Free Republic

Longtime journalist Bob Woodward said Monday that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly “are not telling the truth” when they deny making disparaging statements about President Donald Trump attributed to them in his new book, “Fear.” Kelly is quoted calling Trump “an idiot,” and Mattis is quoted saying Trump has the understanding of “a fifth or sixth-grader,” but they’ve said they didn’t make those statements. Woodward, asked on Monday on NBC’s “Today” show about their denials, said, “They are not telling the truth.” He said “these are political statements to protect their jobs.” The...

A slew of bad economic headlines last week made it official: The Obama economy has failed. As noted in the Wall Street Journal, “Even seven years after the recession ended . . . in terms of average annual growth, the pace of this expansion has been by far the weakest of any since 1949.” --SNIP-- Some voters will care about plans, policies, experience and character, and among those voters, Trump will likely get blown away. But if the state of the economy controls the outcome of the election, Clinton could have a big problem on her hands.

When police found Carlos Cruz-Echevarria dead near his home last Veterans Day, he was lying face down in a ditch, shot multiple times in the head. Beside him was a truck stuck in the mud. Later, the 60-year-old army veteran’s car was found several miles away, torched. It seemed like a random, senseless killing: authorities thought Cruz-Echevarria had been robbed and left for dead after stopping to help a stranger on a Daytona Beach roadside. But a year-long investigation has revealed that it was anything but random.

President Trump ratcheted up his attacks on famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on Monday just 24 hours before his book 'Fear' goes on sale. 'The Woodward book is a Joke - just another assault against me, in a barrage of assaults, using now disproven unnamed and anonymous sources,' he wrote on Twitter. 'Many have already come forward to say the quotes by them, like the book, are fiction,' he claimed. And in a signal that he plans to be an aggressive counter-puncher in advance of the November midterm elections, he jabbed his liberal opponents – suggesting Woodward is among...

A bombshell newspaper essay which detailed efforts to sideline Donald Trump from government was “just an obvious attempt to distract attention from this booming economy and [the president’s] record of success”, Vice-President Mike Pence has said. Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation in an interview for broadcast on Sunday, Pence also denied that White House officials discussed invoking the 25th amendment and removing Trump from power. The comment piece was published by the New York Times on Wednesday, under the title I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration and attributed to a mystery “senior official”. It came...

For months now, the focus of Campaign 2018, rightly, has been on control of the House. All the metrics continue to point to a midterm election in which Democrats could seize control of that chamber. But for sheer drama and unpredictability, the contest for control of the Senate could be the place to look. The House is no slam-dunk for the Democrats, but most Republicans following the campaigns are genuinely worried and probably right to be that way. The overall environment is difficult for the GOP because of President Trump and because of the location of the competitive races; suburban...

Media bias seems to get worse by the week. Even a work week shortened by Labor Day delivered on that depressing trend. Journalists cheered protests at the Supreme Court nomination hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh and swallowed a silly Internet hoax. Then there was the anonymous New York Times op-ed defending a “steady state” rebellion against President Trump. It was a new low for journalists devoted to overturning a democratic election. Call it the pièce de résistance. The New York Times trumped opposition leaders at CNN and The Washington Post. The three battle daily for liberal attention and journalistic kudos...

Donald Trump had to be tricked out of killing a U.S.-South Korean trade deal? He threatened to move a U.S. missile defense system from South Korea to Oregon? He ordered a plan for a pre-emptive attack on North Korea? These supposed moves by Trump, detailed in journalist Bob Woodward's new book, will cause bafflement and worry among government officials in Seoul. But, for many South Koreans, they just add more pieces of evidence to an established picture of an erratic U.S. leader who thinks little of an alliance forged in the turmoil of the Korean War and often described here...

Under the unusual circumstances surrounding his selection, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh should have agreed to recuse himself from deciding cases involving the investigation of President Trump. The reason Kavanaugh asserted at his confirmation hearing for refusing to make such a pledge — that it would violate the imperative of judicial independence — is entirely unconvincing. In turn, senators should decline to approve Kavanaugh’s nomination unless he does so. And, since that’s not likely to happen, in the event that a case involving the Trump investigation were to come before a Justice Kavanaugh, he should not participate — for his...

I love Lindsay Graham. The witty South Carolina senator, who's usually more entertaining than most comedians, has been one of the highlights of the otherwise depressing televised Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Graham put it perfectly Thursday morning. He said some people had been coming up to him and asking if this week's ugly display of disruptions, rude moronic outbursts from the gallery and Democrat grandstanding had become a circus. "I'm here to defend circuses," Graham said, pointing out that it was safe for parents to take their kids to the circus but not to...

