Free Republic

A recent analysis published by the left-leaning Brookings Institution -- which highlights Pew data -- demonstrates significant erosion within Joe Biden's 2020 victory coalition, across multiple key demographics. It cites "major shifts away from Biden have occurred among Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters. Surprisingly, Trump appears to have gained more ground among college-educated Black and Hispanic voters than with less educated members of these groups. Equally surprising: Up to now, Trump has increased his support more among women than men." All survey data should be considered with a large grain of salt with half a year still remaining before the...

Misinformation about everything from election fraud to Covid-19 vaccines is reaching millions of Americans through a popular but opaque medium: podcasts. Many podcasts -- on-demand audio programs which users can listen to on smartphones -- bluntly promote false and unproven claims. The Brookings Institution found "War Room" from former Donald Trump aide Steve Bannon has aired the most false statements, amassing more than 135 million downloads while promoting allegations of vote rigging in the 2020 US election.

Twelve years ago, FBI agents in Baltimore sought to wiretap former Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko on suspicions he was spying for Russia. But the counterintelligence analyst they were assigned to work with ‒ Brian Auten ‒ told them he could not find their target and assumed the Russian national had fled back to Moscow. But Danchenko had not left the U.S., court documents show. He was living in the Washington area. In fact, he had been arrested in Maryland in 2013 by federal Park Police for being drunk and disorderly, something the FBI analyst could have easily discovered by...

The billionaire founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, is using his fortune to further shape journalism into partisan activism to help Democrats win elections. He is the nation’s leading financier of the “mis”- and “disinformation” industries and is now the largest private stakeholder in America’s legacy journalism schools. The most recent Twitter Files released by Matt Taibbi add a deeply disturbing new layer to the story. They show Newmark is at the very heart of an incestuous web of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and corporate media institutions operating in concert to censor political opponents on social media. Newmark is financing the...

TOKYO -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's expected meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken next week signals his desire to stabilize relations with Washington as he faces economic headwinds at home. The planned reception, first reported by the Financial Times and confirmed by U.S. sources, will likely set the tone for China's new foreign policy team -- top diplomat Wang Yi and Foreign Minister Qin Gang -- as they put together their diplomacy playbook. "If President Xi meets Secretary Blinken, it will reinforce to the Chinese government that he is personally engaged in steering the relationship and that any...

LEARNING MORE FACTS ABOUT THE FALSE TRUMP-RUSSIA-COLLUSION. HERE ARE THE BASICS:The latest: The Trial of Igor Danchenko, Christopher Steele’s source for his dirty dossier against then-candidate Trump.Why is this important? We are learning more on how government employees (FBI, DOJ) worked with a political party (the Democrats) to destroy their political opponents, i.e., Trump and his allies. Most probably, the Democrats and government employees who participated in this scam will get away with it, but at least Americans are going to know how they did it.

The FBI deceived the House, Senate and the Justice Department about the substance and strength of evidence undergirding its counterintelligence investigation of President Trump, according to a recently declassified document and other material. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta A seven-page internal FBI memo dated March 8, 2017, shows that “talking points” prepared for then-FBI Director James Comey for his meeting the next day with the congressional leadership were riddled with half-truths, outright falsehoods, and critical omissions. Both the Senate and the House opened investigations and held hearings based in part on the misrepresentations made in those FBI briefings, one of which...

Retired four-star Marine Gen. John Allen, is on administrative leave from his role as president of the Brookings Institute D.C. think tank after the FBI seized his electronic data on suspicion of lying to investigators and withholding evidence about his role in secretly lobbying for the government of Qatar. As a general, he commanded all U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan in the Obama administration. The court records, which were unsealed Tuesday, are the latest public evidence showing the FBI and Justice Department are conducting a large-scale investigation into the stateside influence of wealthy Arab nations including Qatar, Saudi Arabia...

host of foreign policy “experts” are now explicitly calling for “regime change” in Russia following Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine. Reminiscent of the establishment’s failed calls for regime change in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, whose military conflicts cost countless American lives and resources, the sentiment appears to be at odds with the majority of the country. Nearly three-quarters of Americans oppose playing a major role in the unfolding conflict.Benjamin Wittes, a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution, epitomized the establishment’s ultimate policy goal for Russia in a recent tweet: “Regime change: Russia.”

The Biden administration debacle in Afghanistan has convinced America’s enemies of the administration’s weakness and vulnerability. The timing of Vladimir Putin’s march on Ukraine is undoubtedly connected to the perception in Moscow of Washington’s lack of will to engage in a confrontation. Communist China is astutely waiting for the right time to seize Taiwan. Should Moscow achieve its objectives, Xi Jinping, China’s dictator would follow Putin’s example and act, knowing full well that the Biden administration would pay lip service to the violation of Taiwanese sovereignty, and perhaps demand UN sanctions, but ultimately, Washington would live with the new...

