U.S. congressmen are pushing back against a proposed rule listing Rio Grande mussels as an endangered species.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed this new rule on July 25th, 2023 that would list the Salina mucket and the Mexican fawnsfoot mussels as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
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The House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative lawmakers in the House, outlined Monday what conditions would need to be met for them to vote for a new spending bill.
The group is calling for spending bills to include provisions on border security, the “unprecedented weaponization” of the Justice Department and FBI, and the Pentagon’s “cancerous woke polices.” The lawmakers also oppose “any blank check for Ukraine in any supplemental appropriations bill.”
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Former President Donald Trump said his legal team had a “productive meeting” Thursday with the Justice Department for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe, but prosecutors did not give any indication that he would receive a notice of indictment in the probe involving efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.
“My attorneys had a productive meeting with the DOJ this morning, explaining in detail that I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an Indictment of me would only further destroy our Country. No indication of notice was given during the meeting — Do not trust the Fake News on anything!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
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Hunter Biden’s plea deal with the Justice Department on two tax misdemeanor tax charges fell apart Wednesday after the federal judge overseeing the case said she had “concerns” about the constitutionality of a pre-trial diversion agreement that would allow him to avoid prison on felony firearms possession charge.
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The First Amendment is under assault by the very people entrusted to protect it. The Biden administration and the corporate media removed any doubt about this after a July 4 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty. Evidence revealed during the discovery process in Missouri v. Biden convinced the judge that administration officials illegally pressured social media platforms to censor disfavored views. Doughty issued a 155-page opinion and an injunction prohibiting federal officials from “pressuring or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech.”
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Congressional Democrats have joined in bipartisan effort to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amid abuses but GOP outrage over the findings in the Durham Report, including recent calls to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland over such matters, has likely hurt such efforts.
Congressional reauthorization of FISA is due in December, with particular focus on Section 702 of the law, which permits the government to conduct targeted surveillance on foreign people outside the U.S., with the assistance of electronic communication service providers, to acquire foreign intelligence information.
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Pressure is growing in congressional, legal and media circles for the federal judge in the Hunter Biden case to reject a plea deal that would spare the first son from serving prison time after evidence has emerged from two IRS whistleblowers that a more serious criminal tax case was sabotaged by the Justice Department.
“I don’t understand how any judge could bless this plea agreement now that all of this evidence of obstruction and DOJ and FBI wrongdoing has surfaced,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Just the News. “So I hope this judge does reject this, and then insists and demands on an honest investigation and an honest prosecution as well.”
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Financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 death in a Manhattan federal jail cell was the result of “negligence” and “misconduct” on the part of the Bureau of Prisons, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in a report Tuesday.
“Epstein’s injuries were more consistent with, and indicative of, a suicide by hanging rather than a homicide by strangulation,” the report also stated.
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“Democrats have a deep bench. They had better prepare now to turn to it.”
That was former Bloomberg News executive editor Al Hunt writing for The Messenger on June 25, pontificating about the prospects of replacing President Joe Biden in 2024 as the Democratic Party nominee as the incumbent president’s poll numbers still appear gloomy even after Biden’s Justice Department brought his top political opponent, former President Donald Trump, who is standing for election once again in 2024, up on charges over documents retained after the Trump administration that Trump says he declassified.
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by John Solomon When the Justice Department discovered from journalists a storage locker containing evidence against ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a search was executed immediately. But when IRS agents found a similar storage area containing evidence in the Hunter Biden criminal tax probe, they were denied the right to search…
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Life a year after Dobbs, the Left’s skewed view of conservatives, and ” sexually graphic materials” in Iowa political ads. It’s been quite a week on the presidential campaign trail.
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The House Ways and Means Committee took final steps Tuesday to release to the public as early as this week the testimony and evidence from an IRS whistleblower who alleges the Justice Department gave favorable treatment to Hunter Biden and engaged in political interference in the criminal tax case against the first son.
Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., scheduled an executive session for 8 a.m. Thursday where lawmakers are expected to vote to free the whistleblower evidence and testimony of IRS supervisory criminal agent Gary Shapley from the 6103 privacy requirements that normally shield Americans’ tax information from public disclosure.
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The attorney for rapper Kodak Black blasted the Justice Department Tuesday over the plea deal reached with Hunter Biden, questioning whether there is “2 tiers of justice” in America’s legal system.
