Free Republic

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen Republican consultants and pundits publicly fretting about whether Donald Trump will hurt the GOP’s brand. What a joke! When do those people start worrying about what Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and the rest of the GOP’s leadership are doing to the Party’s brand? Just this week-end, McConnell shut down efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, fight sanctuary cities, kill Obamacare and stop Iran from getting nukes because they might get in the way of pushing corporate welfare. At this point, Boehner and McConnell might as well just wear the logos of the corporations and...

The U.S. Department of Justice has been asked to open a criminal investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information in emails she sent through her unauthorized, insecure private email server.

PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. (AP) — A northern New York prison worker admitted Tuesday to smuggling hacksaw blades in frozen hamburger meat to two killers who later broke out and spent more than two weeks on the run. Joyce Mitchell, a tailor shop instructor at Clinton Correctional Facility, wept as she pleaded guilty to charges of first-degree promoting prison contraband, a felony, and misdemeanor fourth-degree criminal facilitation. Mitchell, 51, faces a sentence of 2⅓ years to 7 years in prison under terms of a plea deal with prosecutors. A sentencing date was not announced. Her lawyer said his client won’t be able...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump may have raped his ex-wife Ivana Trump, according to a 1993 biography of the real estate mogul uncovered by The Daily Beast. Trump's attorney on Monday denied the allegation, claiming “you cannot rape your spouse.” “You’re talking about the front-runner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as private individual, who never raped anybody," Michael Cohen, the Trump Organization’s special counsel, told The Daily Beast. "And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.” The biography, Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, by Harry Hurt III, details...

A lawyer and spokesman for current Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump issued a series of vulgar threats to a reporter on Monday, while falsely claiming that it was legal for a husband to rape his wife in New York. Michael Cohen, special counsel for the Trump Organization, threatened Canadian-American reporter Tim Mak of the Daily Beast with untold legal consequences in response to an article that resurfaced allegations that Trump had raped his then-wife Ivana. ... The Daily Beast story repeated details of a deposition relayed by a Trump biographer, who described the mogul as forcing himself on his then-wife...

Judge: Citizens United Must Disclose Donor Information to NY NEW YORK — Jul 27, 2015 A nonprofit conservative organization advocating for less government must disclose information about its major donors to New York's attorney general if it wants to solicit money in the state, a judge said Monday. U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein said it appeared that Citizens United will not succeed in a lawsuit it brought on First Amendment grounds to try to block disclosures of the information to Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, including names, addresses and the total contributions of major donors. The judge noted that there is...

Bill Clinton sexual-harassment accuser Kathleen Willey has launched an anti-Hillary Clinton website titled “A Scandal A Day.” The site is partially aimed at recruiting other women who may have been assaulted by the former president. Calling Hillary Clinton “without a doubt the most corrupt politician that this nation has ever seen,” Willey announced the launch of her new website Sunday on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia’s NewsTalk 990 AM and online. Willey, the former volunteer aide to Bill Clinton who says she was sexually harassed by the president in the 1990s,...

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, sent out a fundraising email on Monday condemning congressional efforts to investigate Planned Parenthood's practice of harvesting and selling aborted baby organs to biotech companies. Gillibrand writes that the congressional investigation of Planned Parenthood "makes my head explode." "I’m confident that if we had more women leading in Washington, we would not still be dealing with the right wing’s efforts to trample women’s health care," she says. The fundraising email concludes by urging supporters: "Please, click here to give every dollar you can right now."

An FDNY recruit is getting a third chance to pass the training academy after collecting top firefighter pay for a year in desk jobs, sources told The Post. Choeurlyne Doirin-Holder, 39 — one of four women among 320 current probies in training — failed midway through a Fire Academy class in 2013, and returned to her former job as an EMT. After entering another class in early 2014, she dropped out because of an injury. But the FDNY kept Doirin-Holder on payroll.

