Free Republic

In remarks on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) spoke about why he was blocking a $40 billion Ukraine bill. Video ...

MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace said Monday on her show “Deadline” that congressional Republicans were a threat to national security. Wallace said, “Over the weekend, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, either ignorant of which is always possible with him or unbothered by, also likely, his own continued startling hypocrisy, suggested Russia would never have invaded Ukraine ever in the first place if the U.S. had simply provided weapons to President Zelensky sooner. Here’s why that matters. You’ll remember just two years ago, Kevin McCarthy repeatedly defended the twice impeached ex-president’s campaign to hold up military aid for Ukraine in the...

The Biden administration is planning to throw Americans’ tax dollars at the Taliban without knowing how the money will be used, according to a watchdog group. “The Biden administration has laid out plans through the U.S. Treasury to open up the U.S. taxpayer dollars spigot back into Afghanistan,” Adam Andrzejewski of the group Open The Books said in a video on the organization’s website. “We run the risk of funding the world’s most dangerous foreign terrorist organization if we open up the U.S. taxpayer spigot through the Department of Treasury,” he said. On Friday, President Joe Biden signed an executive...

Deborah Lyons, the head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, met with Sirajuddin Haqqani, a wanted terrorist with the Haqqani Network, a Taliban component with close ties to Al-Qaeda. Lyons had served as Canada’s ambassador in Kabul when the Taliban carried out a suicide bombing against a Canadian embassy convoy. Lyons put up a monument to the security contractors who were wounded and killed, but they sued after being abandoned afterwards.

Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turns out to be the Taliban.

The Biden Administration chose this past week to inform Congress that it would be releasing millions of dollars in US assistance to the Palestinians, as armed clashes between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas intensified in the aftermath of Jerusalem Day on Monday.The funds are part of $100 million in aid the Administration has designated for Palestinian causes, which represented a huge policy reversal from the Trump Administration, which had cut off nearly all financial assistance for Palestinians.As the conflict intensifies despite U.S. calls for restraint, the administration notified Congress on Thursday that it will provide $10 million to Palestinian...

Shortly after Islamists attacked America on 9/11, then-Senator Joe Biden demanded that the United States should send a taxpayer-funded, "no strings attached" gift of $200 million to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bombshell report has revealed. In the weeks following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Biden reportedly said that "this would be a good time" to hand over a huge chunk of tax dollars to the Iranian regime while America was in mourning.

While the headline states Joe Biden ‘is under fire,’ almost every sentence in the story is designed to defend Biden’s actions, beginning with the rest of the title.A recent Politico article by Caitlin Emma on President Joe Biden’s hold of funding for border wall construction provides a perfect example of the press running cover for the Biden administration. Almost every sentence is designed to excuse or defend Biden’s action, and of course smear the Trump team in the process.Biden’s executive order on Jan. 20 ordered a hold on all funds being used for the construction of the wall along the...

At our current rate of spending, the U.S. will be unable to confront major problems in the future because we’ve already stretched ourselves too thin.America’s debt and deficits usually are spoken of in terms of economics, but they have huge implications for national security. To see why, start with the economics angle. Famed investor Michael Burry — who foresaw the housing market bust and was played by Christian Bale in the hit film “The Big Short” — has just issued a warning. In a series of tweets, Burry said that the stock market could crash because of too much debt....

>“Tons of aid”? Please read this before you repeat that statement: Myth: Israel Is the Largest Beneficiary of US Military Aid The aid that Israel does receive has strings attached to it that no other recipient has, such as the requirement that a minimum of 75% of the aid must be spent on US-made equipment. The remaining 25% may be used on non-US-made equipment only with US government approval. (This will increase until the figure is 100% by the end of the period of the current MOU.) US-made equipment that has become obsolete or obsolescent and is to be replaced...

President Joe Biden's first calls to foreign leaders went to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at a strained moment for the U.S. relationship with its North American neighbors. Mexico's president said Saturday that Biden told him the U.S. would send $4 billion to help development in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala

The Republican Party in Arizona’s largest county voted Saturday to censure the widow of the late Sen. John McCain after she endorsed Democrat Joe Biden. The state GOP is planning a similar vote later this month. The Maricopa County GOP’s censure resolution called Cindy McCain a "troubled individual, with a past riddled with drug abuse and illegalities associated with such behavior." The measure also accused Cindy McCain of supporting "leftist causes" including gay marriage, larger government and "others that run counter to Republican values." Cindy McCain has acknowledged suffering a three-year addiction to pain medicine from 1989 to 1992 and...

