruling during a Wednesday hearing but was skeptical that the original schedule could still be met, according to Politico.
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The Missouri Western District Court of Appeals upheld a decision on Tuesday that declared Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft used “argumentative” and “partisan” language in a ballot description of a proposed abortion amendment, court documents showed.
A Missouri judge determined in September that Ashcroft’s use of phrases such as “right to life,” “unborn child” and “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions” were “problematic,” and rewrote the secretary’s summary to include approved language. The Court of Appeals agreed that Ashcroft tried to “mislead” voters with “insufficient and unfair” language, but said the rewritten ballot summaries must specifically mention abortion to accurately describe the proposed amendment, according to court documents.
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Former President Donald Trump sued Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson on Monday to prevent her from keeping him off the state’s 2024 election ballot.
The lawsuit, filed in the Michigan Court of Claims, asks the court to issue an injunction barring Benson from removing him from the ballot and to find that she lacks the authority to decide whether or not he is qualified. Michigan is one of many states where a lawsuit has been filed to remove Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars officials who took an oath to the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” from holding office.
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For nearly three years, the American people have received media-filtered coverage of court proceedings for January 6 defendants in the nation’s capital.
Pandemic-era rules enabled the public to access hearings by telephone during the early stages of the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Capitol protesters. But as the first jury trials commenced in the spring of 2022, phone-in lines for most D.C. courtrooms were shut down. Now anyone, including reporters, interested in covering the district court in Washington—where jury trials, plea agreements, and sentencing decisions for January 6 defendants take place—must attend in person. Electronic devices are not permitted in the courtroom; media rooms are often full for high-profile cases.
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Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares announced on Tuesday that his office’s Consumer Protection Section has opened an investigation into the Hamas-linked American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) for potential violations of the state’s charitable solicitation laws.
“The Attorney General’s Office has reason to believe that the organization may be soliciting contributions in the Commonwealth without first having registered with the Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Agriculture,” Miyares said in a statement. “In addition, the Attorney General will investigate allegations that the organization may have used funds raised for impermissible purposes under state law, including benefitting or providing support to terrorist organizations.”
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Under legal pressure, the National Archives has located 82,000 pages of emails that President Joe Biden sent or received during his vice presidential tenure on three private pseudonym accounts, a total that potentially dwarfs the amount that landed Hillary Clinton in hot water a decade ago, according to a federal court filing released Monday.
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Hunter Biden received a $250,000 loan from a Chinese businessman just three months after his father launched his 2020 presidential campaign, and he later transferred the debt to a Hollywood lawyer he befriended, according to evidence gathered by federal and congressional investigators.
The House Oversight Committee first disclosed a few weeks ago that Hunter Biden had gotten a $250,000 wire in July 2019 and used his father’s address in Delaware for the transfer. It was one of the later known foreign payments that Hunter Biden received before he fell on hard times.
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A federal judge issued an extraordinary temporary restraining order Monday barring the Biden administration from destroying or tampering with a temporary concertina wire fence installed by Texas to protect its border with Mexico.
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Former President Donald Trump promised to appeal a gag order reimposed on him Sunday night by the judge overseeing his 2020 election case.
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An IRS agent showed up at the door of a Marion County, Ohio, woman and lied about his reason for being there.
Once inside, the Internal Revenue Service agent, purporting to be named Bill Haus, began to harass and intimidate the taxpayer, according to a congressional report released Friday.
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The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over a controversial college program which directly connected mainstream conservative groups and publications to neo-Nazi elements.
As reported by the New York Post, the lawsuit was filed in a Washington, D.C. federal court on Tuesday by Heritage’s Oversight Project. The suit accuses DHS of withholding information by refusing to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding a grant of $352,109 that the University of Dayton received for its studies on “domestic violence extremism and hate movements.”
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An immigration think tank has filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), alleging that the agency has been deliberately withholding crucial information on terror suspects who have crossed the southern border.
As reported by Breitbart, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) sued the DHS after the agency refused to respond to the group’s prior Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, demanding access to “records reflecting the nationalities and group affiliations of the record-breaking 270 illegal border-crossers who have flagged on the FBI terrorism watch since 2021.”
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Law enforcement discovered the body of Robert Card, 40, on Friday, ending a three-day manhunt that followed a major mass shooting in the town of Lewiston.
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Last week, in the trial of former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, details emerged about how the now-disgraced entrepreneur attempted to co-opt U.S. senators from both the Republican and Democratic parties.
With $50 million in donations to secretive dark money vehicles linked to both party’s respective Senate leaders, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, Bankman-Fried presumably sought to influence future crypto regulations.
