Free Republic

US President Joe Biden’s latest bizarre statements, in which he warned that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” of the Gaza Strip, are the best gift he could have given to Hamas and its patrons in Iran. By accusing Israel — falsely — of “indiscriminate bombing,” Biden is actually parroting the bogus accusations made by Israel’s fiercest enemies around the world, such as Hamas and Iran’s mullahs, who are trying to stop Israel from defeating a terrorist organization akin to ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Did anyone call for a ceasefire when the US was routing ISIS in...

Asked for his thoughts about the resignation of Jeff Roe from Never Back Down over the weekend, DeSantis told reporters, “I’m not involved in any of that.” “As you guys know, it’s a separate entity and so it’s just … this stuff just happens, and it’s not in my purview of what’s out there,” DeSantis continued. He later added, “It’s not a distraction for me … I know media may want to do it but at the end of the day, I’m focused on the mission.” Roe’s resignation from Never Back Down came hours after a Washington Post report shared...

Jeff Roe, longtime Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) consultant and chief architect of his flailing political operation, resigned Saturday from the super PAC charged with realizing the governor’s increasingly quixotic presidential aspirations. Roe announced his departure hours after a damning Washington Post report on the collapse of Never Back Down (NBD), the super PAC Roe conceptualized to send DeSantis to the White House and usher in a new era of super PAC-driven presidential campaigns. The Post report comes after five senior officials, pre-dating Roe’s departure, left NBD since late November and three others with Roe’s firm were fired. The Post writes...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis broke campaign finance law by communicating about TV spending decisions with a big-dollar super PAC that is supporting his Republican bid for the White House, a nonpartisan government watchdog group alleged in a complaint filed Monday. The Campaign Legal Center cited recent reporting by The Associated Press and others in the complaint, which was filed with the Federal Election Commission. It alleges that the degree of coordination and communication between DeSantis’ campaign and Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting him, crossed a legal line set in place when the Supreme Court first opened the door...

A highly classified binder of documents related to 2016 Russian election interference disappeared from the White House during former President Donald Trump's final days in office. CNN first reported Friday on the mystery, which remains unsolved nearly three years after Trump left office. The binder contained raw intelligence the U.S. and its NATO allies collected to inform the government's assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan’s probe into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ indictment against former President Donald Trump has seen an interesting turn of events. Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has been looking into the indictment over suspicions that it is motivated more by politics than by a pursuit of justice.On Tuesday, Jordan sent another letter to Willis highlighting her refusal to comply with the demands in the previous letter the committee sent. Of particular note, however, is a new revelation that Willis’ office reached out to the Democrats’ House Select Jan. 6 Committee to get information...

Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has suggested there is strong evidence of collusion involving the Biden White House in the ongoing classified documents case against him. In a series of tweets, reporter Julie Kelly detailed her account from a classified documents case hearing in Judge Cannon’s courtroom. Kelly reported that Judge Cannon was skeptical of the special counsel’s assurances of the trial dates and questioned the DOJ’s approach. COORDINATION AT THE WH WITH DOJ, NARA TO GET TRUMP More importantly, Trump’s lawyers informed Judge Cannon of evidence suggesting that the Biden White House collaborated with the National Archives and...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) obtained private communications and other personal records of multiple Republican House and Senate staffers who were investigating the department’s role in the origins of the Russia collusion hoax, according to former senior Trump administration official Kash Patel. A recently-revealed subpoena shows that the DOJ sought the records for not only Patel when he was an investigator for then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), but also those of Jason Foster, who was at the time chief investigative counsel to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (I-IA) and was also looking into the DOJ’s role in the hoax.

A former FBI official who played a key role in the “Russiagate” investigation into former President Donald Trump pled guilty on Tuesday to conspiracy to provide illegal services to a sanctioned Russian oligarch, according to a press release from the U.S. Southern District of New York Attorney’s Office. Charles McGonigal, a former special agent and chief of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York field office, pled guilty to money laundering and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), in connection to services provided to Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, according to the release issued Tuesday. McGonigal...

Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy announced Tuesday night that he has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice following its “failure to substantively respond” to his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking communications between Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Special Counsel Jack Smith. During an interview on Fox News’s “Ingraham Angle” Tuesday night, Ramaswamy explained that he was trying to “get to the bottom” of what Biden and Garland told Smith regarding the indictment in the classified documents case. The entrepreneur told host Laura Ingraham that he doesn’t think Smith’s investigation is as independent as...

