Feds Crack Down on Pernicious Chinese Hacking Group that Targeted U.S. Gov’t, Dissidents

Hacker mugshots

The U.S. on Monday announced actions aimed at exposing a sweeping Chinese hacking campaign that has targeted U.S. government institutions, critical infrastructure, media and political dissidents for more than a decade.

Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology Company, Limited (Wuhan XRZ), served as a front company for China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), which deals with overseas policing and espionage, allowing Chinese hackers to hide a multitude of malicious cyber operations, the Treasury Department said after sanctioning the organization on Monday in a statement alongside other U.S. agencies and the United Kingdom. In an indictment unsealed separately, the Department of Justice accused Chinese nationals Zhao Guangzong, Ni Gaobin and five others for their role “in furtherance of [China’s] economic espionage and foreign intelligence objectives” over the past 14 years.

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DOJ Creates New Center to Help Local Officials Apply ‘Red Flag’ Laws Against Certain Gun Owners

Merrick Garland

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Saturday the creation of a new entity to train state and local officials on procedures to apply “red flag” laws that temporarily prevent certain individuals from owning a firearm.

The National Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) Resource Center is an entity created under the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP) that will both educate and assist local officials when they initiate legal proceedings to obtain “red flag” orders that rescind an individual’s right to bear arms based on the belief that they pose a risk of harm to themselves or others, according to the DOJ’s press release. The individuals to be trained are “law enforcement officials, prosecutors, attorneys, judges, clinicians, victim service and social service providers, community organizations, and behavioral health professionals.”

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Commentary: Was It Legal to Appoint Jack Smith in the First Place?

Jack Smith

Was Special Counsel Jack Smith illegally appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland and is his prosecution of former Pres. Donald Trump unlawful? That is the intriguing issue raised in an amicus brief filed in the Supreme Court by Schaerr Jaffe, LLP, on behalf of former Attorney General Ed Meese and two law professors, Steven Calabresi and Gary Lawson, in the case of U.S. v. Trump.

We won’t get an immediate answer to this question because on the Friday before Christmas, the Supreme Court issued a one-line order refusing to take up Smith’s request that the court review Trump’s claim of presidential immunity, which was denied by the trial court, in the federal prosecution being pursued by Smith in the District of Columbia. The special counsel had petitioned the court to take the case on an expedited basis, urging the justices to bypass review by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

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Commentary: House Republicans Must Expose the Full Truth of January 6

On a near-daily basis, the Department of Justice announces new arrests related to the events of January 6. Authorities arrested a Minnesota man on Wednesday for allegedly obstructing law enforcement and other minor offenses; U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, appointed by Joe Biden in 2021, trumpeted the news on his office’s X account.

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Julie Kelly Commentary: Trump Wants Cameras in the Courtroom but the DOJ Does Not, and They Are Ready to Fight About It

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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Commentary: Ken Buck Is Wrong About the J6 Defendants

U.S. Representative Ken Buck’s big wet sloppy kiss to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week could not have come at worse time for the Colorado Republican.

Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the federal court in Washington, D.C. was in the process of ordering prison time typically applied to murderers, drug traffickers, and serial child pornographers for five members of the Proud Boys convicted of no serious crime related to January 6. A well-known gun storage company faced backlash for assisting the FBI in yet another armed raid against a January 6 trespasser. And a young man from Utah took his own life just weeks after his arrest on four misdemeanors for his participation in January 6, at least the fourth known suicide of a Capitol protester.

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Commentary: The Bidens’ Existential Threats to the American Rule of Law

President Joe Biden, the Biden grifting conglomerate, the Department of Justice, and the FBI under its fourth consecutive weaponized director, are in danger of subverting the American system of law.

They are in various ways undermining the tradition of self-reported income tax computation and voluntary compliance.

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Voters Sour on Biden on Wide Range of Issues in New Poll showing ‘Buyers Remorse’

The latest Harvard/Harris survey has delivered a strong mix of bad news to President Joe Biden, with much of the public appearing to disagree with him on key policy issues, expressing concerns about his age and fitness and raising skepticism about the Justice Department’s handling of former President Donald Trump’s criminal indictment.

