Free Republic

he impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, uncovered a months-long effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election. As described in this executive summary and the report that follows, President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign.

Now that the Mueller report is out, effectively exonerating President Trump of colluding with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, the Trump administration has begun investigations as to the origins of the phony Steele dossier and the illegal surveillance of his campaign. It's a trail that's unlikely to lead anywhere but to the office of embittered President Obama, and independent reporter Nicholas Ballasy got a chance to ask the Obama administration's former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, whether he thought this investigation would eventually lead. His response was about what you might expect — nowhere Obama...

Obama Had a Secret Plan in Case Trump Rejected 2016 Election Results By Mattathias Schwartz In October 2016, senior staff in the Obama White House discussed what they should do if Hillary Clinton won the November election and Donald Trump refused to accept the result as legitimate. They had cause to be worried. At that time, Trump had openly speculated that the election might be “rigged.” During his final debate with Clinton on October 19, he said that his opponent “should never have been allowed to run” and declined to answer the question of whether he would concede. “I’ll keep...

Remember all those hilarious 2016 election night videos? Well, the good news is that a couple of the best scenes of liberal desolation that night have remained unseen...until now. They come to us by way of "The Final Year" documentary which was intended to celebrate the Obama adminstration foreign policy team in its last year of office. The featured players are former Secretary of State John Kerry, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former United Nations ambassador Samantha Power, and former creative writing graduate and deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. Most of the documentary is just boring propaganda with...

So what's Ben Rhodes been up to these days? His unmaskings and leaks are over, he doesn't have Seb Gorka to lie about, and his failures as a national security official have pretty well been exposed. I kid you not: he hasn't been idle. His latest scheme is launching a "shadow" National Security Council, called "National Security Action," co-chairing the operation with Jake Sullivan. Showing that he was always the one running things in the Obama White House, despite his creative writing major, his past career as a failed novelist, and his lack of national security experience, he's herded a...

Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. on Monday contemptuously dismissed White House deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes’ denials that the Obama administration played a key behind-the-scenes role in getting a resolution condemning Israel through the U.N. Security Council, describing him as an “expert at fiction.” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government says it has “iron-clad” information indicating that the Obama administration had a role in the crafting and passage of the resolution that passed Friday in the absence of a U.S. veto. Ambassador Ron Dermer told MSNBC the Israeli government had proof that it would share that evidence with the incoming...

...While Panetta pointedly never mentions Rhodes’s name, it is clear whom he is talking about. “There were staff people who put themselves in a position where they kind of assumed where the president’s head was on a particular issue, and they thought their job was not to go through this open process of having people present all these different options, but to try to force the process to where they thought the president wanted to be,” he says. “They’d say, ‘Well, this is where we want you to come out.’ And I’d say ‘[expletive], that’s not the way it works....

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh, speaking at a discussion with all the service chiefs before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, told the crowd that ISIS “looked an awful lot like something much more than a terrorist group.” August 2014, the United States looked at ISIS only as a terrorist group and developed a military strategy to take on ISIS as a terrorist group. The Obama Regime--or its Ghost writer Ben Rhodes--mistakenly called ISIS the JV squad, ignoring the possibility that the group was developing an infrastructure and a government. Obama advisors also failed to...

How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age. Picture him as a young man, standing on the waterfront in North Williamsburg, at a polling site, on Sept. 11, 2001, which was Election Day in New York City. He saw the planes hit the towers, an unforgettable moment of sheer disbelief followed by panic and shock and lasting horror, a scene that eerily reminded him, in the aftermath, of the cover of the Don DeLillo novel “Underworld.”

You're lucky to live through big history. And you're living through it. The explosion of joy in large pockets of the country Tuesday night was beautiful to see, and moving. For me, at the end of the evening, looking at live shots of the throngs in Chicago's Grant Park, I flashed back to 1960 and how it felt, as a child, to see that the grown-ups had elected a Catholic president. I can't say we stood taller—we were Irish, we already stood tall—but yes, there was a wave of feeling: "What a country," "What a development!" The other day, when...