Free Republic

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has spoken with people in the West Wing and in Congress about a new plan to knock the Russia investigation off the rails, according to a new report. The Washington Post reported Wednesday night Bannon has a proposal he is presenting to people in President Donald Trump's circle. The plan is designed to protect Trump as the Department of Justice probe into Russia collusion continues. The multi-pronged approach, according to the Post, includes firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, instructing the White House to stop cooperating with FBI special counsel Robert Mueller, and...

Alex Castellanos, Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney's campaign strategist, told ABC’s “This Week” it’s hard to believe that “Robert Mueller is not going to dig up something in Trump’s complicated financial history......”......a switch in Republicans’ fortune in Congress after November’s mid-term elections could bring dire consequences for the Trump presidency. “It’s hard to believe then that when Republicans lose the House in 2018, maybe by 40 or 50 seats, that the House is not going to impeach him,” Castellanos said. “And that a Senate that’s scared to death, but still be in Republican hands, is not going to take a...

President-elect Donald Trump on Friday named a libertarian election lawyer as his White House counsel and a hard-line former Reagan administration official to a top post on his national security staff. Trump announced that Donald McGahn, a controversial former member of the Federal Election Commission who had served as Trump's campaign lawyer, will be his White House counsel. (snip) For deputy national security adviser, Trump chose Kathleen "KT" McFarland, who in her most recent role as a Fox News analyst has expressed strident opposition to many of President Obama's national security policies.

Editor-at-Large of The Weekly Standard Bill Kristol accused President Donald Trump of trying to “shut down” the Russia investigation Tuesday, despite the White House’s continued cooperation with special counsel Robert Mueller. “The president hates the investigation. He fears it, and he wants to shut it down or curb it as much as he can,” Kristol said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” “It may be that he intends to fire Mueller,” Kristol added. “Trump is trying systematically to discredit the FBI … and he’s doing so by attacking individuals, by attacking the whole organization, by saying the whole thing is a...

Swan followed up by asking Cobb to clarify whether he believed that the “Manafort/Flynn” silos would not implicate people in the White House, or at least be used as a vehicle to keep the White House under investigation. He replied: I am saying the interviews will be completed by the end of next week which I have said often and which has been quoted by 50 news outlets over the last month or more (with the caveat and understanding illness, Acts of God or logistical factors could add 24 to 48 hours). The Manafort inquiry has nothing to do with...

On Friday, Michael Flynn plead guilty to lying to FBI agents about making contact with Russian Ambassador Kislyak during the transition period. CNBC reported: Specifically, Flynn is accused of falsely claiming that he had not asked Russia’s ambassador to the United States last Dec. 29 “to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed against Russia that same day.” Flynn also allegedly lied by telling the FBI “he did not recall the Russian Ambassador subsequently telling him that Russia had chosen to moderate its response to those sanctions as a result of his...

WASHINGTON -- The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich, told NewsMax that he believes the recent leaks over the CIA's secret prisons and the NSA's terrorist surveillance program were "politically driven," and that the leakers "ought to be prosecuted." "What we are seeing is a systematic breakdown in the intelligence community when it comes to leaking highly classified intelligence information," he stated. If intelligence officers have concerns about a particular program, they have various legal avenues to make those concerns known, he said. "First, there's an inspector general," he noted. "Then there's a...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Dissident U.S. intelligence officers angry at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped a European probe uncover details of secret CIA prisons in Europe, the top investigator said on Tuesday. Swiss Senator Dick Marty, author of a Council of Europe report on the jails, said senior CIA officials disapproved of Rumsfeld's methods in hunting down terrorist suspects, and had agreed to talk to him on condition of anonymity."There were huge conflicts between the CIA and Rumsfeld. Many leading figures in the CIA did not accept these methods at all," Marty told European Parliament committees, defending his work against...

Hillary Clinton handing over a sizable portion of US uranium production potential to Russia is not an isolated event, but rather is the logical convergence of decades-old Clinton era dealings with Russia and rogue states, for enrichment of the power elite. AT contributor Michael Curtis is correct when he says that the Uranium One deal has serious implications for our national security.  In fact, the revelation of Hillary’s independent intel network, coupled with Clinton era national security policy changes in the form of counter-proliferation (CP) regimes, have been far more strategically harmful than many Americans realize.... 