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Scandal-Plagued Civil Rights Group Launches Attack on Parental Rights Groups

The Alabama-based civil rights organization that made its name suing the Ku Klux Klan has put parental rights groups in its sights and for the first time has started tracking the “antigovernment movement” ideology in its annual “Year in Hate & Extremism” reports.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) added “reactionary anti-student inclusion groups” to a list of 702 “antigovernment extremism” groups it tracked in 2022, separate from 523 “hate” groups. The organization focused almost exclusively on just one in its annual report published this week: Florida-based Moms for Liberty, far and away the leader in chapters nationwide.

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Commentary: Is the Justice Department Blackmailing President Joe Biden?

by Robert Romano   In 2016, the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Hillary Clinton, had an FBI investigation because she was storing classified information on her private server for the convenience of reading her classified emails on a smartphone. Details of the investigation came out throughout the campaign, resulting in former…

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Five More Classified Documents Found at Biden’s Delaware Home

Another set of classified documents were found at President Joe Biden’s Delaware home on Thursday evening, the White House revealed on Saturday.

“Five additional pages with classification markings” were found during proceedings regarding earlier-discovered classified documents, Senior White House adviser Ian Sams said on Saturday.

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FBI Whistleblower: ‘Nobody I Know Signed Up’ to Investigate Parents Who Vented at School Board Meetings

An FBI whistleblower who was recently suspended said in an interview this week that he became a whistleblower last November because of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s email ordering the FBI to use Patriot Act counterterrorism tools to target parents at school board meetings.

Special Agent Kyle Seraphin, who was indefinitely suspended on June 1 after nearly six years with the Bureau, said that he was so disturbed by the directive, he went to his congresswoman’s office in New Mexico, and made a “protected disclosure.”

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Commentary: The FBI Is Now the ‘Federal Bureau of Intimidation’

Nothing symbolizes the decline of the American republic better than the weaponization of justice that we saw last week when the FBI raided the home of former President Trump.

And nothing better represents the divide that now exists between Democrats and Republicans than the fact that some people still have faith in the FBI.

Aren’t they paying attention? Heck, that’s like a citizen of the old Soviet Union saying they had faith in the KGB – yeah, to crush dissent and lock up opponents of the regime in a Siberian gulag.

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DOJ Workers Want Paid Travel for Out-Of-State Abortions

Some Department of Justice (DOJ) workers want to be paid if they take leave and travel to more permissive states to have abortions, according to CNN.

The employee-run DOJ Gender Equality Network sent an Aug. 4 letter to Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland and other high-ranking officials calling for the Biden administration to provide paid time off and fully cover travel expenses for staff going across state lines for “abortion care,” the outlet reported.

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AG Garland Pointedly Refuses to Say If He Would Prosecute Protesters Outside Justices’ Homes

Attorney General Merrick Garland is pointedly refusing to say if he’s open to prosecuting protesters who demonstrate outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes, which a growing number of office-holders are urging him to do.

Republican Governors Larry Hogan of Maryland and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and members of Congress want Garland to uphold federal law that prohibits actions to intimidate judges at their private residences.

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Tea Party Patriots Blast FBI for Monitoring Parents

Tea Party Patriots Action (TPPA) blasted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for allegedly using “threat tags” to monitor and investigate concerned parents that the FBI deemed unsafe.

According to a letter from GOP members of the House of Representatives, whistleblowers informed House Republicans that the government agency used the tags to launch investigations across the country.

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Judiciary Committee Letter Says Garland’s FBI Mobilized Against Parent Protestors

In a lengthy letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the House Judiciary Committee accuses the nation’s top attorney of lying under oath, and claims that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was deployed to monitor parents who have been protesting school board meetings nationwide. 

“It appears that the Biden Administration did in fact mobilize FBI counterterrorism resources to investigate parents for expressing protected political speech at school board meetings. This directly contradicts AG Merrick Garland’s sworn testimony,” said Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit group that advocates for parents rights. 

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Support Grows Among Republicans for Naming a Special Counsel to Investigate Hunter Biden

Nearly 100 House Republicans are urging Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals, saying they had the hallmarks of an influence peddling scandal.

The letter led by Reps. Tom Rice (R-S.C.) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the chair of the House GOP Study Committee, comes as the U.S. attorney in Delaware enters his third year investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes, foreign lobbying and money movements.

