Free Republic

As facts about the Obama administration's spying and leaking are spilling out, media have a brief window of opportunity to salvage some credibility. As new details emerge about the Obama administration’s broad spying-and-leaking campaign against the incoming Trump administration, reporters have a choice to make about whether to cover this story honestly, at long last. There is a brief window of time afforded the media to get the story right. They should take advantage of it.Journalist Lee Smith already noted the seriousness of the problem facing legacy media after the implosion of the Russia collusion conspiracy theory they peddled. “Americans...

No, Townhall has not gone into competition against The Babylon Bee and The Onion.  And –best we can tell—neither has Newsweek. Here’s the (seemingly satirical—but actually deadly earnest) proclamation by Newsweek-The Daily Beast from this week:   “Cuba has mobilized its medical corps around the world to distribute a new "wonder drug" that officials there say is capable of treating the new coronavirus despite the United States' strict sanctions that continue to pressure the communist-run island…The drug, called Interferon Alpha-2B Recombinant (IFNrec), is jointly developed by scientists from Cuba and China. Already active in China since January, the Cuban Medical...

The Statue of Liberty was originally designed to be a Muslim woman, the Smithsonian Institution's magazine says.  An article on the government-administered museum’s blog, Smart News, claims one of the designers of Lady Liberty drew inspiration from monuments in Egypt and originally intended to construct a veiled female peasant on the Suez Canal.  The article cites historian Barry Moreno, author of multiple books about the statue, whose Islamic origins were also reported last week by The Daily Beast.   “Taking the form of a veiled peasant woman, the statue was to stand 86 feet high, and its pedestal was to...

Washington Post journalist has been suspended by the newspaper after she tweeted a link on Sunday to a years-old story about the Kobe Bryant rape case just hours after the basketball legend and his daughter were killed in a helicopter crash. Felicia Sonmez, who covers national politics for the Post, took to Twitter shortly after the world learned of Bryant’s death along with eight others aboard his private helicopter which crashed outside of Los Angeles. She posted a link to an April 2016 story from the news site The Daily Beast which carried the headline: ‘Kobe Bryant’s Disturbing Rape Case:...

President Trump has broken the press in America. Or at least he has left it bruised and battered, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, which crunched reams of data collected from 50 surveys and found that while Democrats continue to have faith in American media, Mr. Trump’s followers are quite done with it all. The findings were released just days after the press received its latest black eye in the inspector general’s report looking at the FBI’s behavior during its investigation into Mr. Trump. The inspector general thoroughly punctured journalists who insisted that the Christopher Steele dossier...

“If you don’t think Tucker Carlson has more influence on national security policy than many of the guys on the National Security Council, you’re wrong,” Stephen K. Bannon declared Wednesday tonight to a small group of wealthy Manhattan elites in a baronial Fifth Avenue apartment. Thus, at a meeting of the Common Good lecture series in the modern art-festooned living room of New York plutocrat Richard Cohen, the president’s exiled former chief strategist revealed that America’s global interests are being guided by a Fox News host, a favorite of white nationalists, who recently proclaimed on his primetime show that he...

Dan Bongino has filed a $15 million defamation lawsuit against liberal, online publication the Daily Beast after the website refused to retract and correct a false story it posted about him. The federal complaint, filed today in the Southern District of Florida calls the Daily Beast a “digital assassin owned and controlled by billionaire Clinton-devotees” and states that the website published an article on Dec 10, 2018 claiming Dan was “dropped” from NRATV when in fact, he did not renew his contract. Prior to posting the false and defamatory story, the author of the article, Lachlan Markay texted Dan and...

I knew this review was coming, I just wasn’t sure where it would appear first. Today the Daily Beast published a nakedly partisan review which barely spares a thought for its artistic merit or quality. What matters is that this film seems to make a point that could be seen as Trump friendly: Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell wants to be a gripping, outrage-inciting drama about an innocent victim persecuted by—and driven to fight back against—institutional power. Unfortunately, what it turns out to be is a MAGA screed calibrated to court favor with the red hat-wearing faithful by vilifying the...

Trending on Twitter: Molly Jong-Fast, notorious Twitter Trump-hater and pathetic hack "journalist", writes for The Daily Beast about her interview with Lisa Page, noted Fibbie "woman-about-town". It's Festivus Day for little Lisa!!https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Lisa%20Page%22Lisa Page Speaks: ‘There’s No Fathomable Way I Have Committed Any Crime at All'https://www.thedailybeast.com/lisa-page-speaks-theres-no-fathomable-way-i-have-committed-any-crime-at-all

The producer who worked alongside Ronan Farrow at NBC News on his Harvey Weinstein investigation quit in protest earlier this month. Rich McHugh tendered his resignation on Friday, Aug. 17, a year to the day that the Weinstein story left with Farrow. Since then, Farrow has won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles that revealed allegations of sexual harassment and assault—and questions have lingered about why the network gave up on the story that helped launch the #MeToo movement. NBC News has long insisted the Weinstein exposé wasn’t ready to run on air or online, contrary to Farrow’s...