Romania and the United States have signed an agreement that would establish the first U.S. military bases in an Eastern European country from the former Soviet bloc. The United States already has the rights to a base in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, and is in the process of vacating one in neighboring Uzbekistan. With the United States already possessing a military presence in much of the world, what does it want with even more foreign bases? Washington, 7 December 2005 (RFE/RL) -- Romanian President Traian Basescu seemed as pleased to be hosting the bases as the Americans are...

Joy Behar told her co-hosts Monday on ABC’s “The View” that Presidents’ Day should not honor “losers” like former presidents Donald Trump and Richard Nixon. Co-host Whoopi Goldberg said, “Today is Presidents’ Day, but not everybody is on board with it. There’s an op-ed calling to take it off the calendar, claiming that most people aren’t even sure what they’re celebrating. It used to honor Presidents Washington and Lincoln, but it expanded to all presidents depending on what state you’re in.”

Politico argued on Monday that President’s Day should be canceled for including former President Donald Trump in the holiday. In an article titled, “It’s Time To Cancel Presidents Day,” the publication made the case that President’s Day is not woke enough, and that it “does a disservice to history” and “is less a show of genuine respect for American history than an insult to it.”

Since 2016, Hillary Clinton has been trolling Donald Trump on social media over his alleged ties to Russia, calling him “Putin’s Puppet.” But Special Counsel John Durham’s probe has uncovered the truth about who was Putin’s Puppet. It was Clinton herself. She and the Obama-Biden administration spy agency chiefs and their corrupt minions were unknowingly, or perhaps even knowingly, Putin’s little helpers in tearing our country apart. It turns out that Clinton and her top foreign policy advisor, Jake Sullivan, spread a bogus Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative. To enable this Soviet-style disinformation campaign, Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign hired a tech firm...

It did not seem possible for the Steele dossier – the collection of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories funded by the Clinton campaign; hyped by the US media establishment; and tapped by the FBI for surveillance and investigative leads – to get more embarrassing for all of those involved. But the indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Steele's key source, Igor Danchenko, offers 39 pages of new evidence that Russiagate — after five years of failed innuendo, debunked “bombshells”, and humiliating revelations — has no rock bottom. Danchenko is accused of making false statements to the FBI about his role in...

Last week, John Durham’s grand jury issued its third criminal indictment in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The person who was arrested may be obscure; the news may have been buried after Virginia’s bombshell election results; but Durham’s move is a big deal. It shows that the special counsel’s probe is methodically unraveling a huge conspiracy, seemingly engineered by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and implicating James Comey’s FBI, either as a willing participant or as utterly incompetent boobs. The latest indictment also damages the mainstream media, which is why so many news outlets have ignored or underplayed it. After all, they...

There are a few potentially important details surrounding the timeline leading to Bowe Bergdahl’s release that might deserve some discussion. Truth Revolt supplies some details on the timeline: This week’s [the week of Bergdahl’s release] secret diplomacy was not the first time the U.S. government had engaged the Taliban in an effort to negotiate a prisoner swap for the release of Bergdahl. In 2011, State Department officials held a series of meetings with Taliban leaders in Doha. In Congress, there was bipartisan opposition to any release of Guantanamo prisoners. After the negotiations were made public in early 2012 by Sen....

Special Counsel John Durham’s indictment of researcher Igor Danchenko yesterday brought many powerful leftists into the spotlight. Impeachment witness Fiona Hill was involved in bringing the right people together. Christopher Steele has long been credited with creating his infamous dossier but may have only been a front to distance Hillary Clinton’s campaign from the whole mess. Now we know a primary ringleader in the creation and subsequent use of the dossier. Charles Dolan, Jr., a PR consultant for the Clinton campaign, is the person referred to as “PR Executive-1” in the indictment. Fox News host Jesse Waters, sitting in for...

The nation argued for five years over the infamous “Steele dossier,” the document on which the Federal Bureau of Investigation relied to investigate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. It should have been called the Clinton dossier. Special counsel John Durham this week obtained an indictment of Igor Danchenko, a Russian who provided information for the dossier. ---SNIP--- Never forget the original claim. According to the FBI, Democrats and the media, Mr. Trump harbored secret and nefarious ties with Russia. We knew that because—as Mother Jones explained in a 2016 article that became the reigning story line— Christopher Steele was a “credible...

Attorney Ralph Martin confirmed Thursday that his client, DC-based communications executive Charles Dolan, Jr., is the person referred to as “PR Executive-1” in Special Counsel John Durham’s indictment of researcher Igor Danchenko. ... Durham indicted the Russian-born, U.S.-based Danchenko on five counts of lying to the FBI in connection with his role as a major source for Christopher Steele’s fraudulent “Russia dossier” on Donald Trump. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid the Fusion GPS opposition research firm, which hired Steele, to prepare the dossier and then provided it to the FBI. It became a basis for...