Free Republic

Epic Fail: Special counsel Robert Mueller has spent a year-and-a-half and $30-plus million attempting to “prove” that POTUS Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign “colluded” with Mother Russia to “steal the election” from Hillary Clinton, but he’s come up empty-handed. So now, he’s going after Trump associates and allies like Dr. Jerome Corsi and Paul Manafort for ‘lying’ to investigators in order to give the impression that collusion occurred but he just couldn’t prove it. That’s what former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova thinks, and he said as much Wednesday evening during an appearance on Fox News‘ “The Ingraham Angle.” The “original purpose”...

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Wednesday called on President Trump to sit down for an in-person interview with special counsel Robert Mueller and his team, saying that the president's written statements to the special counsel's office were insufficient. Schiff, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said Mueller needed the opportunity to ask follow-up questions based on the president's responses. “There really needs to be a live interview with the president because you need to be able to ask follow-up questions in real time," Schiff told CNN on Wednesday. Schiff also said the committee, under new Democratic leadership next year,...

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former lawyer, has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about work he did on a Trump real estate project in Russia. Cohen made a surprise appearance Thursday in a New York courtroom to enter the plea. He admitted making false statements in 2017 to a Senate intelligence committee about a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen said he lied about the timing of the tower negotiations and other details to be consistent with Trump's "political message."

Democrat T.J. Cox claimed victory Wednesday over Republican U.S. Rep. David Valadao after an updated vote count increased his lead in a California farm-belt district. Cox, who trailed in the vote tally until Monday, increased his lead to 529 votes out of about 113,000 cast, after updated numbers were released by Fresno, Kings and Tulare counties. The district also cuts through Kern County, which is expected to update its vote count by Monday. While votes still are being counted, the tallies have favored Cox in post-Election Day updates, prompting him to declare the race over. “I am elated to announce...

A 25-year-old mom in Minnesota was charged last week with one count of felony-level child endangerment that could result in substantial harm or death, after authorities discovered she allegedly gave her 9-month-old son laxatives to inflict starvation. Authorities discovered that Megan Lee Kafer of Lewiston, Minn., who is scheduled to appear in court on the charge in mid-December, had searched the web on her phone for ways to poison a baby, including: “MiraLax overdose,” “Can a doctor tell if you overdose on MiraLax,” “How to make a baby really sick,” “Mom gets 20 years to life for poisoning son with...

Following the tragic passing of New York State Senator Jose Peralta, the pro-vaccine Democrat's widow has revealed the cause her husband's sudden death. 47-year-old lawmaker Peralta died on Thanksgiving eve in Elmhurst Hospital in Queens after developing a fever and later became “disoriented and had trouble breathing." Peralta had reportedly been ill for at least two weeks before his death and, according to the Associated Press, Mrs. Peralta had told reporters that her husband felt pressure behind his ears and headaches for a week or more and had gone to see a doctor.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing over the recent revelation that Paul Manafort’s lawyers have been speaking to Donald Trump’s lawyers. Pundits have said breathlessly that such conduct is obstructive and that only mob lawyers engage in such behavior. Nothing could be further from the truth — by itself, there is nothing obstructive about the lawyers speaking with each other and sharing information. Witnesses do not belong to one side or the other. Paul Manafort has pleaded guilty and as part of his plea agreement has promised to answer Mueller’s questions truthfully. Mueller did not ask Manafort to keep...

Sen. Bernie Sanders knows what he wants. In a Washington Post op-ed last week, the democratic socialist from Vermont laid out a legislative agenda for the 116th Congress’s first 100 days. Among the dizzying array of proposals Mr. Sanders pushed were his signature “Medicare for All” bill, tuition-free college, student-debt relief, tax increases requiring “wealthy people and large corporations to begin paying their fair share” and a $15 minimum wage indexed to “median wage growth,” not inflation. Others in the Democratic Party’s increasingly influential democratic-socialist wing are pressing for their own major legislation to pass the House, even if it...

A report out of the University of Alaska Anchorage estimates some of the most certain consequences of climate change in Alaska will cost the state between $340 and $700 million per year over the next three to five decades. That’s “a significant, but relatively modest net economic effect for Alaska as a whole,” the report notes. But co-author Matthew Berman, a professor of economics at UAA’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, said the dollar figures don’t capture the large disparity between climate change’s cost to urban and rural Alaska. But Berman cautioned that the amount the report predicts climate...

