Free Republic

High-ranking FBI officials are spilling the beans on a massive cover up involving Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, the State Department and a scheme that steered untold billions of tax dollars to the Clinton Foundation and Clinton associates. Thomas Paine broke the story on his Patreon show on Tuesday night as well as his new Podcast. And the Justice Department is implicated too. Not to mention the disturbing implications surrounding the mysterious death of the FBI’s top financial crimes investigator who was privy to the details of the scheme while leading the Bureau’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation. Even by Washington...

Hillary Clinton accepted on Friday an invitation to testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in October. Chairman Trey Gowdy asked Clinton to appear before the committee earlier this week, according to campaign spokesman Nick Merrill. Merrill also disputed media reports that Clinton had handled classified information improperly on her private email server, which prompted two inspectors general to refer the matter to the Justice Department for a possible criminal investigation. "Friday began with the printing of a story that was false," Merrill said in a statement. "Entities from the highest levels of two branches of government have now...

Barely two weeks after Donald Trump took office, Eric Ciaramella – the CIA analyst whose name was recently linked in a tweet by the president and mentioned by lawmakers as the anonymous “whistleblower" who touched off Trump's impeachment – was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to remove the newly elected president from office, according to former colleagues. Sources told RealClearInvestigations the staffer with whom Ciaramella was speaking was Sean Misko. Both were Obama administration holdovers working in the Trump White House on foreign policy and national security issues. And both expressed anger over Trump’s new...

Senate Impeachment Trial LIVE

Last year, Democrats rushed through the impeachment hearings because they claimed the evidence was overwhelming and impeachment had to be done immediately. Today, they’re bellyaching about the need for more witnesses and evidence in order for there to be a fair trial. This is, of course, after the Democrats didn’t allow the president any of his own witnesses during the House impeachment inquiry, and chose not to subpoena more witnesses in favor of getting the vote to impeach over with, so, as Nancy Pelosi has said, President Trump would be “impeached for life.” As White House counsel Pat Cippollone noted...

Besides the transcript of the phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian president Zelensky, the second most important transcript is of Joe Biden's comments at a January 2018 appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. (See below.) Here's why: It's been interesting to hear Republican politicians, Trump-supporters, a few objective journalists, conservative political pundits, and even President Trump himself continue to argue that Joe Biden was the person responsible for threatening a quid pro quo to a group of Ukrainian government leaders involving a billion-dollar loan guarantee from the USA and a prosecutor investigating corruption at the Ukrainian energy company...

Senate Republicans defeated a series of amendments from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to subpoena the Trump administration for Ukraine documents on the opening day of the bitterly fought impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. Schumer offered several measures seeking a trove of documents from the White House, the State Department and the Office of Management and Budget that the Trump administration refused to turn over during the House's impeachment inquiry, but the amendments were thwarted one by one on 53-47, party-line votes. At around 7:30 p.m. ET, Schumer introduced his fourth amendment subpoenaing testimony from acting White House chief...

Rumors abound that small groups of Democrat and Republican senators are contemplating a “deal” on senate trial witnesses that end up with Democrats getting their wish to have John Bolton testify in exchange for Republicans calling the scummy Hunter Biden in to soil the Senate chamber. This would be a terrible deal for the President. Yes, there is no real doubt that Joe Biden and his son played a sleazy influence peddling game with the Ukraine while Biden was vice president. Yes, there should be legal consequences for both men, although we can be sure that our utterly corrupt Department...

“Urgent Concern” Determination by the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community A complaint from an intelligence-community employee about statements made by the President during a telephone call with a foreign leader does not involve an “urgent concern,” as defined in 50 U.S.C. § 3033(k)(5)(G), because the alleged conduct does not relate to “the funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence activity” un- der the authority of the Director of National Intelligence. As a result, the statute does not require the Director to transmit the complaint to the congressional intelligence committees. September 24, 2019 MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE GENERAL COUNSEL OFFICE...

Former DOJ official David Kris was picked Friday to oversee the FBI’s reforms of its surveillance procedures in the wake of a damning inspector general’s report. Kris was an ardent defender of the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page. He was also a vocal critic of Republicans who suggested the FBI misled the surveillance court in its applications to wiretap Page. In one essay, Kris endorsed a suggestion that Rep. Devin Nunes should face obstruction of justice charges. Nunes told the Daily Caller News Foundation the choice of Kris is “shocking and inexplicable.” former Justice Department official picked Friday to oversee...

