Free Republic

The White House said Friday that President Trump supports House legislation that closely tracks his priorities on border security and limiting legal immigration, walking back comments he made on national television rejecting the GOP bill. The reversal came after hours of confusion on Capitol Hill, where Trump’s words roiled an already fragile internal debate between conservative and moderate House Republicans who have been trying to find an immigration compromise after months of false starts. “The president fully supports both the Goodlatte bill and the House leadership bill,” White House spokesman Raj Shah said, referring to legislation drafted by House Judiciary...

... And yet, awarding Trump the Nobel Prize might prove quite fitting. Despite the popular association of the Nobel with great thinkers, diplomats and statesmen, the prize has also routinely rewarded the undeserving, the frauds and the criminals.

BREAKING: Newly disclosed text among FBI officials says ‘We’ll stop’ Trump from becoming president. The message is included in a forthcoming Justice Department inspector general report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation.

Democrats are meeting in Providence, R.I., this weekend to advance changes to their presidential primaries, hoping to end the bitterness that followed the 2016 election — with an emphasis on “hoping.” The push for changes, which began nearly two years ago at the Democrats’ Philadelphia convention, concerns rule revisions proposed by a Unity Reform Commission and vetted by the standing Rules and Bylaws Committee. The most high-profile battles have come over the role of superdelegates, the party leaders and members of Congress whose votes are not pledged to follow the results of any primaries. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who failed...

A former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee has been indicted and arrested on charges of making false statements to the FBI during an investigation into the leak of classified information, the Justice Department announced Thursday. As part of the investigation, law enforcement officials seized years worth of phone and email records of a New York Times reporter, Ali Watkins, who had previously been in a romantic relationship with the staffer, the newspaper reported Thursday evening. The Senate staffer, James A. Wolfe, was indicted on three counts of making false statements while he served as the committee’s director of...

As preparations are underway for a US-North Korea summit, US officials are trying to solve the logistical issue of who will pay for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's housing, according to a new report. A week after abruptly scrapping the summit with Kim, President Donald Trump announced Friday that the historic talks were back on for June 12 in Singapore. With its economy weakened from tough sanctions, Pyongyang is requiring that another country pay for Kim and his delegation's hotel bill, The Washington Post reported Friday. According to the Post, Kim is demanding to stay at the luxury, five-star...

Google was set to rent out its D.C. headquarters to a progressive group running a fundraiser for top Senate Democrats, but canceled it Friday just days before. The group “Run For Something” cultivates up-and-coming Democrats for all levels of government. Its event, “Party For Something,” was supposed to occur June 6 at a location only disclosed if tickets ($100 to $1,000) were purchased. “June 6th: Games, drinks and building the bench with Senators Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand & Cory Booker!!” the invite states at the top. “Why? Because Run For Something set a goal of recruiting 50,000 new voices this...

For the first time, the U.S. government has publicly acknowledged the existence in Washington of what appear to be rogue devices that foreign spies and criminals could be using to track individual cellphones and intercept calls and messages. The use of what are known as cellphone-site simulators by foreign powers has long been a concern, but American intelligence and law enforcement agencies -- which use such eavesdropping equipment themselves -- have been silent on the issue until now. In a March 26 letter to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledged that last year it identified...

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security detected potential surveillance activity near “sensitive facilities” in Washington, including the White House, according to a study conducted last year.Officials disclosed the activity, associated with devices commonly known as “Stingrays,” in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), which was first reported by The Washington Post this week. The revelation boosts long-held suspicions that foreign actors are using the technology to conduct spying in the nation’s capital. Christopher Krebs, the acting head of the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), Homeland Security’s cybersecurity unit, explained in the May 22 letter that the department...

A federal study found signs that surveillance devices for intercepting cellphone calls and texts were operating near the White House and other sensitive locations in the Washington area last year. A Department of Homeland Security program discovered evidence of the surveillance devices, called IMSI catchers, as part of federal testing last year, according to a letter from DHS to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, on May 22. The letter didn’t specify what entity operated the devices and left open the possibility that there could be alternative explanations for the suspicious cellular signals collected by the federal testing program last year. The...