Black was sentenced to serve over three years in prison for illegal possession of a firearm in 2019, the same charge the younger Biden reached a plea agreement on Tuesday, Fox News reported. Biden will be put into a pre-trial diversion program on the gun charge, the Justice Department announced, although U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump in 2017, said the investigation is still ongoing.
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GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is blasting a plea deal announced Tuesday that will keep President Joe Biden’s troubled son out of prison on two federal misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes and a separate felony charge of possession of a firearm by a known drug user.
Multiple news outlets are reporting that Hunter Biden and his attorneys have reached an agreement in which U.S. Attorney David Weiss would recommend probation on the tax violations. The younger Biden also would avoid prison time on the gun possession charge, “subject to a pretrial diversion agreement,” his attorney said in a statement.
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Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is running in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, said Republicans should “back off” of “accusations” of the “weaponization of the Justice Department.”
Hutchinson told ABC on Sunday that while he disagrees with some of the DOJ’s decisions, he believes Republicans are incorrect to label the department’s indictment of former president Donald Trump as “weaponization.”
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Sen. J.D. Vance says he is going to place holds on all of President Joe Biden’s Justice Department nominees following former President Donald Trump’s federal indictment for his handling of classified materials.
Vance, an Ohio Republican, wrote Tuesday on Twitter that he will halt all Justice nominees until Attorney General Merrick Garland “stops using his agency to harass Joe Biden’s political opponents.”
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A Justice Department prosecutor who helped secure last week’s indictment of former President Donald Trump was publicly reprimanded by a judge in 2009 for “gross negligence” in connection with secretly taping a defense lawyer and an investigator, an agency source has confirmed to Just The News.
The prosecutor, Karen Gilbert, is now serving as a deputy to Special Counsel Jack Smith, who on Thursday issued the 37-count indictment of Trump.
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Prior to former President Donald Trump, the Justice Department had not been involved in enforcing the Presidential Records Act, according to testimony from a National Archives and Records Administration official.
On Wednesday, the House Intelligence Committee released a transcript from an interview in March with NARA officials in which the agency’s chief operating officer, William Bosanko, testified that the agency had “found classified information in unclassified boxes” for all the presidential administrations “from Reagan forward.”
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Release of Special Counsel John Durham’s report on law enforcement and intelligence misconduct related to the 2016 presidential election has been met with outrage, recriminations, and a justified amount of vindication for those, including President Donald Trump, who helped expose the brazen operation from the start.
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The Justice Department removed an IRS whistleblower and his entire team from the criminal investigation of Hunter Biden’s taxes in what his lawyers described to Congress on Monday as an act of retaliation and possible obstruction of congressional inquiries, according to correspondence to lawmakers obtained by Just the News.
The IRS whistleblower, whose name has not been released, is a decorated supervisory criminal investigative agent who led the team probing the presidential son’s tax affairs.
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The chief congressional investigator in the Hunter Biden scandal says he is deeply worried that the Justice Department has tailored its criminal investigation narrowly to protect the first family and that Democrat defenders are coming close to engaging in witness intimidation that could obstruct his probe.
House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer told Just the News on Thursday night that he is deeply troubled by legal letters and veiled threats that defenders of Hunter Biden have sent witnesses. Threats were allegedly made to cooperating banks, and political attack activities were being funded in the districts of some lawmakers who are investigating the Biden family for alleged influence peddling.
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Matthew Graves just received a court summons.
As the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Graves is rarely on the receiving end of a legal inquiry. In fact, Graves’ hand must be tired from signing thousands of criminal indictments, sentencing memos, and plea offers related to his ongoing investigation into the events of January 6, 2021. Just this week, the FBI arrested two more individuals on minor offenses, giving Graves’ overstaffed office more fresh meat for the Justice Department’s vengeful retaliation against Americans who protested the certification of Joe Biden’s election that day.
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Adecorated supervisory IRS agent has reported to the Justice Department’s top watchdog that federal prosecutors appointed by Joe Biden have engaged in “preferential treatment and politics” to block criminal tax charges against presidential son Hunter Biden, providing evidence as a whistleblower that conflicts with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent testimony to Congress that the decision to bring charges against Biden was being left to the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Delaware.
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The House Judiciary Committee held a raucous hearing in the Big Apple on Monday to discuss New York City’s rising crime problem. Republicans sought to highlight the poor performance of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is refusing to prosecute various crimes as he instead pursues a criminal case against Donald Trump, and leaving a tide of victims in his wake.
