Free Republic

Ever since she lost the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly blamed her defeat on the FBI’s decision to reopen the probe into her email use after messages were found on the laptop of confidante Huma Abedin’s estranged husband. But now that laptop and those emails are back in the spotlight, this time causing problems for FBI leaders as part of a forthcoming inspector general report. The probe is expected to fault bureau officials for sitting on those emails in the first place. The finding underscores how the laptop continues to play a recurring part in the Clinton case saga,...

Revelations that an FBI informant insinuated himself into the Trump campaign have led some congressional investigators to rethink their theories on how and why former President Barack Obama's Justice Department began investigating the 2016 Trump presidential effort. Most reporting has focused on the July 31, 2016, creation of a document formally marking the beginning of the FBI counterintelligence probe targeting the Trump campaign. The document, known as the electronic communication, or EC, is said to have focused on the case of George Papadopoulos, the peripheral Trump adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller about his...

Seventeen Republican lawmakers, led by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), submitted a resolution Tuesday demanding the appointment of a second special counsel to probe “misconduct” by Justice Department and FBI officials during the 2016 presidential election. ~~~ The 12-page resolution requested the Justice Department to appoint a second special counsel to probe matters associated to three topics: the ending of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, the progress of the Trump-Russia investigation from its “origins through the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel, and abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the warrant application process.”

Democrat California Congresswoman Maxine Waters is slated to pay her daughter over $100,000 in campaign funds this election cycle ... Karen Waters ...had collected approximately $650,000 as of April for running the slate mail operation for her mother over multiple election cycles. That figure will top over $750,000 by the end of this cycle. ... The liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named Waters one of the “most corrupt” members of Congress in 2011. “In the midst of a national financial catastrophe (following the 2008 stock market crash), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) used her position as...

After a rough start to year, House Republicans are suddenly feeling less pessimistic about their fall prospects. At the "macro" level, robust economic data and positive developments on the Korean peninsula have helped lift President Trump's approval rating to 42 percent , his best mark in over a year. Concurrently, Democrats' lead over Republicans on FiveThirtyEight's generic congressional ballot average has ebbed from 12 points in January to just five points today. Republicans have also received small doses of good news at the "micro," race-by-race level. After a winter dominated by a new, unfriendly map in Pennsylvania and a special...

<p>Attorneys for Lou Holtz say the former Notre Dame coach and the news website The Daily Beast have settled a defamation lawsuit filed by the ex-ESPN analyst and college football Hall of Famer.</p> <p>Orlando, Florida, law firm Morgan & Morgan announced in a news release Monday the two sides came to an amicable resolution. The firm says terms of the settlement were confidential, but The Daily Beast apologized for and corrected the headline that ran July 19, 2016, with a story on Holtz's remarks at a luncheon the Republican National Coalition for Life held during the Republican National Convention.</p>

In the year since the start of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, one thing has been notably absent: a public indictment of any Russians for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Mueller has charged President Trump’s former campaign chief, secured guilty pleas from several individuals in Trump’s orbit and indicted 13 Russians for an elaborate plot to leverage social media to influence the American electorate. But the special counsel has yet to announce charges for the hacking of the DNC, even though the intelligence community and private cybersecurity experts linked the attack to the Russian government more than...

Democrats are hoping for a blue wave to take down Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections. Then they can focus on impeaching President Trump over his mean tweets. But the latest Reuters generic poll shows Republicans suddenly with a 6 point lead! That’s a 9 point swing in one week. This comes after more record economic news (ignored by the liberal mainstream media).

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) declared on Saturday that he backs the "real" Second Amendment, rather than an "imaginary" version of the provision that he says is touted by gun rights advocates. "I support the real 2nd Amendment, not the imaginary 2nd Amendment," Murphy tweeted. "And the real #2A isn’t absolute. It allows Congress to wake up to reality and ban these assault rifles that are designed for one purpose only - to kill as many people as fast as possible."