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On Wednesday, the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) made a surprising statement condemning a federal judge’s attempted gag order on former President Donald Trump.
As Politico reports, the ACLU’s statement came as a shock to many who support the group, as it had been one of Trump’s primary enemies during his presidency, frequently suing his administration to block many of his policies. But in a new friend-of-the-court brief, the ACLU agreed with Trump’s assertion that a gag order by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is a violation of his First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, as well as a violation of the public’s right to hear him speak.
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On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-Texas) filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration over federal agents cutting away razor wire barriers that had been set up along the southern border by the state government.
As Fox News reports, Paxton’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, targets the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), accusing the federal agencies of interfering with state efforts to secure the border by actively cutting away the razor wire barriers that had been set up by the state of Texas.
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The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) inspector general concluded in a Tuesday report that Former President Donald Trump did not inappropriately exert pressure on where to construct the FBI headquarters to protect his hotel from competition.
The investigation started in June 2019 following certain lawmakers and the media voicing worries regarding Trump’s possible influence on the FBI’s sudden choice to abandon its plan to construct a $3 billion suburban campus in Maryland or Virginia for its 10,000 workers in 2017, according to the report. The closeness to his former hotel in Washington, D.C. led some lawmakers to question whether he aimed to obstruct the land’s use for a potential rival hotel project, but the report found no evidence of that.
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Several current and former congressional oversight staff have been recently informed that the U.S. Justice Department seized their phone and email records back in 2017 as part of leak investigations, belated revelations that have touched off an inquiry by DOJ’s internal watchdog and raised serious concerns about the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.
Over the last week, several current and former Senate and House staff from both political parties have alerted Congress that they received belated notifications from Apple, Google or other Big Tech firms that their email or phone records were obtained from their personal devices via a grand jury subpoena.
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The reason you have not heard of a gag order on par with the one imposed on former President Trump is that it is highly unusual. Normally, in a criminal proceeding, there are no gag orders. To the extent they exist, they typically only bind the lawyers, who are admonished to adhere to the rules of professional conduct. Rarely—as in almost never—are criminal defendants forced into a gag order on such spurious grounds as they might “vilify and implicitly encourage violence against public servants who are simply doing their jobs.”
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Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and James McGovern, D-Mass., are leading a House of Representatives letter demanding President Joe Biden to stop prosecuting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is fighting extradition to the U.S.
The two congressmen asked fellow House lawmakers to join their bipartisan attempt to “strongly encourage the Biden administration to withdraw the U.S. extradition request currently pending against Australian publisher Julian Assange and halt all prosecutorial proceedings against him as soon as possible,” according to a “Dear Colleague” letter, Fox News Digital reported Monday.
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New crime statistics reveal that in the state of California, violent crime has risen sharply while arrests have fallen, despite a decrease in violent crime nationwide.
As reported by Just The News, the newly-released FBI statistics show that, from 2021 to 2022, the rate of violent crime in California for every 100,000 people rose from 481.2 to 499.5, despite a nationwide decrease from 387 to 380.7. Meanwhile, arrests declined all over the state, falling dramatically below pre-pandemic levels.
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Free speech battles over Hamas terrorism against Israeli civilians and the Jewish state’s military response aren’t just roiling college campuses such as New York University, which is investigating its law school’s student body president for using her office to blame Israel.
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The Supreme Court on Friday took up Missouri v. Biden, the free speech case challenging the Biden administration’s efforts to censor content on social media, while issuing a pause on a preliminary injunction granted by a lower court.
Republican attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration over its communications with social media companies related to the suppression of online speech, arguing it violated the First Amendment. District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty issued an injunction in July blocking certain parts of President Joe Biden’s administration from colluding with social media platforms to censor content online. The Supreme Court paused the injunction, but agreed to take up the case, according to the court order.
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U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Friday agreed to temporarily pause a gag order she imposed on former President Donald Trump while he appeals the decision.
Chutkan on Monday issued the order, prohibiting him from publicly attacking the court staff, the prosecution, and any potential witnesses. The judge is overseeing special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 case against the former president. Trump has vocally accused Smith of pursuing a political witch hunt against him to derail his 2024 White House bid.
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Alaska is suing the Biden administration for cancelling oil and gas leases sold in the state under the Trump administration.
The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) formally filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior on Wednesday, a move which it had promised to make in response to DOI’s September decision to retroactively cancel seven oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The DOI hailed the cancellations as a strong action to protect the environment, but industry groups and political officials slammed the revocations for their questionable legality and effects on the U.S. energy sector.
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) charged a Chinese national on Thursday for crimes related to operating an illegal biolab in California, according to a press release.