It’s fine, and perhaps politically shrewd, for the GOP to shine a light on crime-enabling local prosecutors jeopardizing the safety of their cities in exchange for partisan witch-hunts. But for the next hearing, congressional Republicans need only walk a few blocks from their House offices to the office of Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
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A Massachusetts man on Friday was charged with a felony related to his participation in the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mark Sahady already faced misdemeanors for his nonviolent and brief jaunt through the building that afternoon, but the Justice Department decided to add the common “obstruction of an official proceeding” charge to Sahady’s case on April 7.
That same day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia threw Sahady—and more than 300 January 6 defendants charged with the same obstruction felony—a potential lifeline. In what one judge described as a “splintered decision,” a three-judge panel narrowly reversed a lower court ruling that tossed the obstruction count against three Capitol protesters. D.C. District Court Judge Carl Nichols dismissed the charge last year largely based on the argument that the statute “requires that the defendant have taken some action with respect to a document, record, or other object in order to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence an official proceeding.”
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The Justice Department announced Friday that a jury convicted social media “troll” Douglass Mackey over internet memes posted during the 2016 presidential election.
Legal experts raised concerns about the trial of the 33-year-old Mackey, who posted under the alias “Ricky Vaughn 99,” earlier this year on First Amendment grounds. The Department of Justice indicted Mackey in January 2021, claiming he conspired “to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution.”
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After nine weeks of testimony from multiple government witnesses, including FBI agents, the Justice Department finally concluded its case-in-chief in the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy trial on Monday.
Five Proud Boys, including the group’s leader, Enrique Tarrio, are accused of conspiring to “oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” on January 6, 2021. It is Attorney General Merrick Garland’s most consequential case related to January 6; convictions will help build a similar case against Donald Trump largely based on his infamous “stand back and stand by” remark to the Proud Boys during an October 2020 presidential debate.
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House Republicans think federal agencies have become a weapon against their own apolitical employees and the constitutional rights of Americans. House Democrats think House Republicans have become a weapon against the prerogatives of federal agencies.
The parties traded laundry lists of grievances stemming from agency and congressional investigations, from the Benghazi attack to the Russia collusion hoax, at the first hearing Thursday of the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
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U.S. Representative Bob Latta (R-OH-5) is leading a charge by federal lawmakers against the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) relaxation of safety requirements for abortion drugs so consumers can access them by mail.
The Bowling Green-area lawmaker coauthored a letter with U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) and garnered signatures from 75 other members of Congress to insist that the FDA’s recent actions violate federal law. In particular, the legislators object to the agency’s approval of chemical abortion-inducing substances while no longer requiring in-person dispensing.
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Donald Trump for now certainly seems to have had more documents labeled classified at Mar-a-Lago in Florida than did Joe Biden at his various homes in Delaware.
Yet otherwise, the comparisons between the two cases, contrary to popular punditry, hardly favor Biden.
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A Texas congressman is asking the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) to investigate funding that foreign entities have bestowed on the University of Pennsylvania.
Last week, U.S. Representative Lance Gooden (R-TX-5) authored a letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in which he noted that $51 million flowed to the Philadelphia Ivy League university from non-American sources in 2021 and 2022. Of those donations, $14 million came from unnamed Chinese or Hong Kong entities and $2.4 million came from Saudi Arabia.
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The Justice Department found six new classified documents inside President Joe Biden’s Delaware home during a search by government lawyers, the president’s attorney announced Saturday night. The discovery during a day-long search Friday marked the fifth time since November that classified materials have been found in an office or home of the 46th president.
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When Republicans question Attorney General Merrick Garland on the shocking arrest of a Catholic father, Mark Houck’s lawyer wants the Houck family to be in the front row.
Peter Breen, an attorney with The Thomas More Society representing Houck, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview that the Justice Department sent “20-plus heavily armed federal agents with shields and long guns” to arrest Houck in late September “to intimidate pro-life people and people of faith.”
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In the five months since someone leaked a draft majority opinion by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade—which the high court officially did June 24—pro-life Americans have faced a wave of violent attacks.
Pro-abortion politicians from President Joe Biden on down haven’t just been silent about the attacks on pro-life organizations. They’ve helped fan the flames.
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Career federal prosecutors have reportedly recommended against charging GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz is a sex-trafficking investigation, telling Justice Department superiors that a conviction is unlikely.
The recommendation is in part because of credibility issues with the case’s two key witnesses, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post, which on Friday reported on the status of the roughly 2-year-old investigation.
