Free Republic

With less than two weeks left before the 2020 presidential election, former White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove said it would be more “effective” for the Trump campaign to focus on the economy as opposed to the Hunter Biden “scandal.” Rove made the statement on “America’s Newsroom” on Wednesday shortly after Trump 2020 Campaign National Press Secretary Hogan Gidley appeared on the program and explained the campaign strategy to focus on Hunter Biden and his international business dealings to attack Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

John Durham, the prosecutor tapped by Attorney General William Barr to investigate how Trump-Russia allegations emerged and spread within federal law enforcement, has already been looking into whether the FBI’s former top lawyer, James Baker, illegally leaked to reporters. In fact, the U.S. attorney from Connecticut appears to have begun that work more than seven months ago, to judge from an underreported transcript of an October congressional interview with Baker. The Baker interview, at which Durham was not present, suggests that the prosecutor nevertheless has some people very worried.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller was accused by a very credible witness today of rape at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City in 2010. A formal press conference is scheduled for Thursday at noon in Washington DC..... The Gateway Pundit obtained a copy of the charges. What we know: The woman is a “very credible witness.” Her story are corroborated. The incident happened in 2010 in New York City. The woman is a professional. [....] UPDATE:Here are the documents.

Undercover FBI agents paid for Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum's hotel room and his ticket to the Broadway musical Hamilton during a 2016 trip to New York City, according to a bombshell trove of records that raise new questions just two weeks before next month's election. The records include photos, a video and dozens of text messages between Gillum, former lobbyist Adam Corey and an undercover FBI agent, and they appear to refute what the mayor has said that trip and others. His campaign has maintained – and continued to maintain Tuesday – that Gillum believed the ticket came from his...

President Donald Trump's critics have spent the past 17 months anticipating what some expect will be among the most thrilling events of their lives: special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on Russian 2016 election interference. They may be in for a disappointment. That’s the word POLITICO got from defense lawyers working on the Russia probe and more than 15 former government officials with investigation experience spanning Watergate to the 2016 election case. The public, they say, shouldn’t expect a comprehensive and presidency-wrecking account of Kremlin meddling and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump — not to mention an explanation of...

The primary objective of any people who find themselves in the throes of a revolution is to find ways of diverting its logic from its worst conclusions. [....] The logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior. With Newtonian necessity, each such exercise causes a corresponding and opposite reaction. The logic’s force comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands. If that were the case, acquiescing to or compromising with them could cut it short. Rather, it comes from that which moves, changes,...

Aays results say she could be between 1/32nd and 1/1,024th Native American. Statement From Boston Globe: "Due to a math error, a story about Elizabeth Warren misstated the ancestry percentage of a potential 10th generation relative. It should be 1/1,024."

In a letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday, a group of Georgetown Prep alumni confirmed Brett Kavanaugh’s explanation of the term “Devil’s Triangle,” which he was asked about by the committee after it surfaced in his yearbook. The four alumni — DeLancey Davis, Bernard McCarthy Jr., Paul Murray, and Matthew Quinn — clarified that the term “devil’s triangle” refers not to a sexual act, as has been alleged by Kavanaugh’s detractors, but rather to a drinking game they played in high school. “‘Devil’s Triangle’ was a drinking game we came up with in high school. It was a...

...I just got home and see a DM about a new breaking story from NBC that supposedly makes Kavanaugh look bad. I see every reporter in my timeline tweeting it so I decide to check it out. [....] The story suggests that based on second-hand texts between two people who know Kavanaugh, he was seeking evidence to exonerate himself from an allegation from Debbie Ramirez. Again, no evidence he is asking anyone to lie or do anything wrong. Just exonerate him.

The rubber is about to meet the road for Senate Republicans. They have a simple choice: they can vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, thereby ending the baseless and unsubstantiated Democrat- and media-fueled smear campaign against him, or they can kiss House and Senate majorities goodbye for the next decade, if not longer. [....] A refusal to vote to confirm Kavanaugh in the face of a blatantly obvious Democrat smear campaign, orchestrated in concert with a compliant and obscenely partisan national media, will be strike three, and there will be no more at-bats. I have spent a career...

...Painting a full picture of Mifsud is difficult because after the 58-year-old professor was first identified by name in a Washington Post article in the weeks following Papadopoulos’ confession, he gave a few interviews to the international press, and then disappeared. Rumors circulated in the press that the Kremlin-linked professor may have been recalled to Russia or was liquidated. A new book by former colleagues of Mifsud’s – Stephan Roh, a 50-year-old Swiss-German lawyer, and Thierry Pastor, a 35-year-old French political analyst – reports that he is alive and well. Their account includes a recent interview with him. Their self-published...

For precisely what federal crimes is the president of the United States under investigation by a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department? It is intolerable that, after more than two years of digging — the 16-month Mueller probe having been preceded by the blatantly suspect labors of the Obama Justice Department and FBI — we still do not have an answer to that simple question. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein owes us an answer. To my mind, he has owed us an answer from the beginning, meaning when he appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller on May 17, 2017. The...

...And now that we have the precedent in the Cohen case for federal intrusion into the heretofore sacrosanct attorney–client privilege, we are waiting for Mueller to swoop into the Perkins Coie law firm and seize the records of the Clinton/DNC attorney, Marc Elias. The firm was paid $9 million during the 2016 election by the DNC and the Clinton campaign, and the payments to Fusion GPS flowed through Elias and were falsely reported to the FEC as “legal fees.” We are waiting for Mueller to confiscate the Elias records just as he did Michael Cohen’s, so there can be a...

On Wednesday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed a large cache of evidence against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and a former chief strategist for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was all over it. Tad Devine, Sanders' chief strategist, appears from exhibit 5 onward. Mueller listed a memo from 2006 involving Manafort, Devine, and former Ukrainian President Viktor Vanukovych, Russian President Vladimir Putin's puppet in Ukraine. Mueller's evidence lists email after email between Devine and Manafort, connecting them both to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Putin-connected operative whom Manafort described as "my Russian brain." Devine's name appears a total of 21 times in...

The CNN team wanted viewers to know there could be a very big development in the Trump Russia investigation. "CNN has learned why special counsel Robert Mueller wants the cooperation of former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates," anchor Alisyn Camerota said Friday. "Court documents indicate that Gates could be critical to nabbing even bigger fish in a collusion case involving the Kremlin." [....] So putting it all together, yes, Gates was "in contact with a Russian intelligence officer." And who knows? Perhaps they were plotting to fix the U.S. presidential election for President Trump. But the evidence that Mueller has...

Global bank Citi is starting a new commercial firearms policy within the U.S. "to do our part as a company to prevent firearms from getting into the wrong hands," the company said today. The new policy requires its new retail sector clients and partners to follow several practices: not sell guns to someone who didn't pass a background check; not sell bump stocks and high-capacity magazines; and not sell guns to people under 21 years old. Ed Skyler, Citi's head of global public affairs, said Citi has a few relationships with companies that manufacture guns, and for those relationships, "We...

For too many years, in too many places, our country has seen acts of gun violence that have resulted in heartbreaking losses. We are all too familiar with them and there is no need to recount them here. Over the same amount of time, we have waited for our grief to turn into action and see our nation adopt common-sense measures that would help prevent firearms from getting into the wrong hands. That action has sadly never come and as the weeks pass after the most recent mass shooting, it appears we are stuck in the same cycle of tragedy...

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was placed in custody on Tuesday as part of an investigation into allegations he received millions of euros in illegal campaign financing from the regime of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. A judicial source with direct knowledge of the case told The Associated Press that Sarkozy was being held at the Nanterre police station, north-west of Paris. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Sarkozy has vehemently and repeatedly denied wrongdoing in the case, which involves funding for his winning 2007 presidential campaign. Though...

In a lengthy letter to the inspector general of the Department of Justice (DOJ), two key senators demanded answers on whether anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steele was ever paid by the Russian government or other Russian sources. The letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked Michael E. Horowitz, the DOJ inspector general, for answers to 31 sets of detailed questions related to DOJ’s handling of various Russia-related probes in 2016 and 2017. “What connections are there between Mr. Steele and the Russian government or Russian intelligence community?” the senators asked. “Has Mr. Steele ever been...

...Isikoff and Corn suggest, without saying so explicitly, that the available circumstantial evidence makes the "golden showers" story very unlikely. Reconstructing Trump's time in Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant, Isikoff and Corn report that Trump stayed just one night in Moscow. (Trump did in fact stay in the Ritz Carlton presidential suite where Obama had been a few years earlier.) After arriving in Moscow, Trump attended a brief meeting at the hotel and then left for a day of meetings elsewhere. That night, an "exhausted" Trump went to a party at which he agreed to take part in...