President Trump's fixation on “no collusion” has long belied this reality of the Russia investigation: The obstruction of justice half of the probe appears significantly more troublesome for him personally. It's also likely to be much bigger than we realized. That's the big, reinforcing takeaway from the New York Times's scoop Tuesday night that Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to un-recuse himself in the Russia probe. It's merely the latest clear example of Trump trying to control or otherwise sway the people who could be in charge of his own fate. And it underlines the fact that he had...

The Republican Party’s dance with President Trump has long been marked by fits and starts. And for much of that troubled relationship, it has been hard to grasp why so many conservatives would sell their political souls to a man who wallows in racist stereotypes, questions federal judges’ legitimacy, flogs the free press, undermines Madison’s constitutional norms, declares war on America’s intelligence community, and attacks Justice Department and FBI leaders he appointed for refusing to kill special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. SNIP Even after his calling for a Muslim ban in 2015, professing ignorance of former Ku Klux...

There may have been a real White House briefing with real White House officials, but The New York Times couldn't be trusted to accurately summarize what the White House official said. And it wasn't on a minor point. On the path to the June 12 summit with North Korea, journalists claimed President Donald Trump would not be willing to walk away from the negotiating table because he was too desperate for a win. The Washington Post’s David Nakamura wrote that “critics fear that a president determined to declare victory where his predecessors failed will allow his desire for a legacy-making...

Not that long ago, cigarettes were completely woven into American culture. The Marlboro Man, posters telling us that “more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette,” even the armrests on planes and all our cars were designed for smokers. And now? Not so much. Can it work like that with guns? (snip) I grew up surrounded by cigarette smoke. My dad smoked. So did practically everyone else I knew. But my kids? Totally different. They saw someone smoking in a restaurant while we were traveling abroad recently and they freaked out, like they’d witnessed a beheading. Inconceivable in their world.

It was easy to miss the U.S.-China trade statement that the White House released Saturday, right in the midst of royal wedding mania. But it's hard to hide that China looks as if it's winning President Trump's trade skirmish — so far. The statement said that, after several days of talks, the Chinese agreed to “substantially” reduce the United States' $375 billion trade deficit with China and that the details would be worked out later. It was noticeably vague. Notice China didn't agree to a specific amount. On Friday, Trump's top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, was telling reporters that the...

At first the FBI probed the e-mails of Paula Broadwell and CIA Director David Petraeus from a suspicion of cyberstalking and harassment. They then dropped the probe after determining that the biographer of Petraeus had a personal relationship with him, even though they discovered that Broadwell had classified documents on her computer. After the entire probe went public and forced Petraeus to resign, FBI agents suddenly conducted a seizure of materials from Broadwell’s home — which the Washington Post reports comes from a belated curiosity into her possession of those classified documents: The FBI is making a new push to...

But Trump and his backers are wrong about what it means that the FBI reportedly was using a confidential source to gather information early in its investigation of possible campaign ties to Russia. The investigation started out as a counterintelligence probe, not a criminal one. And relying on a covert source rather than a more intrusive method of gathering information suggests that the FBI may have been acting cautiously — perhaps too cautiously — to protect the campaign, not undermine it. As a former FBI counterintelligence agent, I know what Trump apparently does not: Counterintelligence investigations have a different purpose...

Democratic leaders are right to caution their members and candidates against talking up impeachment. There is the obvious political consideration that impeachment is disfavored, at least now, by many voters, especially those in red states where Democrats need to hang on to precious Senate seats. But there is something more important, both for the party fighting against the erosion of democratic norms and for the country: We cannot normalize impeachment. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, writes that “it is clear that if President (Donald) Trump participated in a conspiracy to defraud the United...

The FBI has been working in recent weeks to soften the blow if the identity of a top-secret informant who fed information to investigators early on in the Russia investigation is revealed. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that FBI officials have been taking steps to reduce the potential damage to other investigations the informant is involved in and protect associates, in the event that the source is outed. The scramble to mitigate the potential harm comes as allies of President Trump hone in on the informant's role in the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia....

Leakers to the New York Times confirmed in a story published on Wednesday that the FBI had run a spy operation on the Trump campaign that involved government informants, secret subpoenas, and possible wiretaps. The story comes ahead of the release of the pending Department of Justice inspector general report on the FBI’s actions during the 2016 election, and likely is an attempt by the leakers to paint the FBI’s efforts in the most flattering light possible. But the story revealed that the FBI – which is supposed to be an apolitical agency – was spying on the Trump campaign...