Free Republic

In The Wall Street Journal’s latest poll of swing states, 74% of respondents said inflation has moved in the wrong direction in the past year. This assessment, which holds across all seven states, is startling, sobering—and simply not true. I’m not stating an opinion. This isn’t something on which reasonable people can disagree. If hard economic data count for anything, we can say unambiguously that inflation has moved in the right direction in the past year. In the 12 months through February, inflation, according to the century-old consumer-price index, was 3.2%, compared with 6% a year earlier. Use a slightly...

Evidence suggests our intelligence agencies launched the Russia-collusion hoax months before the Clinton campaign joined in full force.Tuesday’s explosive news — that long before the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community had asked foreign intel agencies to surveil 26 people connected to Donald Trump — raises the question of whether our intelligence community colluded with the Clinton campaign in these efforts. After all, it was then-Biden campaign adviser and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who “set in motion the events that led to” 51 former intel officials issuing the public statement that falsely framed...

a prominent FBI official, Charles McGonigal, was sentenced to a prison stint. He was convicted of conspiracy and bribery involving a Russian oligarch who is known for being an extremely close associate of Vladamir Putin. While this is being widely reported on today there is a very notable omission seen from the various major news outlets covering this sentencing. To set the stage correctly we need to flash back briefly over what we have been told over the past seven or so years. With the rise of Donald Trump in Republican circles, one of the earliest complaints leveled against him...

In a poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal, former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley came out way ahead of President Joe Biden in a general election matchup by a much larger margin than Trump polls against the current president. Haley, the former Governor of South Carolina, showed she would be a formidable general election opponent to Joe Biden, coming out 17 points ahead of the sitting leader, as compared with Trump's four-point lead against him. Haley began surging in the polls after the first GOP debate and has maintained that momentum through last week's fourth debate. A...

It turns out that Richard Gilliam, who is funding almost every single Trump opponent in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary, has also donated to many of the Republicans who voted against Jim Jordan today. Gilliam has donated to Mike Lawler, who chose to place his vote for Speaker today for disgraced former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.But Gilliam also donated to Lori Chavez-Deremer, who also voted against Jim Jordan becoming Speaker of the House. snip Richard Gilliam, who has funded nearly every single anti-Trump candidate in the Republican Presidential Primary just so happens to be a donor to many of the...

Last week the Wall Street Journal published an unsigned op-ed unworthy of one of the best teams of commentators in the country. The subject was some comments Donald Trump made on Truth Social that, by surprise, displayed his trademark turbo-charged hyperbole. The Journal is usually a reliable source of sober, judicious, and fact-based analysis, but this editorial is a troubling portent that Republican Trump-Derangement Syndrome hysteria may have a negative impact on next year’s election. Trump’s heinous sin, according to the editors, is saying “that Gen. Mark Milley, the nation’s highest military officer, deserves execution—as in death. He said NBC...

Appearing with Sebastian Gorka, Kash Patel puts some excellent context on the issue of Dircuit Court Judge Chutkan presiding over the special counsel case against President Trump. ... I was unaware of the detail where Judge Chutkan originally presided over the case when Fusion GPS tried to block Devin Nunes and Kash Patel from revealing the source of the payments for the Chriss Steele dossier. ... Kash Patel: “Judge Chutkan, for those who don’t know, represented Burisma, Hunter Biden’s fraudulent consulting firm, she was a lawyer at the same law firm with Hunter Biden. But Seb, let’s put that aside....

Huff Post’s Ryan Reilly recently had problems telling the difference between earplugs and rubber bullets. He also has long struggled with telling the difference between fact and fiction. Reilly was recently arrested covering the mob violence in Ferguson, Missouri. He described the loss of his cell phone and communication devices incident to his arrest as “dehumanizing,” which gives you a sense of his priorities I suppose. But Reilly’s clownish debut on the national stage isn’t news to anyone who has followed his checkered history as a “reporter.” Reilly formerly worked for a privately owned website that served as a Department...

WASHINGTON — A Trump supporter who stormed the Capitol wearing a “Make Space Great Again” hat had two guns and 400 rounds of ammunition in his van when he was arrested Thursday near former President Barack Obama’s home, federal authorities said Friday. A federal prosecutor said in court Friday that Taylor Taranto, a 37-year-old man first identified by online sleuths in August 2021, also had a machete in the van he appeared to be living in. Taranto's van has been parked near the D.C. jail in recent weeks and he has appeared at protests in support of other Jan. 6...

What did Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Loretta Lynch, and James Comey know about Russia-collusion — and when did they know it? John Durham dropped a bombshell in his testimony today at House Oversight, which will go on for at least a couple of hours or more, but this part wasn’t the bombshell. In his special-counsel report, Durham had already revealed that CIA Director John Brennan briefed these four in August 2016 that Hillary Clinton planned to paint Donald Trump as linked to Russian intelligence, presumably to shift attention away from her own e-mail scandal.That briefing resulted in a “referral memorandum,”...

