Free Republic

It was mid-May, about six weeks after Trump appointee Mari Stull began her new job as senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs. As senior adviser at the bureau, Stull was in charge of making sure President Trump’s agenda was represented at the many international organizations the U.S. participates in and mostly funds, such as the United Nations and its various agencies. Stull and her boss, Amb. Kevin Moley, had just left for a trip to Geneva for the World Health Assembly. Back at the State Department, Erin Barclay, a senior career diplomat at the IO...

What if the biggest mystery surrounding Col. Moammar Gadhafi had nothing to do with his long, brutal reign as the world's most eccentric and violent leader turned pariah? And what if a long-lost letter from a Catholic cardinal who knew Gadhafi's true identity was evidence that could have solved the mystery? To many Libyan people, the biggest question mark about Gadhafi does not involve his repressive and dictatorial rule, delusional statements or brazen lies. Behind closed doors, for years, they've wondered if he is Jewish. Last week the issue came out in the open, as NBC's Richard Engel reported from...

A bipartisan majority of House lawmakers have written a letter to President Obama backing up the letter 47 GOP senators controversially addressed to Iran on Monday with dire warnings about the impending nuke deal. Some 250 members had signed the House letter by Friday afternoon, a clear majority of the chamber. Its authors, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., and the panel's top Democrat, Eliot Engel of New York, are still gathering more signatures but will send the letter to Obama soon. "Should an agreement with Iran be reached, permanent sanctions relief from congressionally mandated sanctions would require...

NBC Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel and MSNBC’s “Hardball” anchor Chris Matthews criticized President Obama’s address on ISIS during MSNBC’s special coverage of the speech on Wednesday night.

The Talk Shows May 4th, 2014 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.; Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas; Kevin Johnson, mayor of Sacramento, California; Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.FACE THE NATION (CBS): Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti; Richard Williams, father of tennis players Serena and Venus Williams.THIS WEEK (ABC): Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn.; former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabber; former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa.STATE OF THE UNION (CNN): Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.; Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y.

President Barack Obama should not necessarily wait for Congress to return from recess before taking action in Syria, two lawmakers said on "Fox News Sunday." "We have to move, and we have to move quickly," said Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "Congress needs to be involved, but perhaps not initially." The U.S. can and should act to respond after reported widespread chemical attacks in Syria, using cruise missile strikes but not "boots on the ground" to destroy Bashar al Assad's runways, munitions and fuel, Engel added. "I think we have to respond,...

NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel is safe in Turkey after five days of captivity in Syria, the network said Tuesday morning. Engel and his crew were last heard from Thursday just after they entered Syria.

Richard Engel has reportedly gone missing in Syria, with the NBC News foreign correspondent out of touch since last Thursday. Reports of EngelÂ’s disappearance have come from Turkish news sources, which also note that a Turkish journalist working with Engel, Aziz AkyavaÅŸ, has also gone missing. Engel had been reporting on the ongoing conflict between rebels and forces backing President Bashar al-Assad.

NBC is unable to reach its Middle East bureau chief Richard Engel, who was also reporting from inside Syria.

House Democrats this week have amplified their calls for new spending on infrastructure and other federal projects in the face of May's discouraging job-creation figures. Even as Republicans are insisting on "trillions" of dollars in spending cuts, Democrats maintain that a targeted injection of additional federal dollars in the near-term would go a long way toward reversing the hiring slump. Friday's disappointing job report, they say, only bolsters their case. "The American people, while concerned about the deficit, place much more emphasis on job creation, and they see a role for the government," Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) told The Hill....

An Obama appointee who played a central role in crafting the 2010 health care bill has cashed out to a well-connected lobbying firm, where her first clients are two of the bill's beneficiaries: abortion provider Planned Parenthood and a hospital chain. Liz Engel was deputy assistant secretary for legislation at the Department of Health and Human Services. Today she is a managing director at the Glover Park Group in the health and wellness practice. Her story further highlights the coziness of this administration with the abortion industry, and also undermines President Obama's portrayal of the health care bill as a...