White House attorney Ty Cobb was overheard talking about the Russia probe and some of his colleagues at a Washington steakhouse by a New York Times reporter, the publication reported Sunday night. Cobb, who was hired to oversee the White House's legal and media response to the investigation into Russian meddling, was heard talking openly about the Russia investigation with John Dowd, a Washington lawyer with experience in high-profile political cases. "The White House counsel's office is being very conservative with this stuff," Cobb reportedly told Dowd at BLT Steak in Washington last week. "Our view is we're not hiding...

The pictures are dark and ominous, the charges chilling: “There exists a network of extremists . . . [who] spew venomous rhetoric, outrageous theories, and discredited science.” Just who are these evil people and what are they doing? According to the Human Rights Campaign, the world’s largest gay activist organization, this “network” consists of American, conservative Christian leaders “who are working tirelessly to undercut LGBT people around the world at every turn.”I have made it onto this list – unfortunately, only with a “dishonorable mention” – adding to my already impressive résumé of being marked by groups like GLAAD, which...

Ruining someone's name is very easy. So is calling them a "racist." Take the case of Ty Cobb, one of the greatest baseball players ever. Cobb is known as a racist and a dirty ballplayer. Is it true? Charles Leerhsen, author of "Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty" sets the record straight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzbJn2UAoIs He was Major League Baseball's first superstar. The first man ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. And he still has the game's highest career batting average – .366 – almost 90 years after he retired. His name is Ty Cobb. Yet, despite his historic achievements, he is often remembered for being the worst racist and the dirtiest player ever to take the field. If you know baseball, you've heard the stories: Ty Cobb would pistol-whip black men he passed on the street. He once stabbed to death a black waiter in Cleveland just because the young man...

Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time and king of the so-called Deadball Era. He played in the major leagues—mostly for the Detroit Tigers but a bit for the Philadelphia Athletics—from 1905 to 1928, and was the first player ever voted into the Hall of Fame. His lifetime batting average of .366 is amazing, and has never been equaled. But for all that, most Americans think of him first as an awful person—a racist and a low-down cheat who thought nothing of injuring his fellow players just to gain another base or score a run....

Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time and king of the so-called Deadball Era. He played in the major leagues—mostly for the Detroit Tigers but a bit for the Philadelphia Athletics—from 1905 to 1928, and was the first player ever voted into the Hall of Fame. His lifetime batting average of .366 is amazing, and has never been equaled. But for all that, most Americans think of him first as an awful person—a racist and a low-down cheat who thought nothing of injuring his fellow players just to gain another base or score a run....

The two things everyone knows about Ty Cobb are that he was a phenomenal baseball player and that he was the worst racist ever to play the game. But one of these things is mostly wrong. Cobb, the first player voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the holder of more than 90 records upon his retirement and still the pace-setter with a .366 lifetime batting average, could be rude, but not nearly as nasty as you think. And far from being the most notorious racist in baseball history, he was an early and vocal supporter of integrating the big...

Excerpt:"She did not leak any classified information, and she did not have access to the information apparently attributed to her by some government officials," said Washington lawyer Ty Cobb, who is representing veteran CIA analyst Mary McCarthy. Government officials have linked her to the Post's story about the CIA's covert sites in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, used to hold terror suspects. The disclosure of the facilities caused an international clamor last fall because of the legal and ethical issues they raised. McCarthy was fired on Thursday for knowingly disclosing classified information. But Cobb said she hopes to find a way...

ROYSTON, Ga. (AP) -- While gazing at one of the exhibits in the Ty Cobb Museum, a visitor overhears a discussion about the many sides of the Georgia Peach. A dirty player or a fierce competitor? A despicable racist or a generous philanthropist? The visitor jumps into the debate with someone from a different sport, a different time, but the analogy seems to work. ``He's like Dale Earnhardt,'' said Ralph Nix, who stopped by the museum while in this northeast Georgia town on business. ``Half the people cheered him. Half the people booed him. That's just the way it is...