Free Republic

Influential Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primary race last week, and former President Donald Trump wasn’t happy. Vander Platts, who reportedly voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, responded equally fiercely on X, formerly Twitter. In one post, Vander Plaats said Iowa “will exhibit higher standards when they choose @RonDeSantis over a Chump.” Just returned from an Iowa stronghold for @realDonaldTrump Person to Person told me they are done with him. While they long to leave the topic of ‘golden showers’ and return to the discussion of gold standards,The final...

An unsealed indictment on Monday revealed a federal grand jury indicted an Alabama man because he threatened Fulton County, Georgia’s district attorney and sheriff over President Donald Trump’s legal case, according to The Hill. The individual allegedly responsible for the threats is 59-year-old Arthur Ray Hanson II. He is charged with two counts of transmitting interstate threats. Hanson threatened both Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat in separate voicemails on Aug. 6. According to the indictment, Hanson threatened Willis because she intended to charge Trump with his fourth criminal indictment. And Labat was threatened...

One of the most visible purveyors of conspiracy theories that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election due to massive fraud has become one of the "witnesses for the state" in the former president's Georgia racketeering case, Fulton County prosecutors revealed on Wednesday. A once-celebrated defamation lawyer, attorney L. Lin Wood represented the parents of slain child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey and helped secure the vindication of Richard Jewell, the security guard falsely accused of plotting to set off pipe bombs at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. His efforts to help Trump overturn his electoral defeat have put him on...

WASHINGTON, Sept 5 (Reuters) - A former chairman of the right-wing Proud Boys group was sentenced on Tuesday to 22 years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump trying to overturn the former president's election defeat. Enrique Tarrio was convicted of charges, including seditious conspiracy, for his role in planning the storming of the Capitol, when thousands of supporters of the Republican then-U.S. president violently tried to stop Congress from certifying the results of an election that Trump falsely claimed had widespread fraud. Federal prosecutors had asked...

The multiplying charges brought against allies of former President Trump and their mounting legal fees are creating consternation in Trump world — while presenting a real risk to the former president. Trump has burned through millions of dollars in donor money to pay for legal fees as he defends himself against charges in New York City, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C. But the former president, who has built a reputation for stiffing workers, has shown no interest in providing financial aid to former aides charged over their efforts to keep him in power. Former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has listed...

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - A $200,000 bond agreement has been reached for former President Donald Trump as part of last week’s sweeping Fulton County indictment. Also on Monday, a $100,000 bond agreement was reached for John Eastman, one of Trump’s attorneys. A $10,000 bond agreement was also reached Monday for Scott Graham Hall, the Atlanta-area bail bondsman who was allegedly involved in commandeering voting information that was the property of Dominion Voting Systems from Coffee County in south Georgia. On Monday afternoon, Drew Findling, one of Trump’s Atlanta-based attorneys, was seen walking into the Fulton County courthouse. A...

Giuliani has faced a series of legal repercussions for his efforts to overturn the 2020 vote count, and had his electronics seized by federal investigators for a separate (now closed) probe in April 2021, which the attorney has said in court filings resulted in him having to pay high fees to the vendor, Trustpoint, that’s hosting his data from the seized devices. [snip] The attorney has been ordered to pay more than $89,000 in attorneys fees in a defamation case brought against him by two Georgia election workers, which he failed to pay in July as required, and Giuliani’s attorney...

More than half of Americans say there’s no chance of them voting for former President Donald Trump to return to the White House in 2024, according to a national poll released Wednesday. With Trump, 77, the clear front-runner in the Republican primary, 53% of Americans told the AP-NORC Center survey they would “definitely not” support him next November – with another 11% saying they would “probably not” pull the lever for the 45th president.That leaves just 36% who say that they would “probably” or “definitely” support Trump in his third consecutive bid for the presidency. But Trump’s high disapproval rating...

I think he’s in a lot of legal trouble, and I’ve been saying this...for a while and people, you know, attack that. But hey, I live in the real world and the real world is telling us that Donald Trump has a lot of legal problems. He’s probably going to get convicted in one or more of these cases. And people need to wake up and people need to understand what’s happening. And people also need to understand that, while he is not to blame for the hyperpartisan actions of the prosecutors, he left himself very vulnerable. He handed a...

Several of the attorneys who spearheaded President Donald Trump’s frenzied effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election tried, and failed, to collect payment for the work they did for Trump’s political operation, despite the fact that their lawsuits and false claims of election interference helped the Trump campaign and allied committees raise $250 million in the weeks following the November vote. Among them was Trump’s closest ally, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Trump and Giuliani had a handshake agreement that Giuliani and his team would get paid by the Trump political operation for their post-election work, according...

Former President Donald Trump is getting blasted from both sides of the aisle for palling around with conservative provocateur Laura Loomer at his golf club over the weekend.Loomer posted a video and a handful of photos of herself and Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, during the LIV golf tournament."Today was the best day of my life," Loomer posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, Sunday. "I got to spend the entire day with the greatest President our country has ever had: DONALD J TRUMP!"

Former President Donald Trump Monday lashed out at special counsel Jack Smith and U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan even as the judge prepares to consider a gag order in advance of his trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Deriding Chutkan as “the judge of (Smith’s) dreams,” Trump called for a new jurist to be appointed to oversee his historic trial even though his defense team has not yet made any such motion in court. “Deranged Jack Smith is going before his number one draft pick, the Judge of his “dreams” (WHO MUST BE RECUSED!), in an attempt...

Former President Donald Trump’s political action committee has paid the French-born stylist who designed Melania Trump’s inaugural ball gown more than $260,000 for “strategy consulting” since the start of last year, filings with the Federal Election Commission show. Hervé Pierre Braillard was paid $108,000 by the Save America PAC during the first six months of 2023, receiving the money in increments of $18,000 each month, according to a half-year report filed with the FEC Monday night.Braillard, who goes by Hervé Pierre professionally, also received $152,500 in 2022, broken down into eight monthly payments of $18,000 between May and December of...

In a court filing last night, Rudy Giuliani admitted he lied about a key allegation that fueled the “Stop the Steal” movement in Georgia. Giuliani and others in Donald Trump’s post-election efforts accused two election workers — a mother and daughter — of manipulating ballots to wipe out Trump votes. A video of the ballot processing fueled this allegation, even though Georgia election officials insisted it showed nothing out of the ordinary.Giuliani admitted to making false statements in accusing the two women, who are suing him for defamation. But Giuliani asserts in the same filing that he has a First...

With the mainstream media and Political Pundit World busy essentially declaring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign over not even two months after he formally announced, what’s an excitable MSNBC host to do? Tell us who the left really fears, that’s what. As RedState has previously reported, in their own not-so-unique but nevertheless illuminating way, members of the press, their allies on the left, as well as the truuuuue conservatives at the Lincoln Project, have been busy bees over the last year and a half or so telling us how DeSantis is “worse than Trump” because DeSantis in their...

“I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I would have done the same thing.” — Richard Nixon. What Nixon said, Donald Trump could easily say about himself. Of course, he will not. Richard Nixon was the last president who faced anything like the legal jeopardy former President Trump is facing — plus a frothing electronic lynch mob. The end game for both Nixon and Trump has some eerie similarities. Detested by the media, the New York-Washington elites and the left, both...

<p>How did former President Donald Trump celebrate Independence Day? Well, he lit off some fireworks, but not the literal kind, more like that aggro and angry political potshots he’s known for by sharing a late-night meme that read “F*ck Biden” on social media in the wee hours of July 4th.</p>

"...this sounds pretty whiny for a first-look official campaign ad. The script for it amplifies that quality, as it sounds as though Trump wrote it himself. “Struggling big-time,” “failing so bad,” “Trump’s support was so powerful,” and so on. It’s comic-book language for a comic-book grudge. Everything about this ad is about Trump’s personal affront, and nothing — not a single word — is about the issues of the day, policies Trump wants to implement, or even voters themselves. It’s sixty seconds of personal butt-hurt, broadcast nationally."

New Hampshire's uber-popular Republican governor Chris Sununu put it plainly on NBC's Meet the Press: "Donald Trump is a loser." Before that, Sununu had rightly rebuked all the pundits who say the GOP presidential nomination for 2024 is a done deal. "Most folks don’t decide who they are voting for until about three weeks before the election," he said. And he is right. At this time, a year before the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton was the odds-on favorite to be the Democratic nominee. She lost to Barack Obama. At this time, 28 months before the 2016 election, polls showed the...

A super PAC supporting a potential White House bid from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday it will financially support former President Donald Trump's move to California — just one day after the GOP 2024 front runner took aim at the Sunshine State's leadership and called it the "worst state." "Donald Trump has so deeply disparaged the state of Florida by calling it the ‘worst state,’ we at Never Back Down will help him leave by offering financial assistance to help him move to his beloved California, so he can be close to his good buddy Gavin Newsom, whom he...