Free Republic

We Interrupt Our Regular Trump Programming to Announce America’s Surrender to Iran and Global Governance July 20, 2015 At the New York Times website this morning, if you dig down under stories on the Donald Trump Circus, you will find a one-line link, buried beneath several other one-line links, to a report titled, “U.N. Vote on Iran Nuclear Deal Irks Congress.” Further burying the lede, you must scour down to a passing reference in paragraph four to find a glimmer of the real story: The Obama administration has already raced to the United Nations Security Council to spearhead action, today,...

Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby has withheld the autopsy report on Freddie Gray from defense counsel and the public for nearly two months. It is the report on which she relied to file murder and other charges against six police officers, even though the investigation into Mr. Gray’s death was not close to being complete. Now, just two days before Friday’s court deadline for the state to disclose the report to the defense, it has been leaked to the Baltimore Sun. The Sun’s story makes it easier to understand why Ms. Mosby wanted the autopsy kept under wraps. It raises additional...

Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) has penned a column for Breitbart explaining his shift from support to opposition on Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), the “fast track” legislation that would enable the current president and his successor to negotiate trade deals that Congress would then be able to vote up or down, but not amend. Senator Cruz, a contender for the GOP presidential nomination, still supports free trade and, in principle, sees fast-track as helpful to that end. Nevertheless, he says GOP leadership’s sleight-of-hand has convinced him that, if not amended, the current TPA bill will become a scheme for passing...

It is already clear that Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney who is prosecuting the Baltimore Six is not up to the responsibilities of her job. The only questions are: 1. how deeply incompetent?; and 2. what consequences will result from her bungling? The second question is the more important one, for Mosby has set up her prosecution as a response to the “No justice, no peace” movement. If and when she fails to secure a conviction through her ineptitude, then by the standard of the mob to which she is catering, more riots will be justifiable, and therefore the likely...

General Petraeus committed several serious felony violations of federal law. And not in a one-off lapse of judgment; this was a series of offenses committed over an extended period of time. Clearly, Petraeus believed he was a law unto himself. A notorious publicity seeker, he treated journals chronicling his highly classified activities as if they were his own property, to be maintained and exhibited as he saw fit — mainly, for use in burnishing his carefully cultivated image — rather than as federal law dictates. Even after he was caught, he continued to lie, obstruct justice, and put the government...

In my column on the plea agreement the Obama Justice Department allowed David Petreaus to enter after it was discovered that he mishandled classified information, I noted that he had been required to sign a separation agreement when he left the CIA. It is called a “Security Exit Form” and is obviously the CIA version of the State Department departure form described in Jim’s post (and linked in Shannen’s column) that Secretary Clinton should have signed upon leaving government service. The prosecutors’ outline of the evidence against Petraeus includes the following (at pages 11-12, paragraph 27): [O]n or about November...

Having the U.N. Security Council bless a deal wouldn’t make it binding under our Constitution. So, as we warned earlier this week, the international-law game it is. It is no secret that Barack Obama does not have much use for the United States Constitution. It is a governing plan for a free, self-determining people. Hence, it is littered with roadblocks against schemes to rule the people against their will. When it comes to our imperious president’s scheme to enable our enemy, Iran, to become a nuclear-weapons power — a scheme that falls somewhere between delusional and despicable, depending on your...

There’s a lot of half-baked commentary out there urging the Benghazi select committee chaired by Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) to “seize” forthwith the servers through which former secretary of state Hillary Clinton carried out her private e-mail scheme. Regrettably, some of it comes from lawyers and self-styled “constitutional conservatives” who ought to know better. As Chairman Gowdy explained to Megyn Kelly in a Fox News interview on Monday night, however, his committee — a legislative committee — is powerless to obtain search warrants and coerce the physical surrender of evidence. Simply stated, the committee is not a prosecutor. Our...

A journalist informed me this morning that a source close to Congressman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) and the HouseÂ’s select committee on the Benghazi terrorist attack, which Mr. Gowdy chairs, has responded to points raised in my weekend column. In the column, I expressed surprise and disappointment that, while Chairman Gowdy by his own account learned about Secretary of State ClintonÂ’s use of private email over six months ago, the committee took no meaningful responsive action: It did not reveal that alarming information publicly, issue subpoenas for those emails, or issue preservation letters to the relevant telecommunication service providers to...

Chairman Trey Gowdy knew about Clinton’s secret server six months ago, and that too is a scandal. In assessing the Benghazi select committee headed up by Chairman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), there are two possibilities, and they are not mutually exclusive: (1) The committee is just a Potemkin probe erected by the Republican establishment to get restive conservatives to pipe down, and (2) the committee is incompetent. The panel, of course, was commissioned by the Republican-controlled House to investigate the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2012, attack in which al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists killed Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and...

