Free Republic

Several readers have written in this week saying they’re having a hard time squaring The Times’s own past reports of wiretapping with the paper’s assertions that there is no firm evidence that any warrants for wiretaps have been issued. Readers also expressed confusion with The Times’s assertion that it would be illegal for a White House to receive information about such investigations, when its own wiretapping story in January said the Trump White House was given some information from intercepted communications. “For months now the NY Times and many other mainstream news sources has been running stories based on anonymous...

'The FBI's not going to tell the Secret Service if they're monitoring the president-elect' “The Secret Service does ECM sweeps, electronic counter-measures, where they go in frequently and look for listening devices, radio frequencies, all kinds of things to make sure the president or president-elect is not being, in fact, wiretapped or listened in on on specific phone lines,” Bongino revealed. The former agent, noting Trump had Secret Service protection as a candidate, thinks it’s much more likely the Secret Service discovered something while performing one of their ECM sweeps of Trump Tower and later found out it was the...

Trump's 'evidence' for Obama wiretap claims relies on sketchy, anonymously sourced reports Washington Post

..... Debbie Wasserman Schultz and local Jewish leaders are speaking out after swastikas were keyed into vehicles parked along Miami Beach, overnight....

<p>A draft document obtained by The Associated Press concludes that citizenship is an "unlikely indicator" of terrorism threats to the United States and that few people from the countries Trump listed in his travel ban have carried out attacks or been involved in terrorism-related activities in the U.S. since Syria's civil war started in 2011.</p>

After Hillary Clinton’s monumental loss in the 2016 election, she and her team of sycophants, bent on casting blame anywhere but the failed candidate with a losing message, spit out one of the all-time fakest of all fake news stories: The Russians did it. Team Clinton said that she’d lost to a reality show star because the Russians, spearheaded by President Vladimir Putin, had directly sought to influence the election — and succeeded. In their version of events, Putin masterminded the hacking, and subsequent release, of emails from the Democratic National Committee and top aides to Clinton. While the emails...

These are chaotic and anxious days inside the National Security Council, the traditional center of management for a president’s dealings with an uncertain world. Three weeks into the Trump administration, council staff members get up in the morning, read President Trump’s Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Mr. Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls. Some staff members have turned to encrypted communications to talk with their colleagues....

National Security Council (NSC) career staffers are purging their social media accounts of any past anti-Trump sentiments, the New York Times reports. The purge comes amid increased suspicion among NSC political appointees that career officials are leaking key details of the Trump administration’s possible courses of action. These White House political appointees reportedly call these leaks the “insider threat” and are considering monitoring the phone calls and emails of career staffers. The White House was reportedly incensed by leaks within the NSC of plans by Secretary of Defense James Mattis to have U.S. sailors board an Iranian ship in international...

Customs and Border Protection told major US airlines Friday night that it is reinstating visas following a federal judge’s decision to temporarily halt President Donald Trump’s travel ban. CBP is “back to business as usual” prior to the situation that was in place before last week’s executive order, an airline executive told CNN. Airlines are expected as soon as Friday night to start removing travel alerts from their websites and getting messages out to customers to alert them about the change.

Claims that Trump administration caved to Arab pressure over the embassy move constitute fake news. By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus Published: January 25th, 2017 Several Israeli-based media outlets are repeating a story from an Arab media outlet that the U.S. Embassy move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is “off the table” due to Arab pressure. But let’s look at the evidence thus far produced and line it up against reality. The reports claiming the Trump administration has backed down from its stated commitment to move the embassy assert the reason that is happening is because of pressure placed on the new...

Abbas here lied twice. First, it is a lie that he is prepared to return to the negotiating table with Israel. In the past few years, Abbas has repeatedly rejected Israeli offers to resume the stalled peace negotiations. Abbas's chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, claimed this week that his boss was ready to resume the peace talks with Israel in Moscow....... This means that Abbas has not abandoned his preconditions for resuming the peace talks with Israel. The timing of Erekat's announcement in Moscow is clearly linked to the Paris peace conference. It is part of the Palestinian strategy to depict...

As president-elect Trump awaits his briefing on Russian hacking, he has decided to clarify his stance on the intelligence agencies and Julian Assange in the face of so-called media lies... TRUMP'S TWEET "The dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange - wrong. I simply state what he states, it is for the people to make up their own minds as to the truth. The media lies to make it look like I am against "Intelligence" when in fact I am a big fan!" If only the media's narrative could play out how they wanted it!!...

The mainstream media are abuzz with claims that House Republicans have voted to “gut” or “eviscerate” the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), or to strip it of its independence. Perpetual House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) claimed Republicans had “eliminated” the oversight body, and linked the move to President-elect Donald Trump, claiming that the House Republicans’ move represents a violation of Trump’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington. The story qualifies as “fake news,” and the fact that it is being repeated by so many outlets does not make the it any less fake. First of all, the...

The Washington Post has retracted its story about Russian hackers penetrating the nation’s electricity grid with a virus found in a Burlington, Vt., electric company laptop. “Authorities say there is no indication of that so far [that Russians had penetrated the US electric grid],” according to an editor’s note attached to a corrected version of the story on the paper’s Web site. “The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid,” the editor’s note read. News of the supposed hack had set off a firestorm of recriminations, with Vermont leaders calling Russian President Vladimir Putin...

Donald Trump spent the past two years attacking rival Hillary Clinton as crooked, corrupt, and weak. But some of those attacks seem to have already slipped into the history books. From installing Wall Street executives in his Cabinet to avoiding news conferences, the president-elect is adopting some of the same behavior for which he criticized Clinton during their fiery presidential campaign. Here's a look at what Trump said then — and what he's doing now:

Two investigations involving minority women who accused Donald Trump supporters of attacking them last month — one in California and another in Oregon — have stalled because of lack of cooperation or lack of evidence, investigators tell The Daily Caller. The investigations stem from incidents that allegedly occurred at San Diego State University and in Hillsboro, Ore. in the days after Trump was elected president. At San Diego State, a Muslim student claimed that on the day after Trump’s victory, two men stole her purse and car keys while making pro-Trump statements. She later reported her vehicle stolen. Also on...

A privacy group that has dealt with a wide range of Web secrecy and other privacy issues has heard enough talking: It wants to see the evidence regarding the alleged Russian hack of the U.S. presidential election. “The U.S. intelligence community has officially attributed the attacks [on Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee] on the Russian government, yet questions have been raised about the failure of the FBI to investigate that attacks on the political parties of the United States,” said the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The FBI is entrusted with protecting the cybersecurity of the public and...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- He was a first-term senator-turned-president, a former law professor with little experience in economics or management. When he entered the White House he had one essential task: piece together the shards of a shattered U.S. economy. It wasn't smooth and it wasn't fast. But President Barack Obama will leave behind, by most measures, an economy far stronger than the one he inherited. Unemployment is 4.6 percent, a nine-year low. Stocks keep setting highs. An additional 20 million Americans have health insurance coverage. The nation has shifted toward cleaner energy sources: natural gas, wind and solar.

President Barack Obama defended his response to Russia after Wikileaks published emails from top Democrats which disrupted the elections. “I told Russia to stop it, and indicated there will be consequences when they do it,” he said to reporters during a press conference on Friday. Obama said that he personally challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin behind the scenes, but he let law enforcement handle the investigations and the release of information. “In early September when I saw President Putin in China I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly...

Sometimes all you need to highlight “Fake News” is a screen grab: