Free Republic

Last week, the firm behind the contract for the Russian Dossier, Fusion GPS, requested that a U.S. District judge block congressional investigators from access, via a previous subpoena, to its bank records. The judge gave the House Intelligence Committee lawyers and Fusion GPS a week to see if they could work out a mutual agreement on the production of the records. Yesterday the attorney’s for Fusion GPS and the House Intelligence Committee agreed to terms for releasing the bank records. The intel committee will receive the bank records to continue their investigation, but the documents will be sealed from public...

Robert Mueller is as upstanding as any investigator comes — that is, at least, if you listen to the mainstream media. snip A report from attorney Jeffrey Marty on American Lookout paints a picture of Robert Mueller which shows he might be part of the D.C. “swamp” that Donald Trump was elected to drain.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is welcoming a congressional measure killing the ability of millions of Americans to band together to sue bank or credit card companies to resolve financial disputes in a major win for Wall Street. The Senate narrowly voted late Tuesday night to nullify the rule, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the final vote to break a 50-50 tie. The measure now goes to President Donald Trump for his signature. "President Donald J. Trump applauds the Congress for passing," the resolution, the White House said in a statement shortly after the vote that highlighted its...

Congressional oversight of the executive branch is only as useful as the members of Congress doing the oversight. That's the lesson to be learned from media reports filed yesterday and today in which U.S. senators claimed they had no idea the U.S. military had about 1,000 soldiers in Niger. The reports followed the combat deaths of four U.S. Special Forces soldiers after an ambush in Niger near the border with Mali earlier this month: CNN reports today: "I did not," Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pennsylvania, responded to CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day" Monday whether he knew there were troops in...

Mark Stewart is General Counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intel. Fusion GPS is seeking to quash a subpoena for their bank records. FBI is stonewalling Congress for answers – to the Committee which has oversight authority over the FBI. Mark Stewart files a sworn affadavit in response to Fusion’s effort, on behalf of House Committee. Stewart claims, in his affadavit, among other things, Richard Steele, of Trump Dossier fame, was an employee of the FBI, since at least 2010. WHAT??????????

President Trump says Americans don’t worship government, they should call evil by its name and times are “changing back” to an earlier era when the nation’s founders “invoked our Creator four times in the Declaration of Independence.” His comments came Friday at the Value Voters Summit in Washington, D.C., an annual gathering of the nation’s leading conservative and faith organizations, where he spoke just a year ago as a candidate. He’s the first sitting president to address the group. “We know that it’s the family and the church, not government officials, that know best how to create strong and loving...

RUSH: Something dramatic, crucial, and extraordinary has just happened, ladies and gentlemen. It just happened mere moments before this program began. The timing certainly not coincidental. It happened at the White House. It involved the president of the United States and a pen. And what happened was a first serious slice taken out of Obamacare. Despite Senator John McCain’s best efforts to thwart President Trump and preserve this boondoggle, the president’s triumphs here at this stage. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: So let’s go to the audio sound bites, you tell me what you hear. This is the signing ceremony today, executive...

But somehow manage to pump out a cute little cartoon for every obscure NON-western European "history maker." The only surprise is they didn't do an "Indigenous Peoples" day theme. . .

The Second Amendment is worthy of our defense. It is there to defend us. Don't ever lose sight of that Before a people are enslaved, before any nation is taken over, they are first disarmed. That’s just history and common sense. From the inside or out, a nation is always first compromised by the removal of its ability to defend itself. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, et al., they all declawed whatever organism that stood in their way - most especially the people they intended to govern. When Japan was planning to attack our mainland, their Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto purportedly said that...

There is a move afoot to cast Christopher Columbus as an evil person instead of the person celebrated as the first to traverse the Atlantic Ocean, discovering there were two major continents not previously known to the world as it existed in 1492. In another feel-good moment, some cities are renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous People’s Day. American Indians are desperate for real help, not placating moments. Naomi Schaefer Riley has defined how bad things are for American Indians and how Washington, D.C., bureaucracy is destroying the lives of these Americans in her terrific and terrifying book "The New Trail...