In all, 95 House GOP members signed the letter.

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Lawmakers Demand Attorney General Merrick Garland ‘Conduct Comprehensive Investigation’ into Deaths of Five Late-Term Babies Aborted in Washington, DC

House Pro-Life Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) led 69 members of Congress in a letter Friday that calls on Attorney General Merrick Garland to “conduct a comprehensive investigation” into the deaths of five late-term babies, apparently aborted in Washington, DC, to determine whether federal crimes were committed by the abortionist.

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Congress Requests DOJ Investigate Amazon for Alleged ‘Criminal Conduct’

Bipartisan members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday requesting an investigation into Amazon for alleged criminal obstruction of the committee’s probe into the tech giant.

The letter, sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland, alleged Amazon misled committee members and engaged in “potentially criminal conduct” during a 15-month investigation into competition in digital markets. The letter was signed by House Judiciary Committee Chair Democratic New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, Democratic Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, Republican Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, Democratic Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz.

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14 States Sue Biden to Divulge Secret Contacts About School Board ‘Domestic Terrorism’ Letter

The Biden administration is stonewalling 14 states seeking documents preceding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s controversial Oct. 4 memo directing the FBI to prosecute threats against school boards, according to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed Friday.

Garland acted in response to a Sept. 29 letter to President Biden from the National School Boards Association (NSBA), widely perceived as equating parental activism with “domestic terrorism.”

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Biden DOJ Hurts Americans’ Trust by ‘Doing Bidding of the Radical Left,’ Former Official Warns

Attorney General Merrick Garland

Attorney General Merrick Garland has undercut his own promise to restore trust in the Justice Department by “doing the bidding of the radical left,” such as suing to block voter ID laws and launching FBI probes of school parents, a former top agency lawyer says.

Gene Hamilton, who served as counselor to Trump-era Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr, told Just the News he hoped Garland would focus the department on core law enforcement priorities and away from ideological agendas but has been sorely disappointed.

“For all of his rhetoric, and for all of his talk about returning the Department of Justice to norms and all of those other such things, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has betrayed the trust of the American people,” Hamilton said during an interview Friday on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

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Tom Cotton Freezes Confirmation of DOJ Nominees over Failure to Address Antifa Riots

At least eight of Joe Biden’s nominations for the Department of Justice have been placed on hold by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), due to the Department’s failure to answer Cotton’s questions about its inaction over the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

As reported by Fox News, Cotton’s criticisms have focused specifically on the DOJ’s failure to properly defend a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, which ended up under siege by far-left domestic terrorists on a daily basis throughout 2020 and even into 2021. Cotton has already sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland pointing out that, on top of letting the courthouse itself be attacked, the DOJ has not offered any legal assistance to several U.S. Marshals who have been sued for defending the courthouse against rioters.

“These courageous officers were attacked by left-wing street militants with weapons such as mortar fire, ball bearings, and blinding lasers,” Cotton’s letter reads in part. “A refusal to represent these Deputy Marshals would violate the Department’s long-standing practice — not to mention its moral duty — to defend law-enforcement officers when they’re sued for actions in the line of duty.”

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Michigan Senate Republicans Urge State’s School Board Association to Break with National Organization

Senator Jim Runestad

A group of Republican lawmakers in the Michigan State Senate signed a letter written by Senator Jim Runestad (R-White Lake), urging the Michigan Association of School Boards (MASB) to withdraw its membership and affiliation from the National School Board Association (NSBA).

In the letter, the state lawmakers expressed concern over the direction of local schooling and the role parents are allowed to play in their children’s education.

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National School Boards Association Removes Letter Comparing Parents to Domestic Terrorists from Its Website

The National School Boards Association scrubbed its letter, which compared the actions of concerned parents at school board meetings to those of domestic terrorists, from its website.

The deleted National School Boards Association (NSBA) letter, addressed to President Joe Biden’s administration, sparked outrage and backlash from parents across the country for requesting federal government intervention. The letter suggested the use of statutes, such as the USA PATRIOT Act, to stop threats or violence directed toward school board members over actions that it said could be “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” according to the Sept. 29. letter.

