Free Republic

Politico is so anxious to destroy President Donald Trump’s presidency that it has contradicted itself. On October 18, 2019, Politico’s Quint Forgey wrote:

Adam Schiff is at it again, tampering with witnesses. Yesterday, he got caught trying to shove words into a witness's mouth, to make him say things he didn't want to say. I wrote about that here.Today, he's doing something just as bad, getting together with other witnesses and working out a pre-coordinated story for the coming show trial. According to Breitbart News: Itinerary for a trip to Ukraine in August organized by the Atlantic Council think tank reveals that a staffer on Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a meeting during the trip with acting U.S....

So much for the claim from Joe Biden that his foreign-cash-magnet son Hunter "did nothing wrong." Turns out the 'wrong' was all over the place as a U.S. career diplomat, Deputy Secretary of State George Kent, tried hard to raise red flags with Biden himself about Hunter's little Ukrainian cash cow and instead of get taken seriously, got told by Biden's men to beat it. Here's the Washington Post: A career State Department official overseeing Ukraine policy told congressional investigators this week that he had raised concerns in early 2015 about then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son serving on the...

CNN claimed Thursday that the White House “admits to quid pro quo with Ukraine.” That appeared to be the opposite, in fact, of what happened during a press conference with acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney told reporters that there had been no quid pro quo, as described by those pursuing his impeachment — that President Donald Trump had not withheld aid from Ukraine until it agreed to investigate his potential 2020 presidential rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

In a secret interview, Rep. Adam Schiff, leader of the House Democratic effort to impeach President Trump, pressed former United States special representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker to testify that Ukrainian officials felt pressured to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter as a result of Trump withholding U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Volker denied that was the case, noting that Ukrainian leaders did not even know the aid was being withheld and that they believed their relationship with the U.S. was moving along satisfactorily, without them having done anything Trump mentioned in his notorious July 25 phone conversation...

Summary: Erdogan's "invasion" of Syria is not what the media is reporting. Turkey has 3.6 million refugees from the Syrian Civil War, and has prevented them from flooding Europe, causing severe economic hardship. This is the largest number of refugees held by any nation. If Erdogan can be believed, and he has been talking about this for a few years, this "invasion" is about creating 20 x 300 mile zone to create a zone to repatriate Syrian refugees. The Kurds are largely unaffected by Turkey's move. Turkey cannot hold millions of refugees forever. They can send them to Syria or...

Hunter Biden's only qualification for obtaining a seat on the Amtrak board of directors in 2006 was that he often rode trains. That's according to his father Joe Biden's Delaware colleague in the Senate, Tom Carper, who offered the sole nomination speech for the younger Biden when his name was presented in the Senate Commerce Committee. In his prepared remarks, Carper said Biden would be an "excellent addition" to the board, but was unable to list any reason beyond his frequent use of trains. "More significantly, Hunter has spent a lot of time on Amtrak trains," Carper said after listing...

The cease-fire established between Turkey and Syria with the help of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence was an "amazing accomplishment," but the situation is not yet fully rectified, Karl Rove said Thursday on "The Daily Briefing." "It's a pretty amazing accomplishment by Pompeo and Pence to get the cease-fire," he said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday she was delivering a simple message to President Trump as she stood and departed a contentious White House meeting the previous day: "At that moment, I was probably saying, 'All roads lead to Putin.'" The picture of Pelosi standing opposite the president as she prepared to leave the Wednesday meeting quickly went viral, after Trump tweeted it out and Pelosi's office later made it the cover photo of her own Twitter account. In the picture, Pelosi is the only woman at the table, the only person standing opposite a seated row of men....

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow – a pioneer of Putin-ate-my-homework journalism – has predictably mused that Donald Trump is considering pulling troops out of Afghanistan on the orders of Russia’s president. The evidence speaks for itself. In segment on her critically-acclaimed show, “Watch Me Scream ‘Russia’ Until I Dislocate My Jaw”, Maddow made an adroit observation of seismic proportions: Reports that Donald Trump is mulling a partial withdrawal from Afghanistan emerged only hours after Vladimir Putin said that the US keeps promising to leave the country but never does! In layman’s terms: Putin ordered Trump to pull troops out of Afghanistan, during...

On Thursday at her weekly press briefing, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said the American people were “not going to decide” if President Donald Trump should be impeached. When asked about the impeachment timeline, Pelosi said, “I keep saying to people, impeachment is about the truth and the Constitution of the United States. Any other issues that you have, disapproving of the way the president has dealt with Syria, whatever the subject is, reluctance, the cowardice to do something about gun violence, the cruelty of not wanting to help our Dreamers and transgender people, the denial about the climate crisis...

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney acknowledged that he held up $390 million in security aide for Ukraine in order to pressure the country into pursuing a 2016 election probe being demanded by President Trump. Trump and top administration officials have vigorously denied any 'quid pro quo' with Ukraine following a whistleblower's report that the White House was demanding a probe of the Bidens as well as Trump's conspiracy theory that the DNC server might be in Ukraine's possession. In a rare White House briefing, Mulvaney denied any knowledge of a company linked to Hunter Biden – but...

What a terrible betrayal of the Syrian Kurds we saw on Wednesday when the cowards in the U.S. House of Representatives offered up a bipartisan vote of 354 to 60 to condemn President Trump for withdrawing from Syria, including two-thirds of Republicans.

Rick Perry, the energy secretary who has drawn scrutiny for his role in the controversy surrounding President Trump’s efforts to push Ukraine officials to investigate the son of a political rival, on Thursday told the president he would resign from the cabinet. The Perry resignation had been anticipated for several weeks, even before the news emerged of his involvement in efforts to pressure the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate a company that had worked with Hunter Biden, the younger son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Itinerary for a trip to Ukraine in August organized by the Atlantic Council think tank reveals that a staffer on Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a meeting during the trip with acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, now a key witness for Democrats pursuing impeachment. The Atlantic Council is funded by and works in partnership with Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Taylor has been called by House Democrats to appear next week to provide a deposition as part of the investigation...

V.P.Video

MOSCOW, Oct 17 (Reuters) - The Kremlin on Thursday questioned the tone of a letter sent by U.S. President Donald Trump to his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan, saying it was highly unusual for correspondence between heads of state. The White House on Wednesday released the Oct. 9 letter, in which Trump urged Erdogan to halt Turkey's cross-border offensive into northeast Syria, saying "Don't be a tough guy" and "Don't be a fool!"

Turkey has agreed to a ceasefire in northern Syria between its forces and their allied rebels and U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds, Vice President Mike Pence announced.

Former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon told FNC's Maria Bartiromo in an interview on "Sunday Morning Futures" that he doesn't think any of the declared Democratic candidates have the ability to beat President Trump in the 2020 election. Bannon suggests that Democrats may have to recruit Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, or Michael Bloomberg to stop Trump from being re-elected. STEVE BANNON: I said this last week, Maria, I don't see anybody on that stage right now that can take President Trump one on one. I pride myself, he's called me his star pupil, his top pupil, I've been studying this...

Did Gordon Sondland throw Donald Trump “under the bus” in his opening statement to House investigators this morning, or just point out the obvious? The ambassador didn’t spare Rudy Giuliani, at any rate, in expressing his “disappointment” over Trump’s decision to delegate Ukrainian diplomacy to his personal attorney. That’s not quite connecting any dots, however, and Sondland also soundly rejects the “quid pro quo” hypothesis being advanced by House Democrats: Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, will tell Congress that he was told by President Trump that he had to help his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani...