Free Republic

WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham was assigned by the Justice Department in 2019 to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, President Donald J. Trump and his supporters expressed a belief that the inquiry would prove that a “ deep state” conspiracy including top Obama-era officials had worked to sabotage him. Now Mr. Durham appears to be winding down his three-year inquiry without anything close to the results Trump was seeking. The grand jury that Mr. Durham has recently used to hear evidence has expired, and while he could convene another, there...

The Utah senator wasn't talking about Trump or impeachment, but trying to be polite toward his Democratic colleagues.Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, was given an opportunity to bash Democrat politicians for some of their recent violent political rhetoric. During a TV interview yesterday, clips of Democrats using violent or aggressive rhetoric against Republican-affiliated individuals were played from Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Maxine Waters, and Sen. Cory Booker. “I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price,” said now-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the steps of the...

Many of his aides and close allies are veteran Washington hands who have profited from advising big corporations. The Sanders-Warren wing of the party is not happy.

WASHINGTON — It was one of the few issues on which President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. disagreed — how far to go in limiting the influence of lobbyists in government. The vice president privately complained that his boss’s effort to slam shut the revolving door between K Street and the administration would deprive it of experienced talent, and he bristled when Mr. Obama’s aides tried to block him from hiring a well-connected Washington operator who had lobbied for pharmaceutical and insurance companies, credit agencies and others. Eight years later, that same confidant, Steve Ricchetti, is...

Speaker Nancy Pelosi does not believe President Trump can be removed through impeachment — the only way to do it, she said this week, is to defeat him in 2020 by a margin so “big” he cannot challenge the legitimacy of a Democratic victory. That is something she worries about. “We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that,” Ms. Pelosi said during an interview at the Capitol on Wednesday as she discussed her concern that Mr. Trump would not give up power voluntarily if he lost re-election by a slim margin next year. Sitting in...

The metro editor of The New York Times, Wendell Jamieson, resigned on Monday following an internal investigation at the newspaper. "I regret and apologize for my mistakes and leaving under these circumstances," Jamieson said in a statement published by the Times... "We intend to fully investigate and while we do, Glenn will be suspended. We support his decision to enter a substance abuse program. In the meantime, we will not be commenting further."

The polls point to the promised land. But she'll have to get past Trump and WikiLeaks first.___ The final three weeks should have been an anxious but happy time for a Hillary Clinton team on the cusp of making history. Her odds of victory, according to most prediction experts, sit north of 80 percent, and she has solidified modest but durable leads over Donald Trump in most battleground states. But Clinton's final sprint has become a joyless, nail-gnawing slog through Trump Tower’s moat of mudslinging — and the day-to-day worries of WikiLeaks’ dump of internal emails from campaign chairman John...

A star political reporter at the New York Times has been suspended over allegations of sexual misconduct involving younger, female journalists. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Times called the allegations against Glenn Thrush, one of the newspaper’s top reporters covering the Trump administration, “very concerning and not in keeping with the standards and values of The New York Times.” “We intend to fully investigate and while we do, Glenn will be suspended,” the spokesperson said. “We support his decision to enter a substance abuse program. In the meantime, we will not be commenting further.” A story published Monday...

This has been quite the day! Christmas came early and Santa left some wonderful presents under the tree for conservatives. Present #1: A second woman has come forward accusing Al Franken of unwanted sexual contact: A woman says Sen. Al Franken inappropriately touched her in 2010, telling CNN that he grabbed her buttocks while taking a photo at the Minnesota State Fair. It is the first allegation of improper touching by Franken, who is a Democrat, while he was in office. It comes just days after Leeann Tweeden, a local radio news anchor in California, said that Franken forcibly kissed...

RUSH: Well! Another woman has come forward with sexual misconduct allegations against Al Franken. Franken says he’s not gonna resign. He’s sitting out there contemplating and reflecting, which means he’s trying to remember any others that could come forward and try to get hold of him. If anybody’s gonna hire Hillary Clinton, it would be Al Franken. Yes, another woman has come forward, sexual misconduct allegations against Al Franken. The woman says that Franken inappropriately touched her in 2010. She says that he grabbed her buttocks while taking a photo at the Minnesota state fair. So by my count, Al...

Exclusive: NYT White House correspondent Glenn Thrush’s history of bad judgment around young women journalists Several women told Vox about their experiences with the star reporter, and the Times has suspended him pending an investigation. Several women told Vox about their experiences with the star reporter, and the Times has suspended him pending an investigation. Sexual harassment claims against yet another powerful man in media inspired New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush to post an impassioned note on his Facebook page in October, calling on his fellow journalists to stand by women entering the field. In the post,...

Sexual harassment claims against yet another powerful man in media inspired New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush to post an impassioned note on his Facebook page in October, calling on his fellow journalists to stand by women entering the field. In the post, which linked to an article about the latest accusations against political journalist Mark Halperin, Thrush wrote, “Young people who come into a newsroom deserve to be taught our trade, given our support and enlisted in our calling — not betrayed by little men who believe they are bigger than the mission.” It was a noble...

Several women told Vox about their experiences with the star reporter, and the Times has suspended him pending an investigation.

Politico’s Glenn Thrush, who was exposed in WikiLeaks emails sending stories to Hillary Clinton staffers before publication, will be joining the New York Times to cover the White House, The Huffington Post reported Monday. “We’re thrilled that Glenn Thrush is joining The Times,” Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times’ Washington bureau chief, told The Huffington Post. “He’s a premier political journalist, a master of breaking news and long-form story telling and a stellar addition to our White House team.” While Bumiller described Thrush as a “premier political journalist,” in one email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, Thrush chose...

There’s Jeb, and then there’s everybody else. It came as no surprise that Jeb Bush is the uncontested Sultan of Super PACs with his independent expenditure arm, Right to Rise, pulling in a jaw-dropping $103 million during its inaugural reporting period, more than double its closest competitor. That tally was huge but it might have been less impressive than another metric: 1,656 – that was the number of pages of the Right to Rise report filed with the Federal Election Commission on document-dump Friday, astonishing both for the breadth and depth of the contributions listed therein. Bush is getting his...

If he doesn't land punches tonight against Donald Trump, some warn, 'it might be over.'Nobody is more nervous about this week's debate than Jeb Bush’s top fundraisers -- and no audience will have more to say about his future viability as a candidate. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson knew it. He recognized the group assembled at his Rockefeller Center office in Manhattan last Wednesday was in need of some reassurance after Bush’s unimpressive performance in last month’s GOP debate, so Bush’s national finance chairman, recalled one attendee, gave a personal pledge: Jeb would be “well prepared” for the second...

David Brock’s war against the New York Times just went nuclear — and the paper is responding with equal fury. Brock, the former right-wing journalist-turned-pro-Clinton crusader, takes aim at a top New York Times editor in a soon-to-be released book obtained by POLITICO. In the book, titled "Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary Clinton and Hijack Your Government,” Brock accuses senior politics editor and former Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan of helping to turn the paper into a “megaphone for conservative propaganda” by unfairly targeting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The founder of liberal watchdog groups...

How do you know that a Democrat has found him or herself embroiled in a particularly devastating scandal? When the press begins to ask when the Republicans will begin “overplaying” their hands. This weekend, you could feel the ground beginning to fall out from beneath Hillary Clinton’s supporters as members of the reporting and commentary classes began to express their doubts about the former secretary of state’s ethics. Among some prominent members of the media who are generally not predisposed to dismiss the Democratic candidate in a presidential race, the Clinton Foundation’s shady fundraising practices and the former secretary’s...

That’s the simple reality of Friday’s vote to ease the pain for the Federal Aviation Administration. By assenting to it, Democrats have agreed to sequestration for the foreseeable future. In effect, what Democrats said Friday was that in any case where the political pain caused by sequestration becomes unbearable, they will agree to cancel that particular piece of the bill while leaving the rest of the law untouched. The result is that sequestration is no longer particularly politically threatening, but it’s even more unbalanced: Cuts to programs used by the politically powerful will be addressed, but cuts to programs that...

President Obama fears a "nightmare scenario" in which Republicans control the national agenda, an e-book published Monday says. The book, "Obama's Last Stand," also charges that Obama considers challenger Mitt Romney "too weak" to be president, USA Today reported. Author Glenn Thrush describes Obama as describing his GOP opponent as "too weak to stand up to his own money men, too weak to defend his own moderate record as the man who signed into law the first health insurance mandate as Massachusetts governor in 2006, too weak to admit Obama had done a single thing right as president." Thrush wrote...