'Public expenditures on the council and related forums have produced few benefits' President Trump, while still a candidate, promised that he would get a better deal for America. Or, in fact, better deals. Since he’s taken office, he’s talked about cutting funding for the United Nations, renegotiating the NAFTA trade deal. He already pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord. All of which have taken extensive discussion and defending. On Friday, he decided to get a better deal for the U.S. with a simple move: he simply canceled an entire federal program begun by President Obama. It was...

The number of people working for the federal government has declined by 13,000 in 2017, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time, overall government employment in the United States increased by 7,000 as the number of people working at the state government level and the local government level both increased. Meanwhile, the significant increase in manufacturing jobs that started last December halted in September as the nation lost 1,000 jobs in that sector. {..snip..}

Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status…The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There...

BREAKING: All American Wolverine Katica (twitter link) has spotted a massive FOIA data dump from the U.S. State Department today consisting of thousands of documents, many of which relate to Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State. If you want to help search through the emails and documents –CLICK HERE– then share your discoveries in the comments section below. Looks like there’s enough documents to keep us all busy through the weekend.

President Donald Trump discusses the short-term (relief) and long-term (recovery) efforts for Puerto Rico. As everyone is aware, even before the storm the island territory was under financial collapse as a result of Democrat mismanagement and generational political agendas’ creating a culture of dependency. Hurricane Maria has exacerbated Puerto Rico’s problems and is showcasing a governmental structure incapable of governing during crisis. The media hypes the suffering, yet omits the Island’s inept systems of governance and the culture of dependency. The only way the U.S. federal government can assist effectively is by taking over almost every aspect of state and...

President Trump's inaugural committee announced it intends to donate $3 million to several organizations assisting with hurricane relief, following criticism for not donating the outstanding funds sooner. The money will be divided equally between the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and Samaritan's Purse, Thomas Barrack Jr., chairman of the private Presidential Inaugural Committee said. The three organizations have been involved with hurricane relief efforts in the Gulf Coast, Florida, and the Caribbean.

Homeowners in tax-happy blue states could find a bitter pill inside the new Republican tax plan, which would kill their ability to write off the property taxes that can cost even middle class families more than $10,000 per year. The plan rolled out Tuesday would keep in place deductions for mortgage interest and charitable donations. But, in a move to help offset other major cuts in the plan, many other itemized deductions would be scrapped. ... New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo slammed the proposal, saying the loss of the deduction could cost New Yorkers more than $17 billion. “It...

Scalise, the House Majority Whip, returned to Capitol Hill on Thursday for the first time since June, when he took a 9mm bullet to the hip during baseball practice at an Alexandria, Va. baseball field. "I'm back," Scalise tweeted at about 10 a.m. Thursday. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) reportedly became emotional when he saw his longtime colleague at the Capitol on Thursday. The gunman, James Hodgkinson, wounded five people including Scalise during the June 14 shooting, which occurred as lawmakers practiced for the Congressional Baseball Game a day later.

The nation’s approach to managing public infrastructure is often inefficient. Best practices, such as life-cycle asset management and preventive maintenance, are rarely a priority. We can, however, unlock billions of dollars of infrastructure funding capacity now trapped in existing assets by improving how we build, operate and finance infrastructure. While experts discuss the size and urgency of our infrastructure needs, the debates focus on how to pay for new infrastructure. The Trump administration has identified public-private partnerships (P3) as a primary strategy. A majority of states and D.C. have statutes allowing P3s. Other countries have also adopted P3s as a...

We’ll dig through the tax reform details as they become available. However, pragmatic #MAGA Trump supporters would be wise not to get too far out in advance of supporting this GOPe tax reform package yet. The reason for caution is quite simple. Notice the players, the key constructionists. These are the exact same Decepticons who constructed the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) trade deal, and who operate in DC on behalf of their multinational corporate sponsors and benefactors. The representatives within this press conference are the EXACT SAME members who constructed TPP and pushed Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) to ensure its...