Jia Bei Zhu, 62, was arrested for “manufacturing and distributing misbranded medical devices in violation of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) and for making false statements to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA),” according to a DOJ press release. Between April and June 2023, officials in Fresno, California, discovered at least 20 potentially infectious agents, such as HIV and Malaria, as well as mice genetically engineered to carry COVID-19, at an “unlicensed” laboratory in Reedley, California, operated by Prestige Biotech Inc. (PBI), the successor of defunct Universal Meditech Inc. (UMI), Fresno County court records state.
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A federal appeals court rejected challenges Wednesday to a Nasdaq rule mandating that companies listed on the exchange have a female and an underrepresented minority on their board, or explain why they cannot meet the requirement.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals shot down lawsuits filed by the National Center for Public Policy Research and the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for approving the rule in August 2021. The rule requires Nasdaq-listed companies to provide information on gender, racial and LGBTQ+ status of their board of directors, mandating that at least two board members fall into one of those “diverse” categories.
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Seventeen Democrat legislators from Minnesota have attached their names to an amicus brief last week that asks the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn an appellate court decision that would roll back the public’s access to mifepristone, an abortion-inducing medication.
The DFLers joined a group of more than 600 Democrat legislators from 49 states in signing onto the brief, which asks the nation’s highest court to reject the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ August ruling in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine that concluded several decisions the FDA took in 2016 to make mifepristone more broadly available to women were illegal.
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A progressive district attorney who was backed by far-left billionaire George Soros was recently carjacked at gunpoint in his own city, proving to be an ironic display of soft-on-crime policies backfiring on their own advocates.
As the Daily Caller reports, New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams (D-La.) and his 78-year-old mother were accosted by two criminals on Monday, with one pointing a gun at them as they tried to get into Williams’ car. After stealing the DA’s car, the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) confirmed that the suspects abandoned it in an undisclosed location and proceeded to carjack another victim, a young woman, in the same area roughly 30 minutes later.
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Pro-life advocates sued the city of San Antonio Tuesday over its “Reproductive Justice Fund,” which they allege violates Texas law by using taxpayer dollars to aid women getting abortions out of state, according to court documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The city council approved a $500,000 fund in September as a part of its 2024 budget to assist reproductive health organizations and one member of the city council expressed hopes that it would help women get abortions “where they are legal,” according to KENS 5, a CBS News affiliate. The lawsuit filed by Texas Right to Life (TRL), as well as the Texas Leadership Coalition and Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, argues that pro-abortion groups will use the fund to pay for a woman to go outside the state to get an abortion in violation of Texas law, according to court documents.
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The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a federal judge’s order suspending the Biden administration’s “ghost guns” rule, which regulates gun parts kits as traditional firearms.
After blocking U.S. District for the Northern District of Texas Judge Reed O’Connor’s decision to vacate the rule nationwide in August, the Supreme Court vacated O’Connor’s more recent Sept. 14 injunction suspending enforcement of the regulation against two manufacturing companies, Blackhawk Manufacturing and Defense Distributed. The justice’s decision leaves in place the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “Frame or Receiver” rule, which expands the definition of firearm to encompass parts kits that are “readily convertible to functional weapons” or “functional ‘frames’ or ‘receivers’ of weapons.
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New court documents expose the “extreme pressure” prosecutors faced in Hennepin County to charge Derek Chauvin and three other former Minneapolis police officers in the death of George Floyd.
Several attorneys opposed charging the “other three” officers and withdrew from the case due to “professional and ethical rules.”
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“A TERRIBLE THING HAPPENED TO DEMOCRACY TODAY – GAG ORDER!”
That was former President Donald Trump on Truth Social on Oct. 16 following a gag order by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chukan forbidding him from criticizing Special Counsel Jack Smith in the Justice Department’s criminal case against Trump over allegations he somehow committed election fraud by challenging the results of the 2020 election.
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A federal judge recently announced he would not hire law clerks who signed letters defending the actions of Hamas.
In response to a letter released by student groups at Harvard blaming Israel for Hamas’ attacks, U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Matthew Solomson (pictured above) wrote in an October 11 LinkedIn post that he would “refuse to credential anyone who supports or even remotely sympathizes with terror in the form of a modern day pogrom.” Student groups at universities across the country, including Columbia University, Yale University and George Washington University, released statements and held protests in support of Palestine.
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A federal judge limited the scope of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) proposed gag order for former President Donald Trump after raising concerns during a hearing Monday..
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Crime rates per capita in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region, including Northern Virginia and Maryland, have increased 9% in 2022 to a rate of 18.3 crimes per 1,000 residents, according to an annual crime report released Wednesday, with 83,000 more calls for service to primary agency participants in the study.