Thanks to Clinton’s flouting of record-keeping laws, the substance of her communications with the president — on Benghazi, say — remains a mystery Politico is reporting that President Obama knowingly corresponded with then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton via the latter’s private e-mail address. That does not necessarily mean Obama knew Clinton was systematically flouting administration rules and federal record-keeping law. It does, however, mean he and administration officials had to know she was conducting official business over non-secure, non-government e-mail — even in communicating with the president of the United States; even though the White House claims Obama, as his...

Did Hillary Clinton Violate the Federal Embezzlement Law? by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY March 4, 2015 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s systematic evasion of federal recordkeeping requirements involved both the use of private email addresses and a server system installed in her Chappaqua manse. The servers, according to the Washington Free Beacon, may have been set up by shady longtime Clinton lackey Eric Hothem – under a false name (Eric Hoteham) slightly varied from his true name. It may also have been designed to give users the ability to erase emails without a trace. Shannen Coffin’s excellent column today points out...

FEBRUARY 14, 2015 Obama’s Unconstitutional Attempt to Shift the Blame for His Losing ISIS Strategy His proposed resolution would upend the Constitution’s national-defense framework. By Andrew C. McCarthy On Wednesday, President Obama proposed for Congress’s consideration an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) against the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL). The jihadists are already being fought — albeit not nearly vigorously enough — under existing AUMFs. So Obama’s proposal, which would gratuitously repeal one of the prior AUMFs, is unnecessary. It is, in addition, so pathetic a concoction of lawlessness and aimlessness that, in a healthier political climate,...

I don’t understand why folks are giving President Obama and his spokes-minions such a hard time over his insistence that Ahmedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who just happened to be Muslim committing terrorism that had nothing to do with Islam, was just “randomly” picking out folks in Paris to kill when he randomly came upon a grocery that just happened to be Jewish and, coincidentally, to have Jews in it, whom he randomly killed. Sure, we know Coulibaly called a French TV station during the siege, said he was loyal to the Islamic State that has nothing to do with Islam,...

No doubt because of my background investigating, prosecuting, and studying terrorism, the cynical claim by White House spokesmen that the Taliban is not a terrorist organization has annoyed me even more than the Obama administration’s nonstop lying usually does. No surprise then that I could be found railing about it on The Kelly File Thursday night. In that spirit, ten thoughts for the weekend: 1. Under federal law, there are only three requirements for a group to qualify as a “foreign terrorist organization”: It has to be (a) foreign, (b) engaged in “terrorist activity” (bombings, assassinations, etc., carried out to...

When folks like Andrew McCarthy articulated why our findings about then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s close adviser Huma Abedin were important, his camp was smeared as being discriminatory. His argument had nothing to do with discrimination or Islamophobia. It had everything to do with Abedin’s familial ties compromising her judgment and allegiances to the U.S. Constitution. Here we have an example that demonstrates this reality further and it comes via Kenneth Timmerman, who has picked up on the fact that the new Secretary of State – John Kerry – has a son-in-law with family still living in Iran. This...

Footballs are deflating, the president is detached from reality, the Saudi king is deceased, and the sharia state next door, Yemen, is descending into bloody chaos. With mere anarchy loosed upon the world, it would be easy to miss the fact that, in England this week, Bobby Jindal gave as important and compelling a speech as has been delivered in years about America — our leadership role on the world stage, our preservation as a beacon of liberty. In the birthplace of the Magna Carta, it has nonetheless become legally risky to speak with candor (even when quoting Churchill)....

.....I was not outraged when President Obama directed the Justice Department to end the pretense of “defending” the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I feel the same way about the president’s decision not to join dozens of world leaders in Paris last Sunday to march in favor of free speech and against Islamic-supremacist terror.... ...it is better to know where policymakers really stand... The show of international solidarity in the immediate aftermath of last week’s jihadist atrocities was very moving. But let’s not kid ourselves: It was rife with hypocrisy.... Prior to last week, these preening progressives could reliably be...

National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy vigorously defends the efforts of Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee to draw attention to the unconstitutionality of Obama's amnesty plan. Writes McCarthy: "As long as we’re talking about epic insults to our intelligence, special recognition should go to the GOP establishment claim that, by forcing elected legislators to take an accountable vote, Cruz and Lee enabled Democrats to secure confirmation of objectionable Obama nominees. The story goes like this: By orchestrating a “point of order” vote to question the constitutionality of Obama’s decree, Cruz and Lee broke what Fox News gentlycalled an “informal agreement”...

Federal investigations of the Garner and Brown cases are just a pretext. Civil-rights investigations in Ferguson and Staten Island? No, what denizens of St. Louis and New York City ought to be worried about right now is . . . the crime wave overtaking Seattle. If you don’t understand why, then you probably thought Obamacare was about covering the uninsured. Like its health-care “reform” campaign, the Obama Left’s civil-rights crusade is about control — central control of state law enforcement by Washington. The deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York are each tragic in their...