Congress made it official on Christmas Eve: no COVID-19 stimulus money will be approved until next week at the earliest. Partisan gridlock resumed as Democrats sought to unanimously approve President Trump’s request that $600 stimulus checks be increased to $2,000, The motion was refused consideration under House policy because Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had not consented. In a Wednesday night letter, McCarthy accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) of “selective hearing” of Trump’s objections, and asked for unanimous consent for the House to reconsider billions in foreign aid in a relief bill approved Monday by both chambers of Congress....

Washington, DC, hates us. They literally hate all of us useful idiots who are only here to fund their pet projects and advance the personal agendas of those in the swamp. And sadly, the vast majority of Americans have no idea. They will not read the 6000-page bill released by Congress. They won’t read a single word of it. All they’ll do is wait for their $600 checks and complain that they need more.The text of the COVID-19 “relief” bill is loaded with gigatons of pork that Americans know nothing about. Moreover, it’s so significant, so insulting, that mainstream media...

The Trump administration fired the heads of three federal agencies after the election, prompting one to claim he was retaliated against for disagreeing with some policy. The heads of the agencies that oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile, electricity and natural gas regulation and overseas aid were sent packing, NPR reported. The sudden departures included Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who was forced to resign Friday. She was the first woman to oversee the agency in charge of the nuclear stockpile. Last year, she was on the president’s short list as a possible replacement for former National...

From being ostracised by the international community as the centre of the deadly coronavirus outbreak, China is seeking to reframe itself as a global expert that can help hard-hit regions battle the disease. Beijing is keen to reposition the virus as a global outbreak and not just a China malaise as it sends testing kits and experts overseas and translates treatment manuals into foreign languages. The deputy foreign minister said at a press conference Thursday that China had shared its treatment plan with “many countries”. An expert team has already been sent to Iran, where 92 people have died, along...

The newly released White House budget for 2021 proposes cuts to foreign aid, however aid to Ukraine is slated to remain at its 2020 level—a notable standout given how central a role military aid to Ukraine played in President Trump's monthslong impeachment trial. The Washington Post reported last week that the Trump Administration’s 2021 budget will contain $365 million in aid to Ukraine, including $250 million for military support. Though the White House has been accused of putting American security at risk for withholding funding to Ukraine last year, a comprehensive assessment exposes that the U.S. has no security interests...

How Christine Lagarde, Clinton and Nuland Funded a Massive Ukrainian Ponzi Scheme John Helmer Fri, Jul 5, 2019 | 3120 words 8,340 Comments The author is the longest serving foreign correspondent covering Russia. He published his fascinating memoirs in December of 2018. They are full of insights into what has really been going on in Moscow over the past 30 years. RI wrote about it here. He is the author of 12 books, 3 of them about Russia. When Igor Kolomoisky (image below, centre) financed anti-Russian units operating with the Ukrainian Army in the Ukrainian civil war, he was a staunch ally of Petro Poroshenko’s government in...

WASHINGTON — Democrats stepped up their calls on Sunday night for John Bolton to testify at President Donald Trump's impeachment trial after an explosive new report alleged that in his unpublished book, the former national security adviser said Trump personally tied Ukraine aid to an investigation of the Bidens — an account that conflicts with the president's. "John Bolton has the evidence," tweeted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. According to the manuscript, as reported by The New York Times Sunday night, Trump told Bolton that nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine would not be released until that nation...

The Associated Press (AP) described the matter of Joe Biden’s leveraging of U.S. foreign aid to pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating corruption at Burisma — a Ukrainian energy company upon whose board of directors Hunter Biden sat — in order to protect his second son as a “false narrative.” The AP echoed similar news media outlets’ mischaracterization of the above-mentioned event, including the New York Times, Snopes, NPR, USA Today, Vox, and the Washington Post. In a column identifying differing perceptions of political goings on being related to varying news media consumption patterns, the AP dismisses Joe Biden’s...