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National School Boards Association Coordinated with White House on Letter Calling Parents ‘Domestic Terrorists’

A new timeline of events in the controversial National School Boards Association (NSBA) letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland shows that the NSBA was in contact with the White House before sending the letter to President Joe Biden.

Emails obtained by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the group called Parents Defending Education request show that NSBA President Viola Garcia sent a memo to state NSBA chapters on October 12 describing its work against parents who were protesting at school board meetings nationwide. Some of those protests regarded mask mandates and liberal activism within schools.

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Justice Department Sues Texas over New Election Law

The Department of Justice filed a complaint against Texas on Thursday, alleging certain provisions in the state’s new election law violated federal voting legislation.

The complaint alleged that certain provisions in Texas’ new election law, known as SB 1, violate Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act by denying voters, especially those with disabilities, “meaningful assistance” in the poll booth. The complaint also alleged that Texas’ law requiring the rejecting of ballots with certain errors that the DOJ claims are inconsequential violates the Civil Rights Act.

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Commentary: Activating the ‘Secret Police’ to Aid School Boards

The FBI will investigate threats and intimidation against school board members, administrators, teachers, and staff, United States Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Oct. 4. In so doing, Garland claimed federal jurisdiction over local law enforcement, in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution.

This power grab by the AG supposedly came as a response to a letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA), a leftist advocacy group with vast influence over the nation’s school boards. To gain some insight into how this ukase or edict is playing out, I attended a school board meeting in the charming village of Greenwich (“It’s Greeen-wich, not Gren-itch”) in northern New York state.

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Attorney General Garland Denies Knowledge of Claims that Zuckerberg ‘Bought’ 2020 Election

During Wednesday’s hours-long grilling of Attorney General Merrick Garland by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, which mainly focused on the events of January 6 and Garland’s directive to investigate parents who speak School Board meetings, one critical question went almost unnoticed. 

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) questioned Garland about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $400 million spending spree during the 2020 election. The money was allocated through Zuckerberg-funded non-profits the Center for Tech and Civic Life, described by Influence Watch as an “organization [that] pushes for left-of-center voting policies and election administration,” and the Center for Election Innovation and Research. 

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Michigan Parents Sue Attorney General Garland over Plan to Target Anti-School Board Protests

On Tuesday, a lawsuit was filed against Attorney General Merrick Garland by a group of parents in Michigan, with the intention of blocking his plans to use the Department of Justice (DOJ) to target them for protesting school board meetings, as reported by the New York Post.

The parents are from Saline, Michigan, and are represented by the American Freedom Law Center. The civil suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and seeks to protect the parents’ “fundamental right to freedom of speech, to direct the education of their children, and to be free from unlawful discrimination based upon their political and religious beliefs and views.”

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Pro-Trump Cheney Opponent Speaks Out Against Mask Tyranny in Schools

After a battle over masks at Laramie High School in Wyoming ended with a 16-year-old student being arrested for trespassing at her own school, Harriet Hageman, a pro-Trump challenger to Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY-01) issued a statement condemning mask mandates in schools. 

Grace Smith was first suspended for two days from Laramie High School for refusing to wear a mask. After serving her suspension, she returned to school, again maskless. She then politely refused to leave school grounds, and was arrested by officers from the Laramie Police Department. The arrest even triggered a brief lockdown at the school. 

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Navy Engineer, Wife Charged with Trying to Pass Nuclear Submarine Secrets to Foreign Power

The U.S. Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint Sunday alleging that a Navy engineer and his wife repeatedly tried to pass secrets about U.S. nuclear submarines to a foreign power in a plot thwarted by an undercover FBI agent.

Jonathan Toebbe, 42, and his wife Diana, 45, both of Annapolis, Md,. were arrested Saturday in West Virginia by the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service on espionage-related charges of violating the Atomic Energy Act, officials said.

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Commentary: Merrick Garland’s Disdain for Middle America

Are you upset that school officials force your kids to mask outdoors and teach them to hate themselves because of their skin color? You might be a terrorist, according to the Department of Justice.