Mark Zaid, one of the lawyers representing CIA leaker Eric Ciaramella, previously bragged about getting security clearances for “guys who had child porn issues.”Mr. Zaid in 2018 was responding to a fellow lawyer on Twitter who had claimed they helped people with past domestic abuse issues get security clearances. “I’ve gotten clearances for guys who had child porn issues,” Zaid responded to an attorney who specializes in helping government employees get security clearances.“Why would the whistleblower’s lawyer brag about this?” GOP operative Arthur Schwartz tweeted over Zaid. Why would the whistleblower’s lawyer brag about this? https://t.co/R8Wz9s81FL— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) November...

“First, I do think that he knows that he's an illegitimate president,” Hillary Clinton told “The View” on Wednesday. The View wasted no time getting to its two big guests on Wednesday morning. After a brief mention of Bernie Sanders’ health scare, moderator Whoopi Goldberg brought out Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton to talk about the news of the day and their new joint project, The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience. Hillary Clinton spoke out, as she did on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week, in favor of the Trump impeachment inquiry....

Obama officials are accused of holding backchannel communications on how to defeat President Trump’s foreign policy. Last year, John Kerry was caught engaging in shadow diplomacy with Iran through meetings with their foreign minister and others. It is believed he is also telling them how to circumvent President Trump and destroy his policies. Dianne Feinstein also met secretly with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif recently, knowing he is responsible for directing the Iranian terror plots. She has his number on her cell phone. According to The Daily Beast, a far-left Democrat newspaper, The Obama Team told Iran not to escalate,...

Enrique Tarrio, who is the Chairman of the Proud Boys fraternal organization, had his personal Chase bank account shut down abruptly earlier this week. In a letter obtained exclusively by Big League Politics, the bank informs him that he must shut down all of his accounts by April 1st, 2019, without giving a reason. This comes just days after Chase Bank’s payment processor, Chase Paymentech, de-platformed him on a website he runs that allows groups and charities to sell merchandise, and raise money for causes. The website, 1776.shop, is most known for selling the famous “Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong”...

Erik Prince, the founder of private security company Blackwater, has found himself embroiled in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. During the campaign, Prince reportedly met at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., operative George Nader, and social media specialist Joel Zamel to discuss a potential pro-Trump social media influence operation. He also met with Russian sovereign wealth fund manager Kirill Dmitriev during the transition period—a meeting reportedly planned to set up a backchannel between the Trump administration and Russia. Those revelations raise questions about his relationship to the Trump administration—questions...

The Daily Beast will suspend future columns from Joy Reid due to the fallout over comments she made on an old blog a decade ago, the website’s executive editor Noah Shachtman told staff in an internal memo on Wednesday. “We’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns,” said Shachtman in an email reviewed by TheWrap. “As you’re well aware, support for LGBTQ rights and respect for human dignity are core to Daily Beast. So we’re taking seriously the new allegations that one of our columnists, Joy Reid, previously wrote homophobic blog posts during her stint as a radio host.” “Obviously,...

It looks like we may soon see a merger of two of the most well-known Trump-skeptic news sites.According to the The Daily Beast, the billionaires behind Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire are currently in talks to buy Glenn Beck’s conservative media empire TheBlaze. As the Beast noted in their piece, the Wilks family funds Shapiro’s site and are looking to “to expand their holdings in conservative media.” They previously looked at Breitbart, but a difficult relationship with Rebekah Mercer prevented that from occurring. Shapiro didn’t exactly deny that talks are underway regarding the potential purchase of TheBlaze. Per the Beast:...

The Daily Beast's headline, subheadline, and lede about the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee refusing to answer a question are all false.Once again, reporters got burned by believing anonymous Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.Betsy Woodruff and Spencer Ackerman of The Daily Beast credulously believed their “sources familiar with the exchange,” who said Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, refused to deny he had coordinated with the White House when putting together a memo alleging surveillance and law enforcement abuses at the FBI.In fact, Nunes explicitly denied the charge before shutting...

....."Things have recently gotten even more curious. If a news organization with the resources to go to Wales and interview Mr. Davies wanted to do so in order to get some answers, they wouldn’t find him at home. He’s in hiding. Just who would a charlatan opportunist, like the one he’s being portrayed to be, want to hide from, Morley Safer? Davies contacted his publisher, Simon & Schuster by email and informed then he was “going dark,” this past Friday morning. The message indicated that someone had threatened to harm his family if he continued to defend the truthfulness of...

War was just an experiment for two of the U.S. military’s oldest and most unusual warplanes. A pair of OV-10 Broncos—small, Vietnam War-vintage, propeller-driven attack planes—recently spent three months flying top cover for ground troops battling ISIS militants in the Middle East. The OV-10s’ deployment is one of the latest examples of a remarkable phenomenon. The United States—and, to a lesser extent, Russia—has seized the opportunity afforded it by the aerial free-for-all over Iraq and Syria and other war zones to conduct live combat trials with new and upgraded warplanes, testing out the aircraft in potentially deadly conditions before committing...