Russell Hamill, police chiefs committee chair for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, shared the findings of the council’s annual Report on Crime and Crime Control at a meeting with the board. The report reflects data from 17 cities, counties, or entities in Maryland and 18 in Virginia, as well as from law enforcement in the district.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office’s requested gag order against former President Donald Trump is not quite as “narrowly tailored” as he claimed, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Sept. 15 to issue a “narrowly tailored” gag order barring Trump from making public statements that are “disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating” toward any “party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors,” as well as any statements “regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses.” The scope and circumstances surrounding the request — which a hearing scheduled for Monday will consider — are far outside what is normal in criminal trials, experts told the DCNF.
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Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday issued another stay of an injunction blocking the Biden administration from encouraging social media companies to censor speech.
Alito’s administrative stay blocks the injunction originally issued by District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty until Oct. 20, giving the justices more time to consider the Biden administration’s request for a longer stay on the injunction and to take up the case. Alito has issued short stays against the injunction twice, with the last one expiring Sept. 27.
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A federal judge declined on Wednesday to block Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s ban on firearms at parks and playgrounds.
U.S. District Judge for the District of New Mexico David Urias, a Biden appointee, declined to block Lujan Grisham’s emergency public health order banning firearms from being carried in public parks and playgrounds from taking effect, according to the court document. Urias temporarily blocked Lujan Grisham’s initial 30-day order banning all firearms from being carried in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County on Sept. 13, prompting her to issue the amended order two days later restricting guns only in specified areas.
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More evidence has come to light demolishing Joe Biden’s repeated denials that he ever discussed business with his son. New documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL) show that he emailed Hunter Biden, his brother James “Jim” Biden, and their respective firms tens of thousands of times while he was vice president.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) acknowledged in a joint status report published by the Washington D.C. District Court on Friday, that it knew of 4,243 emails between then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, another 1,751 emails between Joe and Jim Biden, 19,335 emails between Joe and Hunter’s private equity firm Rosemont Seneca, and 3,738 emails between Joe and Jim’s Chinese-communist party connected consulting firm Lion Hall Group.
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Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., was charged with conspiracy to act as a foreign agent.
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DFL Rep. Brion Curran was charged with two gross misdemeanor DWI counts Tuesday after she was arrested in Chisago County for driving twice the legal limit.
According to the charging document, a Chisago County Sheriff’s Deputy responded to a report around 2:05 a.m. Monday of an SUV “off the road” on I-35 in Harris, Minn.
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A Space Force reservist filed a lawsuit against the Air Force, Space Force and the Department of Defense on Tuesday alleging he faced unlawful punishment for speaking out against cancel culture and progressive policies during a private event.
First Liberty Institute, law firm Winston & Strawn and the Ave Maria School of Law Veterans and Servicemembers Law Clinic filed the lawsuit on behalf of Jace Yarbrough, who in 2021 was invited to speak at a retirement ceremony for SMSgt Duane Fish allegedly in a personal capacity, according to a press release. After an unnamed Navy member present at the ceremony complained about the contents of the speech, the Air Force censured Yarbrough, now a Major in the Air Force Reserve and attorney.
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Fifty-six years after it exempted antiwar teenagers from First Amendment protections while on campus, a federal appeals court in America’s heartland affirmed students’ speech rights in public schools on an equally contentious subject today.
The St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a preliminary injunction Monday against an Iowa school district policy that threatens suspension and expulsion for “intentional and/or persistent refusal … to respect” a peer’s gender identity, finding it’s likely too vague to survive legal scrutiny.
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Police in Bemidji, Minnesota, found 11 illegal immigrants in a local house after a minor was allegedly sexually assaulted, the Bemidji Police Department said in a recent Facebook post.
The Sanford Bemidji Medical Center’s Emergency Department alerted the Bemidji Police Department to the situation involving a girl that stated she’d been sexually assaulted, according to the Facebook post. Authorities arrested Oscar Ernesto Luna, 22, who is now charged with first degree criminal sexual conduct, and handed the 11 illegal immigrants to Border Patrol.
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The documents released by the House Ways and Means Committee last week shed new light on Hunter Biden’s reported interactions with escorts, including his claiming a tax deduction for payments to the women as business expenses. The documents also disclose documentation of investigators considering Mann Act charges.
Contained in the highly redacted documents the House Ways and Means Committee released last Wednesday are an interview with an “escort” identified as Gulnora and with Hunter Biden’s tax accountant who helped him prepare his tax returns for 2017 and 2018.
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