Free Republic

If there’s one person on Team Obama who had trouble coping with the fact that the country decided to elect a man who is the diametric opposite of his boss, it’s Ben Rhodes. Rhodes, who served as Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, was the Obama’s mouthpiece for his foreign policy agenda. From Syria to the shoddy Iran nuclear deal, there was Rhodes crafting the Obama White House’s narrative to be sold to the American public. Since the 2016 election, Rhodes has taken to his Twitter account to criticize Trump’s foreign policy, mostly...

Team Obama lives in a world of fiction. As President Trump announced to the world that he would finally put a stake through the heart of the Iran deal -- the signal foreign policy "achievement" of the Obama administration -- Obama's former staffers lamented, rending their sackcloth and smearing their ashes. "I will never forget the dark cloud that hung over the White House in the years Iran was advancing nuclear program & Obama was briefed on all the risks of using military force," former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power tweeted. "Trump has demolished America's credibility & paved the...

While congresscritters expressed outrage at Facebook's intrusive data grabs during Capitol Hill hearings with Mark Zuckerberg this week, not a peep was heard about the Silicon Valley-Beltway theft ring purloining the personal information and browsing habits of millions of American schoolchildren. It doesn't take undercover investigative journalists to unmask the massive privacy invasion enabled by educational technology and federal mandates. The kiddie data heist is happening out in the open -- with Washington politicians and bureaucrats as brazen co-conspirators. Facebook is just one of the tech giants partnering with the U.S. Department of Education and schools nationwide in pursuit of...

Each day we learn about more corruption that occurred during the Obama administration. We know about the lies of Benghazi, the use of the IRS to target conservative groups, and the lies about Fast and Furious. It has been forgotten as old news, and was ignored by the mainstream media. We learned about Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s wife taking over $700,000 in campaign contributions from Clinton’s money man, Terry McCauliffe, for a minor state office. McCabe has been forced to resign, which is a discharge in employment law, presumably because of his involvement in the $700,000 coupled with the...

Since the 2016 election, the intelligence community has been under greater scrutiny—and for good reason. The leaks emanating from this cadre of professionals in D.C. was not exposing government malfeasance from the Trump administration, but classified information that was putting America’s national security interests at stake. It seemed to have been done to hamstring a new administration. As apolitical operatives, this was not their job. If you can’t handle working under a new administration, then resign. Leaking to undercut the Trump presidency because you’re sore about Hillary Clinton losing is not an act of patriotism. Former investigative journalist for CBS...

Cue the funeral bagpipes. My fourth health insurance plan is dead. Two weeks ago, my husband and I received yet another cancellation notice for our private, individual health insurance coverage. It's our fourth Obamacare-induced obituary in four years. Our first death notice, from Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, arrived in the fall of 2013. The insurer informed us that because of "changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA)," our plan no longer met the federal government's requirements. Never mind our needs and desires as consumers who were quite satisfied with a high-deductible PPO...

Former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson decided to offer her two-cents in light of the recent revelation that former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort was indeed wiretapped before and after the 2016 election. Mr. Manafort has a residence in Trump Tower, though it’s still unknown if any surveillance occurred there, but what is highly plausible is that conversations between him and Donald Trump were recorded, and we know that the FBI was monitoring the former campaign manager’s phone calls. The wiretaps were given the green light by the FISA court, which signs off on such surveillance activities in secret....

Health care is at the front line in a power play for America. A White House official announced Wednesday that the Trump administration will continue President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional payment of cost-sharing reduction (CSR) subsidies to insurers through August.Despite outward appearances and media commentary, this is not ultimately about health care. The Affordable Care Act is focused on nationwide leveling of American incomes. Redistribution of workers’ wages is taking place through skyrocketing premium subsidies and billions in illegal CSR subsidies.Congress never appropriated money for CSR payments, which are estimated to be around $10 billion in 2018. The payments are...

After the congressional testimony of fired FBI Director James Comey, many Democrats, with notable exceptions, pulled back from the impeachment talk. MSNBC's Chris Matthews, one of the cheerleaders of the Donald Trump-must-go crowd, even said that Comey failed to make a case for obstruction of justice. "The big story has always been ... the President had something to do with colluding with the Russians. Something to do, a helping hand, encouraging them, feeding their desire, to affect the election in some way, some role they played, some conversation he had with Michael Flynn, or Paul Manafort, or somewhere. And yet...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Chinese government "systematically dismantled" CIA spying operations in China starting in late 2010 and killed or imprisoned at least a dozen CIA sources over the next two years, The New York Times reported Saturday. The newspaper cited 10 current and former U.S. officials, who described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. They spoke on condition of anonymity. The report said U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies scrambled to stem the damage, but were bitterly divided over the cause of the breach. Some investigators were convinced there was a mole within the CIA,...