President Trump asks: “Are these “dirty cops” going to pay a big price for the fraud they committed?” However, the only person who can honestly answer that question is the person in the mirror when President Trump brushes his teeth. Perhaps forgotten… In the spring of 2018 a group of congressional reps led by Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, Lee Zeldin and Bob Goodlatte, asked President Trump to declassify a series of documents so the public could see how former officials in the DOJ & FBI abused their offices and conducted political surveillance. In September...

Russia has recalled its ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, according to a report. The decision to send Kislyak back to Russia comes amidst multiple investigations into the ambassador's ties to President Trump's top aides during the 2016 presidential campaign, BuzzFeed reported. Trump's top aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former national security adviser Mike Flynn all had meetings with Kislyak that have since come under scrutiny as the FBI and multiple congressional committees continue to investigate the Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. More specifically, the meeting between Kislyak, Kushner and Flynn in...

Roughly a dozen GOP senators want to change the Senate’s rules and allow for lawmakers to dismiss articles of impeachment against President Trump before the House sends them over. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced the resolution on Monday, arguing the Senate's impeachment rules do not envision a scenario where the House would delay transmitting articles against a president, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has done. "The Constitution gives the Senate sole power to adjudicate articles of impeachment, not the House. If Speaker Pelosi is afraid to try her case, the articles should be dismissed for failure to prosecute and Congress...

Former Rep. Ron Paul said he wished President Trump would "flip-flop" his policy on Iran and criticized Trump's loyalty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia. "I think our country is not doing so well. Our foreign policy is in shambles," the Texas Republican said. "Unfortunately, the one place where I wish he would flip-flop every once in a while or change his policy completely is dealing with Iran. He is steady on it, he said it on the campaign. He's very loyal to Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia." Trump authorized airstrikes that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and...

Think about all of the media panel discussions on gun ownership you have watched; segments where second amendment advocates were ridiculed by media pundits for daring to bring up the possibility of the U.S. government using arms against U.S. citizens who hold opposing political views… There are hundreds of recent reference points. Now consider, earlier today U.S. House of Representatives Legal Counsel, Douglas Letter, argued in court it would be a possible remedy -for a conflict between branches of government- for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to order an armed “gun battle” between the House and the United States Department of Justice....

A Republican senator said he would vote to repeal the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act following a scathing report that found serious problems in how the FBI sought to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser. Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a longtime critic of the FISA program, told One America News Network on Saturday that the audit released last month by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz was a wake-up call to "stop allowing the American people to be subjected to this type of abuse and manipulation." "We should all be scared to death," Lee said. "We shouldn't rest until FISA is...

The historic fast-track impeachment of President J. Trump by the House Democrats may re-elect President Trump. The House followed party lines except for 4 Democrat representatives. The House vote is merely the charging document — tantamount to a grand jury indictment. The Senate is the trial court — the jury, the trier of fact.

The truth behind House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff’s role in engineering President Trump’s impeachment may soon come out. Judicial Watch, a nonprofit group promoting government transparency, is suing to get the whistleblower’s e-mails. That’s good news. Because no matter what comes of Trump’s Senate trial, Schiff should be held accountable for his devious methods. The public also needs the truth about the so-called whistleblower. Real whistleblowers deserve to be treated like heroes. But Eric Ciaramella — the man Judicial Watch and many media accounts have identified as the whistleblower and who doesn’t deny it — is no hero. To dignify...

Former US President Barack Obama is now in severe legal jeopardy, because the Russiagate investigation has turned 180 degrees; and he, instead of the current President, Donald Trump, is in its cross-hairs. The biggest crime that a US President can commit is to try to defeat American democracy (the Constitutional functioning of the US Government) itself, either by working with foreign powers to take it over, or else by working internally within America to sabotage democracy for his or her own personal reasons. Either way, it’s treason (crime that is intended to, and does, endanger the continued functioning of the...

The Democrats have taken a sinister, dangerous turn. The December 18 House votes (230-197 on abuse of power and 229-198 on obstruction of Congress) to impeach President Trump, one day shy of 21 years since Bill Clinton was impeached, followed one of American history’s most delicious ironies: the very date, December 10, that the House Judiciary Committee began formal debate, there was a reminder of the Ghost of Impeachments Past, none other than one Jerrold Nadler, who exactly 21 years earlier, in his opening statement in the Clinton vote, said, The effect of impeachment is to overturn the popular will...