Free Republic

The Biden administration has failed to comply with the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into President Joe Biden’s mishandling of top secret documents after promising the “highest standards of transparency” in United States history. In a letter issued by the president on February 4, 2021, Biden vowed the highest standards of transparency would be “revitalized” and implemented within his administration.

The White House on Tuesday accused Republicans of stoking political division by pledging to investigate President Biden’s involvement in an array of potentially criminal business dealings with his son Hunter Biden. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Americans aren’t interested in an investigation of the president’s alleged entanglements, and accused the GOP of reneging on their pledge to bring down the cost of living for families. “House Republicans promised that fighting inflation, during the midterms, was going to be their number one priority,” she said. “That’s what they said was important to them, and that’s what they said they...

Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said Friday on CNN’s “The Lead” House Select Committee investigating January 6, 2021 would release a large amount of raw evidence containing “pretty bad things” on Monday. Lofgren said, “Judge Carter in California already said in his written opinion on the Eastman evidence issue it’s more likely than not that President Trump, as well as Eastman, committed a crime. We’ve worked very successfully as a team on the committee, Republicans, and Democrats together, and I’m looking forward to wrapping this up. We’re working throughout the weekend, actually, on some of the tag ends of what we...

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is increasingly turning to the Department of Justice as a potential partner for carrying out its mission once the panel sunsets. The two investigative teams have at times been at odds over the last year and a half, with the panel rebuffing a request from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to share transcripts of its interviews in May. But as it stares down an end-of-the-year deadline, the committee’s tune is changing toward something reminiscent of a high school yearbook: Let’s keep in touch. “If they would want to...

The wife of Jack Smith, the newly-appointed special counsel in the investigation into the documents former President Donald Trump brought to Mar-a-Lago at the culmination of his term, made political donations to President Joe Biden and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) throughout the years and helped produce the 2020 Michelle Obama documentary Becoming. Federal Election Commission records show that Smith’s wife, Katy Chevigny, contributed $1,000 each to Biden’s 2020 campaign, Biden for President, and the Biden Victory Fund super PAC, on September 9, 2020. Moreover, she donated $150 to the Friends of Rashida Tlaib committee in July 2008 when Tlaib was...

Former SinoHawk holdings chief Tony Bobulinski – who was partners in that China-linked company with Biden family members – praised Kentucky Republican Congressman James Comer's newly-launched probe into the First Family's business deals. Earlier Thursday, Comer made a point during a press conference to note the probe will be focused on Joe Biden's alleged links to corrupt overseas deals, but greatly weights the behavior of his surviving son, Hunter. With the House flipping to GOP hands, the Republican representing Paducah and Bowling Green will ascend to the chairmanship of the Oversight Committee and replace Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New...

ExploreIGO, a Twitter fan account devoted to icy worlds, asked its community yesterday what to call a spacecraft visiting the big blue world. Embedded with the tweet is a 2021 proposal by three scientists led by Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The group told the U.S. decadal survey of planetary science that a spacecraft to Uranus is a "journey whose time has come." Uranus was voted the top destination by the community in April after this proposal process, which was led by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The decadal committee called...

CAPSTONE entered into safe mode during the evening of Thursday, September 8, just as the probe was completing a trajectory correction maneuver. CAPSTONE’s mission team “has good knowledge of the state and status of the spacecraft,” NASA said in a painfully brief statement. “The mission operations team is in contact with the spacecraft and working towards a solution with support from the Deep Space Network. Additional updates will be provided as available.” No further updates have been provided since the statement was published on September 10. CAPSTONE, or Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, launched to space...

Gary Gensler, President Joe Biden's Securities and Exchange Commissioner, had final approval authority for the Hillary Clinton campaign's payments for the discredited Steele dossier, according to congressional testimony that is adding to concerns about conflicts of interest as the SEC investigates Donald Trump's social media firm’s merger request. Questions surfaced last month about the SEC's probe of Trump's Truth Social when RealClearInvestigations journalist Paul Sperry reported that Gensler, as SEC chairman, previously served as the Hillary Clinton campaign's chief financial officer. In addition, Sperry reported that SEC Associate Director of Enforcement Melissa Hodgman was married to Peter Strzok, the FBI...