Attorney General Merrick Garland this week issued a memo directing his agency to investigate and counter alleged threats to school board officials and teachers. The memo was prompted by spirited protests happening at school board meetings across the country. Parents are fed up with left-leaning bureaucrats and their insidious ideas for kids. It’s no surprise some parents get very passionate about these issues—it’s their own kids they’re trying to protect.

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Commentary: The Collectivist Presumption Against Parents

Like religion, the traditional family poses a rival authority to liberalism’s arrogant conception of the state. Consequently, liberals view religious freedom and parental authority with suspicion and often hostility. Liberals are keenly aware that the fulfillment of their statist goals — pushing propaganda about abortion, transgenderism, critical race theory, socialism, and so on — depends upon isolating children from the influences of religion and family.

It is this view that drives liberalism’s opposition to parental consent and notification laws and its distaste for private education and homeschooling. Last year, a Harvard law professor argued for a ban on homeschooling, saying that it represents a danger to a “democratic society.”

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‘Totalitarian Tyranny’: Parents Groups Slam Attorney General Garland for Turning FBI on Their Activism

Parents who protest public school policies on race, gender and COVID-19 are crying foul after Attorney General Merrick Garland promised to “discourage” and prosecute “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school boards, administrators, teachers and staff.

His “mobilization of [the] FBI against parents is consistent with the complete weaponization of the federal government against ideological opponents,” Rhode Island mother Nicole Solas, who is waging a public records battle with her school district over race-related curriculum, told Just the News.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland Instructs FBI to Investigate Alleged ‘Threats’ by Parents Against School Officials

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field office, Minneapolis Division, at 1501 Freeway Boulevard in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Monday that the Department of Justice and the FBI are launching an effort to address the alleged increase in “threats” made against school officials.

According to a statement from the Department of Justice, Garland has directed “the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend.”

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Commentary: Justice Department Should Defend Unborn Not Abortion

Leave it to Attorney General Merrick Garland, once seemingly destined for the Supreme Court. When choosing between America’s most vulnerable members and most determined political lobby, he picked the abortion industry over millions of babies.

He didn’t put it that way, of course. He explained, “The department will provide support from federal law enforcement when an abortion clinic or reproductive health center is under attack.”

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Republicans Demand Update on Long-Awaited Durham Report

After two years of waiting for a federal report on allegations of Democratic spying on the Trump campaign, Republicans are demanding answers.

More than 40 Republican U.S. senators sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland Thursday requesting the release of the Durham report, the long-awaited results of an investigation into the controversial origins of the FBI investigation into Russian collusion.

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DOJ Legal Threats Against State Election Audits Suggest Unease about Potential Findings

The U.S. Department of Justice’s recent guidance on the process of state election audits indicates that the federal agency is apparently deeply unsettled by the string of election audits and election reform efforts carried out by state Republicans since last November’s presidential election.

The guidance, distributed last week and directed in part toward state legislatures, instructs investigators on “how states must comply with federal law” when conducting election audits. It also addresses efforts by some state legislatures to repeal emergency COVID-19 voting rules that other states have in some cases sought to make permanent.

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Biden DOJ Sues Texas over Executive Order Banning Transportation of Sick Illegal Aliens

The Biden Justice Department on Friday sued Texas and Gov. Greg Abbott seeking to overturn an executive order prohibiting the ground transportation of illegal aliens who could be carrying COVID-19.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s team argued in U.S. District Court that Abbott’s order interferes with the federal government’s ability to address immigration.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he would contest the order and “keep President Biden out of Texas business.”

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Police Groups, Unions to Argue Against Minneapolis Police Racism Probe in Meeting with DOJ

Minneapolis Police Department

Top police organizations and unions will reportedly express concern to Attorney General Merrick Garland about his racism probe into the Minneapolis Police Department, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The groups are expected to confront Garland and other Justice Department (DOJ) officials about the investigations during a meeting Friday afternoon, the WSJ reported. While many of the groups’ leaders have endorsed various police reforms since George Floyd’s death last year, they worried a broad probe would be unproductive and hurt rank-and-file officers.

“We recognize that there needs to be more oversight, there needs to be some reform in place, but we need DOJ to work with us because there has to be buy-in from the line men and women who do this job,” David Mahoney, president of the National Sheriffs’ Association and sheriff of Dane County, Wisconsin, told the WSJ.

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