President Trump on Friday described his 2016 presidential election as Hillary Clinton's funeral. "I call it Hillary Clinton’s funeral, that was the night she lost the election," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. "It was a funeral, it was a wake." Trump made the remark while speaking about special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election interference. The president has repeatedly attacked the probe as a "witch hunt" and blasted lawyers in the special counsel's office as "17 angry Democrats." Mueller is himself a longtime Republican, previously serving as FBI director under presidents of both parties. Trump on Friday...

iring picked up in August and so did worker pay -- registering the fastest wage growth since 2009 in an encouraging sign that wages may finally be moving higher after years of sluggish gains. August was the 95th straight month the U.S. economy added jobs, with a robust 201,000 job gains, the Labor Department reported Friday, while wages for U.S. workers grew at 2.9 percent in the past year. The national unemployment rate remained at 3.9 percent, one of the lowest levels in half a century. The higher pay is a sign that businesses are having to compete hard for...

When delusions and fantasies are substitutes for reporting. How did the Washington Post cover the end of America's UNRWA Funding?Here’s how: The United States will no longer contribute to the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees, the State Department announced Friday [August 31], amid widespread Palestinian outrage charging that the decision violates international law and will aggravate an already dire humanitarian situation, particularly in Gaza. The Washington Post should explain to readers, if it can, what “international law” the “Palestinians” claim has been violated. I do not think there is any. Contributions to UNRWA are voluntary. In any case,...

Officials from the Trump administration reportedly contacted a Yale University psychiatrist last year because President Trump was "scaring" them. Dr. Bandy Lee told Salon and the New York Daily News on Thursday that two White House officials flagged Trump's behavior last October. "[They] said that Trump was 'scaring' them, that he was 'unraveling,'" Lee, who wrote the book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” told Salon. ADVERTISEMENT "Not wishing to confuse the role I chose, as an educator of the public, and a potential treatment role, I referred them to the...

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein on Thursday called for Congress to hold hearings on President Trump's fitness for office. "What we need here are, finally, I think, some hearings in which an executive session or open session, those around the president of the United States are questioned about the fitness of Trump to be the president of the United States," Bernstein, a CNN political analyst, said on the network. Bernstein justified his call by citing excerpts from former reporting partner Bob Woodward's new book and an op-ed from an anonymous senior Trump administration official who argued that the president's actions are...

“We’re doing a great job,” said President Trump yesterday in a surprise endorsement of his own success. “The poll numbers are through the roof. Our poll numbers are great. And guess what? Nobody is going to come close to beating me in 2020 because of what we’ve done.” Though Trump can always be counted on to testify to his unblemished record of winning, it was odd he chose to focus on poll numbers right at the moment, because one place they are not going is “through the roof.” In fact, Trump’s numbers are dropping to near the lowest point of...

President Trump claimed this week that he had never used the word “retarded” to describe Attorney General Jeff Sessions — or anyone else — in an attempt to rebut one of the details included in the forthcoming Bob Woodward book that paints a harrowing portrait of his presidency. Since then, video and transcripts have surfaced proving the president wrong. Trump’s claim about Sessions came in a Tuesday tweet, in which he wrote: “The already discredited Woodward book, so many lies and phony sources, has me calling Jeff Sessions ‘mentally retarded’ and ‘a dumb southerner.’ I said NEITHER, never used those...

It’s day two of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Democrats are still annoying. The protesters are still unhinged. And everyone on the Left cannot seem to grasp what is reality: Brett Kavanaugh is going to be confirmed. Conservatives will have a 5-4 majority on the Court. You’ve lost. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) performed a great show, wanting to release confidential documents relating to racial profiling during Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush administration. He said he was willing to be expelled for releasing this document, which by the way, was already cleared for release by the committee and the Bush team....

First lady Melania gave a rare outspoken criticism Thursday by calling out the White House official who attacked President Trump anonymously in print, accusing the person of subversion. Her statement addressed the anonymous writer of the New York Times op-ed directly: “You are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions.” She criticized the media’s use of anonymous sources. “If a person is bold enough to accuse people of negative actions, they have a responsibility to publicly stand by their words and people have the right to be able to defend themselves,” Mrs. Trump said in...

On NBC’s Thursday morning broadcast of the “Today” show, former CIA director John Brennan repeatedly praised the unknown author of the New York Times’s recent anti-Trump op-ed as a supreme example of “courageous” American patriotism. While admitting that the anonymous writer was committing “active insubordination” with the piece, Brennan justified his or her actions by claiming that because Trump is too “unfit” to be President, the writer is admirably trying to “prevent disasters” in the future. “I think there are two major takeaways,” Brennan told “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie in relation to the op-ed. “One is, what the author...