Great result for tea party favorite, Congressional candidate, Anthony Melé, who won the Republican primary on September 14, but b-i-z-a-r-r-e process that took 14 days to announce the winner. So bizarre that as of Thursday, September 30 at 11:00 PM, fully 16 days after the polls closed, NY1 continues to erroneously show York Kleinhandler, the loser in the race, in the lead by 153 votes! It cost New York State $70 million to install a new system of paper ballots in order to make things easier, not more difficult to count the vote. In fact, counting the 7,000 votes cast...

Rep. Charles Rangel told Harlem leaders Saturday he signed a plea deal on ethics charges but that the GOP pushed for a trial. "He said he had signed an agreement. He was ready to go but I guess politics came into play," said Assemblyman Keith Wright (D-Manhattan), one of about 50 leaders gathered for a Harlem district meeting Saturday. Another attendee said Rangel implied, "It was Republicans that didn't want an agreement" and that he signed a deal before the ethics committee released its report last month. Rangel, who faces 13 ethics violations, said earlier this week that he won't...

Big lies die slowly. After a claim by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that 90% of Mexican drug dealers' military weapons (machine guns, hand grenades and missiles) come from American gun stores was exposed as a lie several months ago, it's back — this time with the imprimatur of the Government Accountability Office.A June 21 CBS "60 Minutes" report by Anderson Cooper was clearly coordinated to coincide with release of the GAO report and a similar one by "activist" Josh Sugarmann. You are likely to soon hear and read that the GAO report commissioned by Rep. Eliot...

Last fall the AT reported on a couple of instances in which members of Congress seemed to be confused as to where they lived, sometimes in order to claim tax benefits for which they were not entitled and sometimes to maintain the facade that they lived within the boundaries of the district they claimed to represent. We now have another case of residential confusion. This time a New York Democrat, Eliot Engel, and his wife claim to live in a large house in Maryland purchased in 1993 for purposes of that state's property tax exemption while Eliot files his income...

Bronx Rep. Eliot Engel may call himself a life-long Bronx resident, but he has also called Maryland his primary residence for years to get a local tax break that state officials have just squashed. Engel, who rents an apartment back in his district, also owns a $1 million house with his wife in the well-off Washington suburb of Potomac, Md. - a property that has been afforded $7,000 in tax breaks since he bought it in 1993, The Associated Press reported. To get the state and county paybacks, he had to list the property as his primary residence on county...

I figured something was up when Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY) kept calling Kosovo "Kosova" (the Albanian pronunciation) at the most recent House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing on the Balkans. Turns out Engel's swapped the last "o" in Kosovo for a central boulevard in the heart of Pec, a majority Albanian city in western Kosovo that was once the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Patriarch.........

As reported here, in a story airing on 'Today' of October 28th, NBC reporter Richard Engel delved into the most private concerns of US soldiers serving in Iraq. Engel queried one solider about his fears of dying in combat, or as he put it: "You ever worry one day your number's gonna come up?"Engel also drew soldiers out on their concerns as to the faithfulness of their loved ones back home, inviting them to discuss "the Jody," described by one soldier as "the guy who is back home with your wife or your girlfriend." Added Engel: "They worry and tell...

As Tim Graham reported here earlier this week, NBC reporter Richard Engel, who spends much of his time in Iraq, has declared: "I think war should be illegal...I'm basically a pacifist."This morning's 'Today' ran a feature Engel had put together focusing on depression among American troops serving in Iraq. Engel spoke with men of the 1st Platoon, 562nd Engineer Company. At one point, Engel asked the soldier pictured here: "You ever worry one day your number's gonna come up?'" Replied the soldier, in words echoing those of comrades over the generations: "Yeah, but you try to keep that in the...

While it only lasted about three weeks, the second Gulf War was an unqualified success. Jubilant Iraqis danced in the streets as U.S. military forces rolled into the center of Baghdad, while the dictator Saddam Hussein and his evil cohorts were, as General Tommy Franks put it on April 11, either dead or “running like hell.”      So what about TV coverage of the war? While the media covered many aspects of the war fairly well — reports from embedded journalists were refreshingly factual and were mostly devoid of commentary — television’s war coverage was plagued by the same problems...