The U.S. government has filed an emergency stay request to lift a recent injunction issued by a federal judge forbidding the government from violating Americans’ First Amendment rights by colluding with social media companies to censor their constitutionally protected speech. In the emergency stay, the government contended that the injunction was vague and that the attorney generals could not show harm from the censorship, an argument that Judge Terry Doughty had rejected multiple times in the past. “Defendants respectfully request that the Court stay its July 4 preliminary injunction pending Defendant’s appeal of that order,” the government argued. “The Government...

U.S. media should care about Americans’ First Amendment rights. Instead, outlets repeatedly insisted that online censorship wasn’t happening.Corporate media mocked widespread conservative outrage over online censorship as a “baseless” and misdirected ploy to gin up controversy and votes, but Missouri v. Biden proves Big Tech and the federal government colluded to suppress “millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.”There is hardly a lack of proof that Americans were the subject of years of government-led partisan purges on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. Emails, documents, files, and statements show that it was often at the prompting of...

Under President Joe Biden, the government has faced intense scrutiny for its efforts to curb disinformation online, with critics contending that such undertakings were in truth an attempt to silence opposition to government narratives. The Biden administration will appeal a recent judicial order that a range of administration officials, including the entire FBI and DOJ, refrain from contacting social media companies to have First Amendment-protected content removed.Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty issued the order on July 4. The case is part of an effort by Republican-led states to challenge the administration's coordination with social media platforms, which they...

This is a huge victory for free speech, though it must be kept in mind that the injunction issued by US District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty is a preliminary injunction that almost certainly will be appealed and will take a long time to be finally decided, perhaps by the Supreme Court eventually. I expect there will be fierce attacks on the ruling, and on Judge Doughty, who is a Trump appointee (thank-you, Mitch McConnell). Judge Doughty’s nomination was confirmed by a vote of 98 – 0 on March 1, 2018. The ruling by Judge Doughty is 135 pages long,...

When the Justice Department discovered from journalists a storage locker containing evidence against ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a search was executed immediately. But when IRS agents found a similar storage area containing evidence in the Hunter Biden criminal tax probe, they were denied the right to search despite meeting the probable cause standard, then Biden's lawyers were tipped off, according to new congressional testimony. Likewise, when federal prosecutors believed there was evidence of crimes at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, they launched an unprecedented and full scale-raid on the former president. But when agents wanted to execute a search warrant...

When last we left the proceedings in U.S. v. Trump, the federal case regarding former President Donald Trump’s purported improper retention of classified documents, Special Counsel Jack Smith had moved for a continuance of the trial date from August 14, 2023, to December 11, 2023, and further disclosed the existence of 84 witnesses, the list of which the government sought leave to file under seal.As previously reported, during Trump’s arraignment, the parties discussed conditions of his release, resulting in a subsequent order that prevents the former president from discussing the criminal case with witnesses or co-defendant Walt Nauta. This order...

It was clear from the beginning that charges of “collusion” between Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 election were phony — a cheap, and illegal, political trick. But they did their damage. While Trump beat Hillary Clinton, there has since been a non-stop Democratic Party-led campaign to tar him as a “traitor” or worse. And, as the recent testimony of Special Counsel John Durham to Congress shows, Clinton lay behind this scheme to defraud American voters and throw an election. So, today, despite powerful evidence of official wrongdoing, we’re back where we were some seven years ago. By the...

What did Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Loretta Lynch, and James Comey know about Russia-collusion — and when did they know it? John Durham dropped a bombshell in his testimony today at House Oversight, which will go on for at least a couple of hours or more, but this part wasn’t the bombshell. In his special-counsel report, Durham had already revealed that CIA Director John Brennan briefed these four in August 2016 that Hillary Clinton planned to paint Donald Trump as linked to Russian intelligence, presumably to shift attention away from her own e-mail scandal.That briefing resulted in a “referral memorandum,”...

Former Special Counsel John Durham on Wednesday said FBI agents had “apologized” to him for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into former President Donald Trump and his campaign from 2016 to 2019, per his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee. Durham, who was appointed Special Counsel to investigate the origins of the investigation into Trump’s campaign – which later revealed that Trump had not colluded with Russia to win the election – interviewed FBI agents who were involved in the investigation. Those FBI agents were ashamed of their work on the investigation, according to Durham, who also said that several other...

Twelve years ago, FBI agents in Baltimore sought to wiretap former Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko on suspicions he was spying for Russia. But the counterintelligence analyst they were assigned to work with ‒ Brian Auten ‒ told them he could not find their target and assumed the Russian national had fled back to Moscow. But Danchenko had not left the U.S., court documents show. He was living in the Washington area. In fact, he had been arrested in Maryland in 2013 by federal Park Police for being drunk and disorderly, something the FBI analyst could have easily discovered by...