Free Republic

Remember Never Trump? For four years, an influential clique of think tankers, Republican operatives and talking heads claimed that any conservative who supported ­Donald Trump was complicit with a uniquely malevolent presidency. But if Trumpian conservatives are ­responsible for everything the 45th president was faulted for, then Never Trump should likewise own the evils of the new Biden administration. Never Trumpers spoke of the Trump GOP almost as if it were Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, a dictator’s discredited political organ, badly in need of a purge. “President Donald Trump leaves office with a crimson-stained legacy,” thundered Peter Wehner, vice president...

I took a beating on Twitter Thursday night for making what I thought was a commonsense observation that President Trump should be negotiating favorable terms for resignation "if there are 20 GOP senators who’d vote to impeach." In our current climate, this was taken as a call for Trump’s impeachment. But it wasn’t a value judgment. It was a mathematical calculation. As it happens, I do think the president has committed an impeachable offense, making a reckless speech that incited a throng on the mall, which foreseeably included an insurrectionist mob. These rioters ended up overwhelming security forces and storming...

These are dark days in the history of the United States, and no one is feeling them more intensely than Mike Pence. On Wednesday, the vice president admirably turned aside the president’s high-intensity demands that he shred the Constitution. Trump was pushing Pence to usurp the states’ power over the disposition of their electoral votes — in effect, to claim dictatorial power to reverse President-elect Biden’s victory. Pence’s fidelity to his constitutional oath so enraged Trump that the president publicly rebuked him even as an insurrectionist mob was descending on the Capitol. Press reports indicate that the rioters, upon overwhelming...

The first thing to notice about Texas’s desperation lawsuit, which seeks to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, is what does not appear on the front page: the name of the state’s solicitor general, Kyle Hawkins. The lawsuit is brought against four other states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin — that have certified Joe Biden as the winner of their electoral votes. Thus, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton invokes the original jurisdiction of the United States Supreme Court to hear disputes between states. Yet the brief is not signed by the lawyer who typically represents Texas before...

So, what crime would you charge, Mr. President? The closing weeks of the campaign find President Trump berating William Barr, the attorney general who has served him and the country well. Trump’s increasingly strident complaints relate to the probe of his 2016 campaign, launched by the Obama administration. At Barr’s direction, the genesis and conduct of that probe have been under investigation since early 2019 by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham, a well-regarded career prosecutor.

As regular readers of my column know, I’m no fan of Donald Trump. And that’s putting it mildly. I don’t like his chronic dishonesty. I don’t like narcissism. I don’t like his nastiness and his silly name-calling. I detest his need to constantly cause chaos, as he did with a recent tweet suggesting we should postpone the 2020 presidential election. There’s nothing about this man’s character that I like. And I hope he wins re-election in a landslide. Actually what I mean is that I hope the Republican candidate beats the Democratic candidate. And I wish the Republican candidate were...

How does Watergate differ from Obamagate? Journalists led the charge to uncover the first. But now? Now journalists are leading the coverup of the second. J. Peder Zane has illustrated the media coverup exactly: “This week’s news that at least 39 Obama officials had unmasked Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s private conversations during the last month of their administration seemed a little shocking. Today, major media outlets are telling readers and viewers that the practice is “routine.” A CNN headline told readers, “Trump pushes 'Obamagate' conspiracy based on routine intel activity.” Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, now a CNN...

Now, a California man has put a painstakingly amount of effort into creating the world’s clearest image of the moon’s craters. Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy is the genius behind this masterpiece, which took two weeks to create. So, how did he do it? Here’s McCarthy describing the process: “This moon might look a little funny to you, and that’s because it is an impossible scene. From two weeks of images of the waxing moon, I took the section of the picture that has the most contrast (right before the lunar terminator where shadows are the longest), aligned and blended them to...

Thanks to Senators Rand Paul (R., Ken.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah), as well as an amen chorus of Trump loyalists in the House, the president seems poised to fulfill one of the fondest dreams of Clinton and Obama Democrats: Government policy that regards international terrorism as a mere crime, a law-enforcement issue to be managed by federal judges rather than a national-security threat from which the officials Americans elect must safeguard our country. I doubt the president realizes these ramifications of declining to reauthorize three PATRIOT Act security measures that are set to expire. Successfully camouflaging themselves as “FISA...

Two things happened simultaneously on Wednesday: (a) The House of Representatives transmitted to the Senate two articles of impeachment approved on straight partisan lines a month ago, and (b) the House’s impeachment inquiry - yes, it’s still very much alive - highlighted new, relevant evidence it has turned up about the activities in Ukraine of President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Giuliani’s associates. The Democrats’ strategy is coming clear. The House provided the Senate with two half-baked impeachment articles. House Democrats rushed through the investigation, forgoing salient witnesses and evidence, because of the political calendar. The charges are weak...