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With one sentence, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon spoke for the majority of Americans who no longer have faith in the nation’s top law enforcement agency. “It is also true, of course, that even-handed procedure does not demand unquestioning trust in the determinations of the Department of Justice,” she wrote in her September 15 order denying the government’s request to prevent a third-party review of allegedly “classified” documents seized by the FBI during the raid of Mar-a-Lago last month.
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The Justice Department said Monday that agents discovered a “limited” number of potentially privileged documents during the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
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The court ruling clearing the way for Americans to get a glimpse into the reasoning behind the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s estate may shed some light on the state of the criminal investigation but likely won’t answer many of the substantial legal and political questions bedeviling America.
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The Justice Department on Wednesday announced the indictment of a Missouri man for allegedly threatening an election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County.
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Like Shakespeare’s King Lear, Donald Trump is a “man more sinned against than sinning.” Trump’s enemies invariably exceed him in excesses. They accuse him of dictatorial behavior even as they seek to turn America into a left-wing authoritarian regime. The wags who dubbed their feverish hatred of him “Trump Derangement Syndrome” were right. The condition is altogether real, spurring everything from the bogus Russia investigation to the equally outlandish FBI raid on his home.
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The Department of Justice on Wednesday announced charges against a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for allegedly plotting to murder former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
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Republican members of Ohio’s congressional delegation reacted with mistrust that the federal government had sufficient cause to conduct its surprise search of former President Donald Trump’s home at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, FL earlier this week.
The former president himself has characterized the move as “prosecutorial misconduct” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice to unfairly target President Joe Biden’s most high-profile adversary. Sources with knowledge of the event told the press that agents intended to gather evidence regarding whether Trump brought classified documents from the White House to his Palm Beach residence.
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The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Idaho over its law that greatly restricts abortion in the state, marking the first Biden administration lawsuit related to the Supreme Court recently striking down its decades-old Roe v. Wade decision that provided a constitutional right to abortion.
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A senior Justice Department official recently flagged by a U.S. senator in an FBI whistleblower probe into alleged politicization of prosecutions played a key role in the Lois Lerner IRS scandal a decade ago in which conservative Tea Party groups were improperly targeted for scrutiny, government emails and congressional evidence shows.
Richard Pilger, the current chief of the DOJ Elections Crime Branch of the department’s Public Integrity Section, engaged in discussions in 2010 and 2013 with Lerner and other IRS officials about ways to pursue criminal prosecutions of conservative nonprofits, the records show.
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In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents.
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To hear federal prosecutors tell it, Guy Wesley Reffitt almost single-handedly organized and led a bloodthirsty mob to overtake Congress on January 6, 2021.
One of the first protesters arrested in the Justice Department’s “shock and awe” dragnet of Donald Trump supporters, Reffitt was immediately indicted on numerous offenses. He spent more than a year in the D.C. gulag set aside for Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election under pretrial detention orders sought by the Justice Department—and he was the first January 6 defendant to stand trial in a city that voted nearly 93 percent for Biden in 2020.
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The final set of witnesses testifying before the January 6 select committee had the potential to shed more light on the government’s foreknowledge of the protest on Capitol Hill that day. Jeffrey Rosen, appointed by Donald Trump on Christmas Eve in 2020 to replace departing Attorney General William Barr, and two of his deputies gave opening statements and fielded questions for more than two hours last week.
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A former immigration judge who was fired by the Justice Department claimed that the Biden administration was packing immigration courts on Fox News Tuesday.
“The Biden Administration is trying to turn the court into essentially a free candy store so that anyone who appears in front of the immigration court winds up getting some benefits or winds up being allowed to stay in the United States,” Matthew O’Brien told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “That is not what the courts were designed to do.”
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An already overworked grand jury in Washington, D.C., presumably will be very busy in the days to come.
For nearly 18 months, at the behest of Joe Biden’s Justice Department, grand juries in the nation’s capital have issued a nonstop flood of criminal indictments against Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election on January 6, 2021; hundreds of people who peacefully entered the building as police stood by face serious felony charges punishable by decades in prison. Even those accused of low-level misdemeanors such as “parading” in the Capitol have been sentenced to months in jail.
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The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of Georgia has indicted two men on federal drug and money laundering charges for their participation in the facilitation of the importation and distribution of illegal narcotics, including fentanyl.
“Pills in the underground drug market and on the Dark Web are often diluted with dangerous and deadly substances like fentanyl, as was the case in this investigation,” said Robert J. Murphy, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta Field Division.
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