Free Republic

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) pushed back on comparisons between the politically damaging dog stories that plagued both his and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s (R) potential bids for the White House. During Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, a decades-old story about him tying his dog Seamus to the roof of his car on a family road trip became a political headache for the then-Republican candidate for the White House. Now, more than a decade later, Noem faces a similar political firestorm that could doom her chances of being selected as former President Trump’s running mate in 2024. But Romney rejected the...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is seeking prison time for Aimee Harris, the woman who stole the diary of the president’s daughter, Ashley Biden, and sold it to conservative media site Project Veritas for tens of thousands of dollars before the 2020 presidential election. According to the DOJ, Harris was temporarily staying at the Delray Beach, Fla., residence of Ashley Biden in September 2020 when she stole the diary “containing highly personal entries” as well as tax records, a cellphone and family photographs. Harris enlisted defandant Robert Kurlander to assist her in selling the collected material. Project Veritas, based in...

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said his hot-mic remark last month predicting GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley would get “smoked” in the race against former President Trump was a “complete mistake,” but he did not apologize for making the comment. In a preview of a “Good Morning America” interview set to air on Tuesday, Christie recounted the hot-mic moment that took place just minutes before he suspended his presidential campaign, when Christie was heard saying about Haley, “She’s gonna get smoked. And you and I both know it, she’s not up to this.”

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday claimed that former President Trump has “cognitive disorders” in response to his apparent mix-up of her name with his GOP presidential primary opponent’s name, Nikki Haley. In an interview on MSNBC during election coverage of the New Hampshire primary, Pelosi responded to a question about the apparent mix-up, saying, “Well, let me just say, I’m not going to spend too much time on Donald Trump’s cognitive disorders.” At a rally this past weekend, Trump repeated a false theory, embraced by some of Trump’s supporters, that blames then-Speaker Pelosi for security failures at the...

Former President Trump said in an interview that aired Monday that he predicts the U.S. economy will crash and that he hopes it does so within the next year. In the interview with Lou Dobbs, Trump, the current front-runner in the GOP presidential primary race, explained that, if he were elected again, he would not want to serve a term similar to President Hoover’s — who took office when the economy was stable but later oversaw the start of the Great Depression.

A 13-year-old boy was accused of planning a mass shooting at an Ohio synagogue, according to court documents cited in local news reports. The reports said the boy, who has not been publicly named because he’s a minor, now faces juvenile misdemeanor charges of inducing panic and of disorderly conduct. He is set to go to trial on Dec. 20 in Stark County Family Court. In the court documents, law enforcement officials claimed the boy “did create a detailed plan to complete a mass shooting at the Temple Israel on the Discord platform,” which is an online platform for group...

2024 GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie on Sunday criticized his primary opponents for not clearly stating their positions on federal abortion policy, saying voters deserve a “straight answer” from the candidates. “I’m concerned, quite frankly, Margaret, that, you know, candidates in this race have been all over the block on this. And it’s not right. People deserve to have a straight answer from you. And that’s my straight answer,” Christie told CBS News’s Margaret Brennan in an interview on “Face the Nation.”

Former President Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement marking the death of Rosalynn Carter on Sunday, honoring her work spreading “hope, health and democracy across the globe.” In their statement, the Clintons thanked Rosalynn Carter for her decades of “extraordinary service to our nation and world, and for more than forty years of friendship.” “Rosalynn Carter was a compassionate and committed champion of human dignity everywhere,” they wrote in the statement, adding later, “Rosalynn will be forever remembered as the embodiment of a life lived with purpose.”

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said on Monday he would not serve as former President Trump’s running mate if the former president were to win the party’s nomination in 2024. “No, I would not,” Burgum, who is also running for president, said in an interview on “CNN This Morning,” when asked whether he would serve as Trump’s vice president. “Happy to do lots of other things. I [had a] fabulous 30 years in the private sector, a lot of opportunities there,” the North Dakota governor continued. Burgum also shot down the suggestion of accepting a cabinet position.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday that Ukraine has already retaken about 50 percent of the territory that Russia initially seized, stressing that Kyiv’s counteroffensive is still in its “relatively early days.” “In terms of what Russia sought to achieve, what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin sought to achieve, they’ve already failed. They’ve already lost. The objective was to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, its sovereignty, to subsume it into Russia. That failed a long time ago,” Blinken told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview on “GPS.”

Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Wednesday that he would resign from his post after an independent investigation found “serious flaws” in some of the research he oversaw decades earlier. The panel of experts, which formed in January to look into allegations of research misconduct, found that Tessier-Lavigne did not personally engage in any fraud or manipulation of research data, nor did he have any knowledge of the malpractice going on in the lab. Still, the report found that on various occasions, when concerns about his papers emerged, Tessier-Lavigne “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record.”...

Former Attorney General Bill Barr pushed back on former President Trump’s characterization of the special counsel’s documents probe as politically motivated and said he thinks the public eventually will come to realize the former president’s culpability. “Over time, people will see that this is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt,” Barr said in an interview on CBS Tuesday. “In fact, they approached this very delicately and with deference to the president, and this would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a...