In the wake of the strike ordered by President Trump that killed General Qasem Soleimani, many on the left have rushed to criticize Trump for retaliating against the attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. 2020 Democrats, in particular, piled on Trump with condemnations. "President Trump just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox," said Biden. Cory Booker, who apparently is still in the race, claimed, "We have a president who has failed to show any larger strategic plan." Elizabeth Warren acknowledged that Soleimani was an evil terrorist responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, but also said,...

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy asserted on Tuesday that former FBI agent Peter Strzok will not succeed in suing the government for violating his rights, saying “he is going to strike out.” McCarthy made the statement on “Fox & Friends” one day after Strzok filed the lawsuit in Washington, D.C., federal district court arguing that his politically charged anti-Trump messages were protected by the First Amendment — even though he sent them from bureau-issued phones while playing leading roles in the probes into both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. McCarthy, a Fox News contributor, said Strzok, who is suing the...

In Tuesday morning’s impeachment inquiry hearing, in the questioning of Lt.-Col. Alexander Vindman of the White House National Security Council and Jennifer Williams of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff, Democrats are pressing three misleading themes. First, Chairman Adam Schiff and the Democrats’ counsel, Daniel Goldman, have attempted to frame a dichotomy between President Trump and what they call “official” US foreign policy. It’s a false framework. Official policy is not, as they suggest, made by the so-called policy community (comprised mainly of the NSC, the State Department and government agents from the intelligence community and the armed services). The president...

McCabe has indicated that, if charged, he would claim the Justice Department was under pressure from the White House. Federal prosecutors in Washington have recommended that criminal charges be filed against Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s former deputy director, and the Justice Department has rejected a last-ditch appeal by McCabe’s lawyers, according to a report on Thursday by Fox News. This clears the way for what appears to be McCabe’s imminent indictment.

People living in Palestinian territory are being denied rights and Tlaib was similarly denied the ability to visit her grandmother, Rivera claimed Monday on "The Story." "I also think it is absolutely outrageous that two sitting members of the Congress of the United States of America... were denied entry into the country. I'm shocked that the ambassador did not mention 52 years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories." Prior to Rivera's remarks, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon discussed the situation with host Martha MacCallum. In his interview, Rivera explained why he found it wrong for Israel...

The most effective way to spot The Indecent is to watch for those who incessantly peacock their own decency … which perfectly describes the increasingly reprehensible Never Trump publication National Review. Granted, there are still a couple of interesting contributors over there, chiefly Victory Davis Hanson and Andrew McCarthy, but this in no way mitigates National Review’s indecency anymore than a couple of innocent men wrongfully convicted turn a state prison into a Boy Scout camp. National Review’s fall has been breathtaking. What was once the premiere source of conservative thought has become one of the most hypocritical, anti-intellectual, feelings-first,...

This is Part Two of a two-part series. In Part One, we took a look at the OLC guidance that bars the indictment of a sitting president. (The OLC is the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.) In particular, we looked at (a) how, in investigating President Trump for purported obstruction, special counsel Robert Mueller’s staff distorted the guidance into a prohibition against even considering whether an offense occurred; and (b) the futile hope of congressional Democrats, during Wednesday’s hearings, that Mueller would contradict his final report on this point. In Part Two, we explore why Mueller’s staff of very...

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is quite the comeback for Quentin Tarantino. After the stillborn Hateful Eight and the loss of his mentor Harvey Weinstein into the maw of #MeToo, the writer-director is all on his own with his ninth film; he’s off-the-leash, flush with 90 million of Sony’s dollars, and what did he deliver…? A straight-up masterpiece. If this isn’t the movie Tarantino was born to direct (that was probably Pulp Fiction) OUATIH is unquestionably the movie his 27-year career has been chugging toward, the one where it all comes together: a passion for forgotten B-movies, for correcting history, for all things pop culture...

Almost from the start, Democrats and their media echo chamber have moved the goal posts on collusion. The original allegation – the political narrative that the Clinton campaign, through Obama administration alchemy, honed into a counterintelligence investigation – was that that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russia’s “cyberespionage” attacks on the 2016 election. But there was no evidence that candidate Trump and his surrogates had anything to do with the Kremlin’s hacking and propaganda schemes. And no supporting logic. The Russians are very good at espionage. They neither needed nor wanted American help, their operations predated Trump’s entry into...

Jan. 18, 2019 - 5:03 - Special counsel's office issues rare public statement to dispute Buzzfeed report; reaction from former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy.