Free Republic

If the Justice Department and FBI are, as we've been told incessantly over the past year, not merely patriots but consummate professionals incapable of being distracted by partisanship or petty Washington intrigues, why are Donald Trump's antagonists freaking out over the fact that an inspector general will assess whether political motivation tainted an investigation into the president's campaign? The American people should get a full accounting of what transpired during 2016. Isn't that what we've been hearing since the election? You believe President Trump is corrupt. We get it. But surely anyone who alleges to be concerned about the sanctity...

There has been a lot of misinformation about both getting out of the so-called Iran deal and getting into a new North Korean agreement. The two situations may be connected, but not in the way we are usually told. Getting out of the Iran deal did not destroy trust in the U.S. government. Our departure from the deal does not mean that North Korea cannot reliably negotiate with America. [snip] Obama got the deal approved by the Iranians in part by paying them ransom for hostages through huge nighttime cash transfers.

You don't need to believe that the special counsel investigating President Donald Trump is a terrible person to conclude that the Obama administration and Clinton machine (and later their holdovers during the Trump administration) politicized and weaponized federal agencies to protect Hillary Clinton and damage Trump. So if you just can't shake your instinct that Robert Mueller is the epitome of virtue and professionalism, hold fast to it, but consider the litany of facts that prove serious and abundant malfeasance on the part of the Obama-Clinton "deep state" actors. The Department of Justice, especially the FBI, bent over backward to...

"F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims," read the headline on a lengthy New York Times story May 18. "The Justice Department used a suspected informant to probe whether Trump campaign aides were making improper contacts with Russia in 2016," read a story in the May 21 edition of The Wall Street Journal. So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump's campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparat have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was...

Is it unthinkable that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would spy on a presidential campaign for political purposes? I can personally attest that it has happened before—during Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. Every poll agreed that President Lyndon B. Johnson would easily win the election against the conservative Sen. Goldwater of Arizona. But LBJ wanted a landslide so he could implement his Great Society vision without resistance and go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents. For Johnson, extremism in the pursuit of victory was no vice. Thus was born Johnson’s “Anti-Campaign” to smear Goldwater’s candidacy. The operation was...

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement on Monday put an end to bargains. Officially, Washington has begun its war on the Iranian regime. The weapons of economic sanctions threaten the entire regime and do not only restrain it. The French Total left the gas fields in the Gulf and moved on. Head of the Italian company ENI told the company’s board that they shut down their offices in Tehran and stopped searching for oil and gas. Airbus signed a contract to sell Iran 100 airplanes and only three jets arrived in Tehran’s airport as part of this historic deal...

As the television season wraps up, it seems that Satan is having a bad year on Fox. The still-Rupert Murdoch-owned network canceled not only its devil drama "Lucifer" but also "The Exorcist," which "blessed" us with anti-religious plots about sexually active gay and straight priests and mercy-killing nuns. It even waved goodbye to the sitcom "The Mick," which routinely mocked religion as something only naive grade schoolers believe until they grow up to be "smart and progressive." Is Fox going soft? Rest easy, atheists. For people who want to ridicule God and those crazy believers, there is still Seth MacFarlane...

President Trump is working to fulfill his campaign promise to seat judges who respect both the rule of law and the Constitution. Trump fulfilled this pledge when he nominated Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has a strong record of interpreting the law as it is written, not as he wishes it were written. The president should also be commended for nominating similarly fair-minded and qualified judges for lower courts. Thanks to the hard work of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, 38 of these well-qualified nominees have been confirmed. But...

US District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, a Clinton appointee, ruled that when Trump blocks Twitter trolls from his personal @realDonaldTrump account, he violates the First Amendment. Trump is accused of unconstitutionally blocking unfavorable users, dubbed Twitter trolls, from his personal @realDonaldTrump account. The Twitter trolls sued Trump, arguing that when they were blocked, they could not participate in discussions with others in the comments sections on Trump’s tweets, and were therefore deprived of their First Amendment rights. The fact that @realDonaldTrump is a personal account did not prevent Buchwald from opining that the sporadic use of the account for...

Because they view President Trump in these extreme terms, progressives view themselves not as violent extremists, but as "the resistance."  But resistance implies that there exists something worthy of resisting.  The progressive resistance began just seconds after Trump was declared the victor on election night.  The resistance was not engendered by anything Trump had actually done.  It was just a refusal to accept any candidate who varied from the left's own line of thinking. That sort of reaction, reminiscent of what happened with the election of George W. Bush, is a dangerous turn in American politics.  It implies that the left refuses to accept any...