Kelly Sadler, a White House communications aide, made a crack recently during an internal meeting about how Sen. John McCain’s opposition to President Donald Trump’s CIA pick, Gina Haspel, didn’t matter because McCain is “dying anyway.” Once the remark was leaked, presumably by someone who doesn’t much like Sadler, the media — mainstream and social — exploded as if the stock market had crashed. What a horrifying thing to say! Proof of the rottenness at the core of the Trump White House! Off with her head — that is, let’s get her fired and ruin her career! Of course, it...

Congressman: Rosenstein’s referral to IG has no subpoena power. ‘It’s a ruse … he knows exactly what happened’

By one key measure, it is now official: This is the most authoritarian Congress in history. The House Rules Committee, meeting in its ornate chamber on the third floor of the Capitol on Monday night, sent two bills to the House floor under “closed” rules — that is, legislation that must be rubber stamped in toto, without being amended by so much as a comma. That brings the number of closed rules in this Congress to 84, beating the previous record of 83 set in 2014, according to the Democrats’ tally (a Republican tally counts one fewer). And here’s the...

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. — Bertrand Russell Belonging is a drug and we are all addicted to it. When a “like” validates our social worth, or we ignore work to respond to our most recent email, we confirm our identity in a tribe. Our brains reward the recognition with a dopamine rush. For years, I started my day with a dopamine hit at six a.m. from Morning Joe. -snip- It was great television. At its best, TV is an ensemble medium, an instrument...

It’s January 2019 and President Trump is entering his third year in office. Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House again and one of the first items on the agenda is oversight. The California Democrat is leading a large House Democratic caucus newly ascendant to the majority after nearly a decade in the wilderness. They want answers. They want to know what Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is doing to public schools, they want to know what Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is doing to public lands, they want to know how EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is spending taxpayer dollars. And most...

The Democratic National Committee's latest fundraising numbers show the party continues to have trouble with fundraising as the 2018 midterm elections approach. April 2018 marked the DNC's worst April of fundraising in a midterm election year since 2006, according to data filed with the Federal Election Commission. While the DNC raised only $7.9 million in April 2018, the Republican National Committee raised $13 million. April's numbers brought the RNC's totals to $43.8 million cash-on-hand and no debt, while the DNC's totals came to $8.7 million cash-on-hand and $5.3 million of debt. Some of the money recently spent by the DNC...

On Sunday a justifiably outraged President Trump called for the former Obama administration to be investigated for its unprecedented and profoundly un-American spying and sabotage operation against the 2016 Trump campaign. “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the [Federal Bureau of Investigation/Department of Justice] infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” Trump tweeted Sunday at 1:37 p.m. Just the day before, President Trump had written on Twitter, “If...

Former CIA chief faces the legal consequences of his dirty deeds. John Brennan, director of the CIA during the Obama administration, is running for cover. He could be facing criminal charges for his role in the Deep State cabal that sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and then to undermine the legitimacy of the duly elected president of the United States, Donald Trump. Acting in desperation as the noose tightens around him, Brennan tweeted a warning to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, claiming they will "bear the majority of the responsibility of the harm done...

If you want to understand the moral sickness at the heart of leftism, read the first paragraph of the most recent column by Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne: "It's never right to call other human beings 'animals.' It's not something we should even have to debate. No matter how debased the behavior of a given individual or group, no matter how much legitimate anger that genuinely evil actions might inspire, dehumanizing others always leads us down a dangerous path." Let's begin with the first sentence: "It's never right to call other human beings 'animals.'" This is so self-evident to...

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said: “Jesus says love, because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.” On today’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough gave us a glimpse of just how corrosive hate can be. As the show was going to a break, a visibly angry Scarborough, reacting to recent criticism of the show’s one-note Trump-hating samba, railed at his own audience: “If you’re thinking: it’s just one note. Morning Joe is just one note. Yeah! Yeah, guess what? A fire department has one focus when there’s a four-alarm fire. All right? So if you don’t want to hear...

Donald Trump won the White House by flouting political norms and is determined to break the mold of the presidency. But his escalating battle with his own Justice Department and his refusal to accept the historic boundaries of executive power are leading the nation onto the most treacherous constitutional ground so far of his term. Trump on Monday delivered his order for an inquiry into claims that the FBI infiltrated a "spy" into his campaign -- first touted in conservative media -- to the bureau's director, Christopher Wray, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in an Oval Office meeting. In...