Two leading House Democrats are requesting a government watchdog step away from an investigation into deleted text messages sent by the Secret Service around the time of the U.S. Capitol attack. Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of House Homeland Security Committee, and New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight Committee, sent the request Tuesday to the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. In their letter, Thompson and Maloney wrote they have "grave concerns" about Joseph Cuffari, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general -- including what they said was his failure to promptly notify Congress...

Wash Post reports DOJ has opened criminal probe into President Trump…BREAKING Tonight - DOJ is investigating Donald J. Trump's actions and role in an effort to overturn the 2020 election results. w greats @DevlinBarrett @jdawsey1 @hsu_spencer https://t.co/G9xmc2CKH8— Carol Leonnig (@CarolLeonnig) July 26, 2022

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — FBI agents served a search warrant Wednesday on Nevada’s top GOP official, sources told KLAS. Agents seized the cell phone of state Republican chairman Michael McDonald reportedly as part of an investigation into an alleged fake elector scheme initiated at the end of the 2020 presidential election. In December 2020, KLAS reported that the Nevada Republican Party’s six electors signed paperwork signaling their support for former President Donald Trump in a symbolic ceremony devoid of any legal merit, which was held in Carson City and coincided with the official state-sanctioned tally on Dec. 14, 2020. A...

Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” The Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway reacted to former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann being acquitted of lying to the FBI about supposed “collusion” between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign. Conway said that special counsel John Durham’s probe into the “Russian collusion” hoax should be “headed into the trash can.” He described both the case and investigation as jokes.

MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Wednesday reacted to former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann being acquitted of lying to the FBI when he fed it false information about supposed “collusion” between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign. Scarborough called special counsel John Durham’s probe into the “Russian collusion” hoax “asinine” and declared that it was time “to shut this down.” He added the investigation was “a joke.”

The Washington Post was accused of bias on Monday after publishing a piece that claimed there is "no evidence" Hillary Clinton triggered the Russian probe despite her former campaign manager testifying that she approved distributing materials alleging a secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank to the media, despite not being "totally confident" in the legitimacy of the data. On Friday, ex-Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook testified that his former boss approved the move when grilled during the trial of ex-Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who has been charged with making a false statement to the...

Prosecutors in the criminal trial of former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann are expected to introduce their most important piece of evidence this week, a billing record for the defendant’s 2016 meeting with the FBI to pitch anti-Trump dirt. Court watchers say waiting until later in the trial to show jurors a smoking gun in the case is the right call. “My speculation is that they are saving the billing record for the bolo punch at the end. The bigger risk is introducing it earlier in the trial and the jury won’t remember what it’s about,” said Andrew Leipold,...

President Biden’s chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Merrick Garland, promised the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday he will not interfere with the agency’s probe into Hunter Biden’s potential tax fraud, money laundering, and violation of lobbying laws. Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) asked Garland if he knew of the probe into the president’s son. Garland refused to reveal any internal deliberations against Hunter but noted the investigation is being run by David Weiss, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Wilmington, Delaware.

A Russian oligarch who allegedly paid First Son Hunter Biden $3.5 million has not been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department amid the war in Ukraine, prompting House Republicans to launch a probe. On Thursday, GOP lawmakers, led by House Oversight and Reform Committee member Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding to know why Elena Baturina was not targeted by the sanctions. “​If​ ​the United States is avoiding sanctioning certain Russian oligarchs because of concerns they may attempt to influence American policy by exploiting Hunter Biden’s connection with his father​ – the President...

Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Ivanka Trump, the daughter and senior White House adviser of former President Donald Trump, was “helpful” during her eight-hour testimony before the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. Anchor Jake Tapper asked, “Former President Trump’s daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump testified in front of your committee for eight hours this week. Was her testimony helpful? Did she shed any new light on the crucial hours while the attack was underway?

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is expanding its probe of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack to include the events leading up to the preceding rally, and the wider conspiracies that fueled the violence, people familiar with the issue told The Washington Post. Before supporters of former President Trump attacked the Capitol, many participated in a rally that had multiple speakers, including Trump himself.