Free Republic

Democrats, Biden will be as he was in 2020, but Trump will be as he was in 2016 and you should be worried. My prediction is, that as bad as he is in the polls, Democrats will circle the wagons around Biden and Kamala Harris. They and their sycophantic press will cancel any pretenders to the Throne in the White House. And being fully to the LGBTQ Left, the press and the Party will forgive their tack to the middle; to fool the country as they always do at election time. Trump, on the other hand will be faced with...

Antony Blinken represents neither the beginning nor the end of the info ops run to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Revisiting the contemporaneous coverage of the laptop story in light of last week’s revelations about Blinken reveals the scandal extends far beyond the Biden campaign and involves government agents. Last week, news broke that a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, testified as part of a House Judiciary Committee investigation that Blinken, now-secretary of state and then-Biden campaign senior adviser, had contacted Morell to discuss the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story. Blinken and Morell...

Washington CNN — The Republican chairs of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday asking for information related to the crafting of a public letter signed weeks before the 2020 presidential election by dozens of former intelligence officials, who said they saw signs the Hunter Biden laptop story could be Russian disinformation. In October 2020, 51 former intelligence officials signed on to a public letter that stated that the appearance of the Hunter Biden laptop story on the political scene had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”...

Why is French President Emmanuel Macron cozying up to China while trashing his oldest ally, the United States? Why is there suddenly talk of discarding the dollar as the global currency? Why are Japan and India shrugging that they cannot follow the United States’ lead in boycotting Russian oil? Why is the president of Brazil traveling to China to pursue what he calls a “beautiful relationship”? Why is Israel suddenly facing attacks from its enemies in all directions? What happened to Turkey? Why is it threatening fellow NATO member Greece? Is it still a NATO ally, a mere neutral or...

The Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to block it from doing so, according to two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official. China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real time, the three officials said. The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons...

* Pandemic-related emergency funding from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, ended this month in most states. * For retailers like Kroger, Walmart and Dollar General, the decline in SNAP dollars will put pressure on discretionary sales. * Add in lower tax refunds on average this year, and shoppers have fewer dollars to spread around. More than 41 million Americans receive funding for food through the federal program. For those households, it will amount to at least $95 less per month to spend on groceries. Yet for many families, the drop will be even steeper since...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal prosecutors disclosed Wednesday that a witness expected to testify for the defense at the seditious conspiracy trial of former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four associates was secretly acting as a government informant for nearly two years after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, a defense lawyer said in a court filing. Carmen Hernandez, a lawyer for former Proud Boys chapter leader Zachary Rehl, asked a judge to schedule an immediate emergency hearing and suspend the trial “until these issues have been considered and resolved.” Lawyers for the other four defendants joined...

WASHINGTON — Federal bank regulators are prepared to do whatever is needed to “ensure that depositors’ savings remain safe” in U.S. banks, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. Yellen is likely to face tough questions from senators about the federal response to two bank failures earlier this month: California-based Silicon Valley Bank on March 10 and New York-based Signature bank just two days later. In the hours after the banks collapsed, she and top Treasury officials determined the situation posed a danger to “the broader banking system and the American economy” and required...

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday enacted a quarter percentage point interest rate increase, expressing caution about the recent banking crisis and indicating that hikes are nearing an end. Along with its ninth hike since March 2022, the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee noted that future increases are not assured and will depend largely on incoming data. “The Committee will closely monitor incoming information and assess the implications for monetary policy,” the FOMC’s post-meeting statement said. “The Committee anticipates that some additional policy firming may be appropriate in order to attain a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive to...

Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign had “surreptitious involvement” in organizing a letter written by 51 former intelligence officials that falsely claimed the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, according to a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday. The complaint, from lawyers for former President Donald Trump, asks the FEC to record the infamous “Dirty 51” letter as an “in-kind contribution” to Biden’s campaign because it allegedly was used to influence the outcome of the election. The Oct. 19, 2020, letter was signed by 51 ex-spooks, including five former or acting CIA directors...

