Free Republic

Federal investigators are examining whether the emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News. The FBI seized the laptop and a hard drive through a grand jury subpoena. The subpoena was later published by the New York Post. The bureau has declined to comment. The Post, a conservative tabloid, has published a series of stories based on emails the newspaper said it obtained from President Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani. The...

When a Republican benefits, it’s treason; when Democrats are in charge, the intelligence agencies serve their candidates. Here’s the main question that arises from Media-Democrat shrieking over President Trump’s twaddle about taking campaign-related information from foreign powers: Is it just silly or actually dangerous? In our latest episode of Un-reality Government, the president was egged on by — who else? — George Stephanopoulos, a partisan Democrat who is the face of ABC News. When last noticed in an election cycle, the Clinton confidant was setting up Mitt Romney with a question about whether the Constitution permitted the banning of contraceptives....

If you read the newspapers, tuned into the cable TV pundits or received an email from one of the Democrats running for president, you’d swear Donald Trump was back to his treasonous ways. All that was missing was an annoying OMG text exclamation punctuating the unfounded claims that Trump might violate the law in 2020 by accepting intelligence on a political rival from a foreign country. The inference, of course, is that it would come from a hostile power such as Russia or North Korea or Iran. Actually, what Trump told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos was that he’d consider taking...

Federal Election Commission (FEC) Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub said Thursday it is illegal to accept foreign assistance during elections after President Trump publicly suggested he would accept foreign intelligence on opponents. "I would not have thought that I needed to say this," Weintraub tweeted Thursday with her statement. "Let me make something 100 percent clear to the American public and anyone running for public office: It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election," Weintraub said. In an interview with ABC News Wednesday, Trump suggested he...

President Donald Trump may not alert the FBI if foreign governments offered damaging information against his 2020 rivals during the upcoming presidential race, he said, despite the deluge of investigations stemming from his campaign's interactions with Russians during the 2016 campaign. Asked by ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos in the Oval Office on Wednesday whether his campaign would accept such information from foreigners -- such as China or Russia -- or hand it over the FBI, Trump said, "I think maybe you do both."

A defiant President Trump pushed back Thursday against the outrage over his comments that he would be open to accepting opposition research from individuals from foreign countries, arguing he should have no obligation to call the FBI in certain cases while trying to turn the tables on Democratic lawmakers over their own foreign contacts. “I meet and talk to ‘foreign governments’ every day,” the president tweeted Thursday. Citing recent conversations with leaders in the United Kingdom and Ireland, France and Poland, Trump said, “We talked about ‘Everything!’ Should I immediately call the FBI about these calls and meetings? How ridiculous!...

President Trump on Thursday defended his comment that he would listen if a foreign entity offered damaging information on a political opponent, equating it to his contacts with foreign governments as part of his role as president. In a series of tweets, the president sought to downplay the significance of his comment a day earlier to ABC News, which critics argued invited a foreign power to interfere in the 2020 election and some Democrats highlighted as reason to begin impeachment proceedings. Trump first suggested listening to damaging information from a foreign actor was equivalent to holding diplomatic meetings with foreign...

THE current disagreement between our intelligence agencies and those of our allies regarding Iran's nuclear program reveals the debased state of our $75-billion- a-year intel system. The Germans, French, Israelis and now the Brits agree that Iran has an active nuclear-weapons program, differing only as to how swiftly Tehran can field warheads. The US intel community's holding out. It's worried about political risks. A reassessment's supposedly under way, but we're clinging to our comforting conclusion that Iran gave up on designing nuclear weapons in 2003.