Fusion GPS, a contractor that worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, reportedly withheld over 1,500 documents from Special Counsel John Durham. These documents were sought during Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe. Fusion GPS cited attorney-client privilege in their refusal to hand over the documents, a claim that has been contested by many legal experts​. According to the initial report, Durham did not take legal action to acquire the documents. On Friday, Paul Sperry, a senior reporter for Real Clear Investigations, broke the news on Twitter, stating, “BREAKING: Hillary Clinton campaign contractor Fusion GPS held back...

The special counsel’s report provides the summary Americans need to understand the breadth of the malfeasance.. Special Counsel John Durham released his long-awaited report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation Monday. While the 306-page report includes some new details of the Russia-collusion hoax, the Clinton campaign’s role in the plot, and the FBI and intelligence agencies’ misconduct, much of the content merely rehashes what conservative media have reported for the last five years. Still, our country needed a public record of the events that represent one of the biggest political scandals in American history, and on that front Durham delivered. FBI’s...

While it’s bad enough the debunked dossier the FBI used to spy on the Trump campaign was paid for by the Clinton campaign and authored by a foreign FBI informant and his carousing researcher, the newly released report of Special Counsel John Durham strongly suggests a top Justice Department official and his wife had an early hand in shaping the political rumor sheet. According to the 306-page report, former Justice Department prosecutor Bruce Ohr’s wife Nellie Ohr first plowed the ground for the dossier with a series of a research reports she wrote for Fusion GPS, the D.C.-based opposition research...

Hoffman, 55, has told New York Magazine‘s Kara Swisher: “The short answer is I will spend as much as I possibly can and it takes and is effective [to beat Trump].” This could involve aiding other GOP primary candidates, reports Puck News, to the point where Hoffman and his cohorts are investigating state primary rules, as well as the idea of supporting anti-Trump, right-leaning media. The issue was discussed at length in a late March podcast by the new, D.C.-based news site. While Hoffman has demurred on specifically endorsing a Republican candidate, claiming “I’m almost certainly in the Biden camp,”...

Things are disappearing in the Ukrainian city of Kherson at a rapid rate. Some are physical objects. Russian troops are taking away ambulances, tractors and stolen private cars. Cultural things are going too: archives, and paintings and sculptures from the art and local lore museums. Even the bones of Catherine the Great’s friend and lover, Grigory Potemkin, have been grubbed up from a crypt in St Catherine’s cathedral and spirited away. Russian soldiers are ferrying this loot across the Dnieper river, to the left bank of the Kherson region. They have also been deporting local citizens under the guise of...

LEARNING MORE FACTS ABOUT THE FALSE TRUMP-RUSSIA-COLLUSION. HERE ARE THE BASICS:The latest: The Trial of Igor Danchenko, Christopher Steele’s source for his dirty dossier against then-candidate Trump.Why is this important? We are learning more on how government employees (FBI, DOJ) worked with a political party (the Democrats) to destroy their political opponents, i.e., Trump and his allies. Most probably, the Democrats and government employees who participated in this scam will get away with it, but at least Americans are going to know how they did it.

...Mr. Mueller resolutely set about to change the “culture” of the FBI. That’s the word he used. He was going to make the bureau into an intelligence agency, or in his repeated terminology, an “intelligence driven” organization. Unintended consequences followed. The organization I had served for 33 years would undergo a cultural change in subsequent years, culminating in the ugly disaster of Crossfire Hurricane, the fruitless but disruptive investigation of the Trump campaign and Russia. Mr. Mueller had worked with FBI special agents in Boston and San Francisco, but he didn’t know the FBI’s culture or how it functioned. He...

Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City who was involved in the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia during the 2016 election, has fallen under the scrutiny of a grand jury convened by U.S. attorneys late last year for his own ties with Russia and other foreign governments, reports Insider. The grand jury is reportedly investigating McGonigal’s business dealings with a top aide to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who was at the center of allegations that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign, according to a recently obtained...

"[O]ne of the biggest revelations in the motion is that Danchenko himself was a confidential paid human informant!" Special Counsel John Durham's request to unseal a motion in limine pertaining to the trial of Igor Danchenko, who has been identifed as the "primary source" behind ex-British spy Christopher Steele's dossier, has been granted. A motion in limine is a "pretrial motion asking that certain evidence be found inadmissible, and that it not be referred to or offered at trial," according to Cornell's Legal Information Institute. The Special Counsel's motion to include the evidence against Danchenko reveals that the FBI was...

Democrats are entering the homestretch before November’s election in better shape than earlier this year, boosted by gains among independent voters, improved views of President Biden and higher voting enthusiasm among abortion-rights supporters, a Wall Street Journal poll shows.