The story certainly seemed like a blockbuster: A criminal investigation of Hillary Rodham Clinton by the Justice Department was being sought by two federal inspectors general over her email practices while secretary of state. It’s hard to imagine a much more significant political story at this moment, given that she is the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. The story – a Times exclusive — appeared high on the home page and the mobile app late Thursday and on Friday and then was displayed with a three-column headline on the front page in Friday’s paper. The online headline...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Family Leadership Summit. Donald Trump is still the clear front-runner of the 2016 GOP presidential field. A new Economist/YouGov poll released on Friday actually showed Trump gaining support in the last week, despite a controversy over his comments questioning Sen. John McCain's (R-Arizona) status as a "war hero." According to the poll, the number of registered Republican primary voters who responded that Trump is their first choice jumped from 15% at the beginning of July to 28% last week. Another 10% of voters pick him as their second choice. That puts the real-estate...

Inside El Chapo’s secret Mexican prison escape tunnel (VIDEO) 7/27/15 | by Chris Eger Vice News traveled south of the border and dropped down the most famous underground tunnel in the world– that used by a Mexican drug lord to vacate the premises. The figurehead of the Sinaloa cartel, drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, released himself on his own recognizance on July 11, via a tunnel from Mexico’s only maximum-security prison in Mexico. It took him a year to arrange his self-parole and Vice went to Altiplano prison– where they found a different tale than what the local media...

Jeb Bush hasn't campaigned for himself in this part of Florida since 2002, but on Monday, he will return here to reconnect with former supporters and make an overt appeal to the region's fast-growing Latino population. In a first as a presidential candidate, the Republican plans to sit for a Spanish-language interview with a Telemundo news anchor. He will meet with dozens of mostly Hispanic evangelical pastors at a mega-church, visit a small business owned by a Mexican immigrant and try to introduce himself to the hundreds of thousands of people who have moved to this transient region in the...

This new poll finding, courtesy of CNN, is not all that surprising, but it is very illuminating of the demographic challenges the GOP faces right now: A big majority of Republicans believes that the government’s main focus on immigration should be not just on stopping the flow of illegal immigrants, but also on deporting those already here. The poll asks:

MSNBC host and NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell stated that when she spoke to intelligence officials at a security conference, “nobody can give an explanation for why a cabinet secretary would have a private email system other than to thwart inquiries, FOIAs” on Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Mitchell said that it’s possible that the impact of Clinton’s emails on her campaign has been underestimated. She continued, “Look, you have two inspectors general, and they are referring to this to the Justice Department. Now, you can try to confuse it, and there’s been a lot of...

On Sunday, New York City’s AM 970 host John Catsimatidis had former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) on his “The Cats Roundtable” program to talk about the Iran nuclear deal. Lieberman started off by ripping the White House for its proposed Iran nuke deal by saying, “First, it’s a deal with somebody we can’t trust. Why? Because they have said for years and continue to say even after the agreement was signed, ‘Death to America.'”

A day after Donald Trump announced the formation of “Veterans For Trump,” a small New Hampshire-based coalition that supports the bellicose business mogul’s bid for the White House, at least two of the veterans named as supporters distanced themselves from team Trump. The announcement of the veterans group came five days after Trump said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is only considered a war hero because he was captured by the enemy during the Vietnam War. “I don’t know anything about it,” said Ernie Fusi, a World War II veteran whose name was still listed among the 51 veteran supporters on...

Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Rand Paul are in. Donald Trump is out.A total of 14 candidates will participate in the Voters First Republican Presidential Forum on Monday, Aug. 3, at St. Anselm College. The two-hour forum,intended to highlight the importance of the first-in-the-nation primary,along with the Iowa caucuses and South Carolina’s early primary.“I am in the North Country today,” Bush said Thursday,“meeting with voters about my message of reforming the culture in Washington. I’m looking forward to participating in the August 3rd forum. It’s clear it is a great opportunity to engage with Granite Staters about the important issues...

An Episcopal priest shocked his Queens congregation recently when he left his wife and married someone else — a much younger man. The Rev. Juan Andres Quevedo-Bosch, 59, the archdeacon of Queens and rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Astoria, announced over Facebook last week that he got married in a Los Angeles church. The Cuban-born prelate was pictured on a beach with the caption: “I’m in Miami Beach with my new husband. God is good.”

Mayor de Blasio is a big fan of presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders — because the Vermont senator is a proud “Democratic socialist.” [Snip] De Blasio was quick to correct CNN’s Carol Costello after she called Sanders a “socialist,” telling her the senator is a “Democratic socialist.” “I think there’s a lot to like in that title,” he gushed.