There’s little reason to be surprised that Donald Trump canceled his anticipated summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. While some quarters will criticize Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton for raising the specter of Libya and the 2011 overthrow of strongman Muammar Gaddafi, the fact is that the administration from the beginning pursued a tactic of combining “maximum pressure” and accommodation. The White House never wavered in dangling both the stick and the carrot in front of Kim, seeing that approach as the surest way to avoid getting played by the North Koreans...

In the United States, the percentage of adults identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender has increased to 4.5 percent, according to a year-long survey, which also shows that the biggest increase has been among millennials. Gallup's daily tracking in 2017 has found that more than 11 million adults now identify as LGBT in the country, which is 4.5 percent of the population — up from 4.1 percent in 2016 and 3.5 percent in 2012. The increase is driven primarily by the millennials, meaning those born between 1980 and 1999, as those from this group who identify as LGBT rose...

After Kim Jong Un called the VP names the only possible course of action was to respond this way; Trump compliments Kim while reminding him of the subjugated nature of his military abilities. To have gone ahead with the meeting without forcing the DPRK to come back to the table would be disastrous, diplomatically, and start any negotiations off with Kim Jong Un as the superior actor.

Think about this – a significant portion of our country, including a majority of its elite, thinks that it’s A-OK for a Democrat administration to spy on a Republican candidate. Think hard about that. And think about whether or not we can ever put the pieces of our shattered republic back together again if we can’t even agree that using government power against our political enemies is a bad thing.But the terrifying truth is that liberals and their Never Trump enablers actually think this kind of tyranny is a good thing. You see, they think Normal Americans are so transcendently...

A woman walks next to a road sign to the US embassy in Jerusalem, May 11, 2018. Photo: Reuters / Ammar Awad. When Iranian Quds forces fired missiles at Israeli targets on the Golan Heights recently and Israel responded by decimating significant parts of Iran’s military infrastructure inside Syria, something remarkable happened. The United States, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, and United Arab Emirates all identified Iran as the aggressor. Bahrain even explicitly acknowledged the Jewish state’s right “to defend itself.” A decade ago, that would have been unthinkable, but the Middle East has changed in a very fundamental...

How was the New York Times’ coverage of the Gaza suicide-riots? So off-target that not even the Times’ own Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed columnist, Thomas Friedman, believed it. The Times news columns had been insisting that the suicide-riots (to use a term I picked up from a Weekly Standard editorial) were drawing international sympathy and attention to the Palestinian cause. Perhaps this was wishful thinking, or a self-fulfilling prophecy, but, in any event, that was the Times’ story, and it was sticking to it, at least until Friedman came along. A “news analysis” in the April 8 Times by Jerusalem bureau...

Like a trio of famished buzzards, three ugly words have started to circle over Hillary Clinton: obstruction of justice. After reviewing the FBI’s recently released E-mailgate files, House Government Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) on Tuesday wrote U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Channing Phillips. “The Committee identified a sequence of events that may amount to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence by Secretary Clinton and her employees and contractors, including her attorneys, employees of Platte River Networks,” and others, Chaffetz explained. He then asked Phillips to investigate Clinton and company for possibly violating 18 U.S....

President Donald Trump has long complained about what he calls a "witch hunt" investigation into his 2016 presidential campaign by "deep state" actors in the law enforcement and intelligence communities — a probe that he says was first designed to deny him the presidency and, after he won, to delegitimize or even remove him. Now, with all the tools of that federal government at his disposal — including some of the very agencies he's cast as enemies of his presidency and the American public — he is weaponizing them to make his case that he is the victim of malfeasance...

This week, for the first time in months, a generic ballot poll showed Republicans beating Democrats in the midterm elections. According to Reuters, Republicans are now leading by six points. And while that poll is obviously an outlier, the movement of the generic ballot in the direction of Republicans isn't: The average lead for Democrats has been dropping steadily since late February, from a nine-point lead to a four-point lead. Why? Certainly, the economy has something to do with it: The job market continues to boom; the stock market continues to hover around 25,000; and GDP continues to grow...

Imagine for a moment that Robert Mueller was never pressed into service as a special counsel and wasn’t a household name. Imagine that there had never been any prompt for his investigation — that Donald Trump hadn’t blown all those kisses at Vladimir Putin, that the stooges and grifters around Trump hadn’t swooned at the prospect of sucking on Mother Russia’s teat, or that there’d been no offer of milk in the first place. What would we be focusing on right now? Maybe the just-published Politico report of Trump’s deliberate, cavalier use of a cellphone that doesn’t have strict security...