The Treasury Department has agreed to let House Oversight Committee members review suspicious activity reports pertaining to President Biden’s family, the panel’s chairman James Comer announced Tuesday. The records submitted by wary banks to the US government may contain new bombshells on the first family’s murky foreign income and the millions reaped by first son Hunter Biden and first brother James Biden in countries where their powerful relative held sway. “After two months of dragging their feet, the Treasury Department is finally providing us with access to the suspicious activity reports for the Biden family and their associates’ business transactions,”...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal prosecutors are employing an unusual strategy to prove leaders of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group orchestrated a violent plot to keep President Joe Biden out of the White House, even though some of the defendants didn’t carry out the violence themselves. As they wrap up their seditious conspiracy case, prosecutors are arguing that Proud Boys chief Enrique Tarrio and other leaders of the group handpicked and mobilized a loyal group of foot soldiers — or “tools” — to supply the force necessary to carry out their plot to stop the transfer of power from Donald...

The origins of Covid-19 are being explored by a US congressional committee in a first hearing in Washington. The panel, formed by a new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives, is aiming to establish how the coronavirus emerged. Some US officials have concluded that Covid "most likely" came from an unintended lab leak in Wuhan, China. But many scientists point out there is no evidence that it leaked from a lab. And the White House has said there is no consensus across the US government on the virus's origins. Dr Redfield was an early proponent of the lab...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Handed some 41,000 hours of Jan. 6 security footage, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has launched an impassioned new effort to explain away the deadly Capitol attack, linking the Republican Party ever more closely to pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2021 riot. The conservative commentator aired a first installment to millions of viewers on his prime-time show, working to bend perceptions of the violent, grueling siege that played out for the world to see into a narrative favorable to Donald Trump. He promised more Tuesday night. The undertaking by Fox News comes as Trump is again running for...

WASHINGTON, Feb 28 (Reuters) - U.S. consumer confidence unexpectedly fell in February, with the decrease concentrated among lower-middle-income households, though Americans grew more upbeat about the labor market. The survey from the Conference Board on Tuesday also showed consumers apprehensive about buying big-ticket items like motor vehicles and household appliances over the next six months. But correlation between confidence and consumer spending has been weak. A strong labor market has kept Americans spending despite worries about the future fueled by the Federal Reserve's stiff interest rate hikes to quell inflation. "Households are likely cautious given inflation is still elevated and...

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Energy Department has concluded that the COVID pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak. The conclusion is reportedly based on a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. Many will be exploring why the scientific evidence of a lab leak was so slow to emerge from intelligence agencies. However, for my part, the most alarming aspect was the censorship, not the science. There will continue to be a debate over the origins of COVID-19, but now there will be a debate. For years, the media...

If you shop organic, you may be paying a pretty penny these days. That’s a key finding in a new report by LendingTree that analyzed pricing data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The report noted that while inflation has resulted in price increases in many conventional food items over the past year, the hikes for their organic equivalents have often been more significant. Consider: Organic strawberries have more than tripled in price, increasing by 224.4%, while conventional ones have seen a more measured (though not insignificant) price hike of 22.6%. And organic vine-ripe tomatoes have doubled in price, while...

More than one in three of the 535 senators and representatives in the U.S. Congress showed up to the new session with FTX baggage, having received campaign support from one of the senior executives of the fraud-ridden crypto giant. CoinDesk has identified 196 members of the new Congress – many of whom were just sworn in last week – who took cash from Sam Bankman-Fried or other senior executives at FTX including new Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), down to a list of recipients new to high-level politics. After the lawmakers...

Nishad Singh, the former head of engineering at the collapsed exchange FTX, met with the US federal prosecutors seeking a cooperation deal, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter. Singh, Bankman-Fried’s former roommate in the Bahamas and a significant donor for Democrats’ election campaigns himself, could reportedly provide insight into the campaign finances of FTX. Since 2020, he has donated over $9.3 million to Democratic candidates and committees, with the largest recipient being Mind The Gap, a political action committee founded by SBF’s mother, Barbara Fried, which last year received a $1 million donation. According to...

After the 2021 Election, there was an unstoppable effort to get to the bottom of the 2020 Election in Arizona’s Maricopa County. Eventually, an audit was voted on, approved and performed in the Arizona GOP-led Senate. There was much discussion then on who would perform the audit and where it would be performed. Eventually, it was determined that the audit would be performed at the Maricopa County Veterans Memorial Coliseum. There also were months between when the audit was voted on and when it started. The audit did occur, but based on the information we know today, the ballot count...