While serving time in a South Carolina prison, several inmates created an elaborate online “sextortion ring” that preyed on hundreds of U.S. servicemembers and manipulated them into sending money and nude photos of themselves, according to federal prosecutors. In five separate indictments, prosecutors allege that the male prisoners used contraband cellphones to extort members of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps through online dating websites by posing as young women. The online scheme bamboozled 442 troops out of more than $560,000, prosecutors say. The prisoners developed fake personas as 18 or 19 year-old women on social media forums...

Migrants who came with the caravan are suffering from respiratory infections, tuberculosis, chickenpox and other serious health issues, Tijuana's Health Department warned on Thursday morning.

A day after doubling down on unscripted fare come January, the network is firming up its comedy slate for 2019, with its Murphy Brown reboot and Damon Wayans Jr. vehicle Happy Together both ending their respective runs after their initial 13-episode orders.

President Trump's former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, is reportedly set to plead guilty for misstatements he made to Congress while testifying about his contacts with Russians during the presidential campaign. ABC, citing anonymous sources, reported that Cohen is expected to appear in a federal court in Manhattan on Thursday after reaching a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller. The misstatements stem from testimony he gave in 2017. The plea from Cohen marks the first time he has been charged by Mueller as part of his investigation into Russian election interference.

When someone says squirrels you'd think of those small size rodent-like creatures with their bushy tails. Jumping and running across from trees to trees, squirrels make for cute creatures hunting for their nuts more often. But residents in North Carolina can spot some oddity in and around Robeson County. Going by the recent pictures posted by state wildlife officials there are 2-foot tall squirrels in the area. Baby Squirrel Taken into Police Custody After Chasing a Man in Germany.

President Trump started Thursday on Twitter the same way he ended it on Wednesday, attacking special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign. "Did you ever see an investigation more in search of a crime?" he asked in an early morning tweet. "A total disgrace!" he added. Trump in a subsequent tweet asked when "will this illegal Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt, one that has shattered so many innocent lives, ever end," adding that it has proven there was "NO Collusion with Russia." Wednesday night, Trump...

It would be doable, but would it be wise? Researchers say they’ve looked into how hard it would be to spray chemicals into the atmosphere to block the sun and curb global warming — and it would be neither technically difficult nor too expensive. The researchers, in a new study, did not make any judgments about whether it should be done, but they did “show that a hypothetical deployment program starting 15 years from now, while both highly uncertain and ambitious, would be technically possible strictly from an engineering perspective,” said Gernot Wagner, research associate at Harvard’s School of Engineering...

Special counsel Robert Mueller is taking a look into late-night phone calls between President Trump and his former campaign adviser Roger Stone that were made in 2016, The Washington Post reported late Wednesday. Trump and Stone spoke in a “series” of phone calls during the campaign, people familiar with the phone records told the Post. Mueller's interest in the calls comes as he probes whether Stone coordinated between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks while WikiLeaks was publishing hacked Democratic emails. Earlier this week, Jerome Corsi, a right-wing conspiracy theorist and Stone associate, provided a number of news organizations with charging...

The complex network of interdependencies between plants and animals multiplies the species at risk of extinction due to environmental change, according to a new study. Scientist Giovanni Strona, in collaboration with Professor Corey Bradshaw constructed 2000 "Virtual Earths," which they populated with thousands of plants and animals organized into a global system of inter-connected food-webs. They then subjected the virtual Earths to extreme trajectories of environmental change, consisting in either a "global warming," i.e. a linear, monotonic increase in temperature, or a "nuclear winter," i.e. a progressive cooling, such as that which could follow multiple nuclear detonations or an asteroid...

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Thousands of Central American migrants are digging in for the long haul at a filthy, overcrowded sports complex in sight of the United States, while a small number have opted to return home after clashes with border forces dimmed hopes of crossing. The bedraggled men, women and children of a caravan of mostly Hondurans began cramming into the complex in Tijuana about three weeks ago. They now number more than 6,000 in a space the city government first prepared for a third as many. * * * The overcrowding has also helped illness spread. There have...

A 27-year-old mother who left a placenta, umbilical cord and forceps in a Mississauga park for “holistic purposes” said a police investigation into the matter was “the biggest misunderstanding.” Natasha Das Gupta told CP24 she left the afterbirth items at Sugar Maple Woods Park, located in the area of Duncairn and Glen Erin drives, one year after she had her daughter Indika inside her home. “I wanted to do something really natural with it,” she said. “I didn’t just want to throw it in the garbage and the compost bin was not really a better choice. I wanted to do...