For good reason, the Iran nuclear agreement has been deeply unpopular and viewed with much skepticism since its signing in 2013. Not only did the Obama administration negotiate the agreement without a guarantee Iran wouldn't eventually build a nuclear bomb, President Obama and his State Department approved a number of secret side deals that have been exposed in the aftermath of negotiations. One of those secret deals included $400 billion in cash sent to Tehran in the middle of the night on an airplane. When caught, the administration initially denied the transaction and then later admitted much of the untraceable cash...

As Susan Rice faces growing calls to testify under oath, the former Obama administration official now accused of ordering the unmasking of Trump officials under surveillance is suggesting that she never did so for political purposes, and that it is sometimes "necessary" for investigative purposes. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of both the Senate Judiciary and Select Committee on Intelligence, suggested in a tweet earlier Tuesday that Rice "needs to testify under oath."

Call it the tale of two National Security Advisers, Michael Flynn and Susan Rice. As much as Flynn has taken fire as being an architect of unspecified "collusion" with the Russians, Susan Rice has been like the iceberg that sank the Titanic -- barely visible above water but dangerous enough to threaten the Trump administration’s ship of state. As reported by Circa News, Rice, while serving as Obama’s National Security Adviser, requested the unmasking of the names of Team Trump officials mentioned in the so-called “incidental” surveillance of the Trump transition team: Computer logs that former President Obama’s team left...

In October 2011, the Obama Administration ordered 100 U.S. special operations troops to deploy to central Africa to help African and U.N. forces capture Joseph Kony, the psychopathic commander of the Ugandan rebel Lord's Resistance Army. Kony is an evil man. Note the present tense: is, not was. In the late 1980s, Kony took control of a movement whose goals linked the Acholi tribe's demands for autonomy in northern Uganda with a promise to govern Uganda according to the Ten Commandments. But Joseph Kony lived by a different testament. In 2005, the International Criminal Court indicted him on charges of...

In the final hours of Barack Obama's presidency, some White House officials reportedly raced to spread and preserve information about possible communications between associates of then-candidate Donald Trump and Russians. The New York Times, citing former American officials, reported that these officials were concerned that the information they were gaining on the Russian meddling in the election and the possible campaign contact could be compromised with the new administration, and they wanted to set up any future investigation with the information. According to The Times, after Obama asked for an investigation into Russian tampering into the elections, officials found some...

America should not withdraw from the United Nations without first ensuring that the organization cannot retaliate. “Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.” –Niccolò Machiavelli The recent actions of the Obama administration and the UN Security Council have renewed calls for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations....

resident Obama has managed to sit in the Oval Office for eight years without facing a major scandal, so he claimed at a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton Sunday night in Florida. The statement came in response to criticism from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). "Here's a guy who called my administration perhaps the most corrupt in history — despite the fact that actually we have not had a major scandal in my administration," Obama said. On behalf of the American people, we would like to remind Obama about the decline of the Veterans Affairs agency, in which we learned thousands...

The Obama administration's policy in the Middle East appears to be designed to remove secular tyrants and replace them with more religiously oriented regimes. Thus, Gaddafi ("We came, we saw, he died." Ha ha ha.) and Mubarak were targeted. Bashar al Assad is the current target. This policy has been marked by monumental incompetence, mendacity, and confusion. Nothing about it should be accepted without a healthy dose of skepticism, including what follows. The Telegraph of the U.K. has a video of U.S. commandos fleeing a town under a barrage of insults ("Crusaders! Infidels! Dogs! Get out!") from the Free Syrian...

Republican attorneys general from Nevada, Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma are suing the Obama administration in a last-ditch effort to stop the U.S. from giving up control of the internet’s domain name system. “Trusting authoritarian regimes to ensure the continued freedom of the internet is lunacy,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. “The president does not have the authority to simply give away America’s pioneering role in ensuring that the internet remains a place where free expression can flourish.” The AGs … asked a judge late Wednesday to step in and stop the transition to an international oversight...

A federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas, Monday disallowed the Obama administration's attempt to change the nation's mind on the latest liberal social cause: sex-alteration. Judge Reed O'Connor enjoined the administration from enforcing new directives from the Departments of Justice and Education, which would prop open public-school restroom doors for access by students identifying with a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth. How this moral/constitutional tangle gets resolved we will learn in due course. Meanwhile, O'Connor's decision highlights a campaign issue deserving of the closest attention, despite its receiving, up to now, almost none. The Bolsheviks...