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Three Americans have been kidnapped in Baghdad by "militias," according to Arab news channel Al Arabiya, citing its own sources. The State Department said it is aware of the report and is working with Iraqi authorities to locate the missing Americans. Officials, however, would not confirm that anyone been kidnapped. "We are aware of reports that American citizens are missing in Iraq," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement to The Hill. "The safety and security of American citizens overseas is our highest priority, he continued. "We are working with the full cooperation of the Iraqi authorities to...

(NEW YORK) - In New Hampshire in an election year, even young children aren't afraid to share their views with politicians - as Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina saw firsthand Friday night. "Do you think Donald Trump is taking away our rights by not letting Muslims in the country because there's some terrorist attacks?" Harrison Golden, an eight-year-old Fiorina supporter, who is Muslim, asked the businesswoman after a town hall event she held in southeastern New Hampshire. "I think Donald Trump says a lot of things that are crazy," Fiorina responded. Harrison's sister, Zahra, who is 10 years old,...

The Supreme Court could announce as early as Friday if it will be taking up President Obama's appeal to save his executive action on immigration, according to a Reuters report. The news service reported early Friday that the nine Supreme Court justices were set to meet privately on whether to hear the White House appeal to a pair of lower court rulings that found invalid Obama's move to shield 4 million immigrants from deportation. Declining to hear the case would effectively kill the program, whereas taking it up would immediately make it one of the most-watched cases of the court's...

The leaking of the Clinton emails has been compared to as the next "Watergate" by former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova this week, if current FBI investigations don't proceed in an appropriate manner. The revelation comes after more emails from Hilary Clinton's personal email have come to light. "[The investigation has reached] a critical mass," DiGenova told radio host Laura Ingraham when discussing the FBI’s still pending investigation. Though Clinton is still yet to be charged with any crime, DiGenova advised on Tuesday that changes may be on the horizon. The mishandling over the classified intelligence may lead to an imminent...

A pro-Ted Cruz super PAC is out with a searing new TV ad invoking ISIS and the San Bernardino terrorist attacks and suggesting that Marco Rubio's efforts to pass an immigration reform bill are imperiling national security. The commercial, from the group Stand for Truth, is the latest in a series of anti-Rubio ads that have homed in on the Florida senator's work on the so-called Gang of Eight bill, a bipartisan 2013 effort to pass immigration legislation through the Senate. "We are at war - not just abroad, but here at home. With the clear and present threat of...

Has the State Department released a smoking gun in the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal? In a thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel. That should be game, set, and match, yes?

Trump: Let's face it, Ted Cruz is copying me on building a border wall in order to step up his "weak" immigration game. Skip to 4:55 of the clip below for the key bit from yesterday's "Face the Nation" interview. Pop quiz: Who said the following, and when did he say it - and to whom? We have a crisis on illegal immigration. Neither party is serious about stopping it. I strongly oppose illegal immigration. I categorically oppose amnesty. I support legal immigrants who come here supporting the American Dream. I come from the perspective of someone who spent much...

Many people do not understand the inability of the Republicans to accomplish more in Washington. They can certainly put a stall on many of President Obama's appointments, especially judges who will outlast this president's term, but the president has too much power. If we look forward to the next president, who will be a Republican -- short of a fit of stupidity -- that person will have a lot to do and it is clear what their second task will be. The obvious first task is to review all of Mr. Obama's executive orders, many of which are lawless, and...

Them against the rest Bigoted, juvenile Donald Trump — with a tax plan that would increase the U.S. deficit by up to $12 trillion over 10 years — dominates national Republican presidential polls. The billionaire boor’s competition with the rest of the field is but a proxy for a struggle of huge importance to the GOP, as well as to America. Two Republican strains are slugging it out: Rejectionists, represented by Trump and Ted Cruz, are pitted against candidates who offer greater hope of responsibly governing an ideologically diverse country. Voting in state primary contests, just over a month away,...

In the wake of the horrific attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, how dare Hillary Clinton lecture us on how to win the war against terrorists. As we endure the politically driven rhetoric about terrorism from Mrs. Clinton, a candidate who refuses to even identify the enemy as "Islamic Extremist Terrorists," I burn for our electorate to understand Mrs. Clinton's history of pandering to terrorists and politicizing terrorism for her perceived gain. Long before Mrs. Clinton's politically driven terror denials about Benghazi, and her recent praise for the release of terrorist Omar Khadr from Guantanamo Bay, in the summer of...

The Obama administration calls its national security strategy "Countering Violent Extremism." In the benighted times before January 20, 2009, we used to call it counter-terrorism. Why does Obama insist on the more fuzzy "extremism"? Because "terror" has its roots in Islamic scripture. This fact ought to be undeniable, but Obama denies it -- and in Washington, he's far from alone in that. It is not just that the word terror appears several times in the Koran; it is that the word appears in a particular context: The duty of Muslims to act as Allah's instrument to terrorize non-Muslims is...

Digging into the Opinion Savvy/FL poll where Trump leads 29-20% over Cruz, and beating Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio combined, some rather stunning details popped out from the internals Trump leads among black Republicans with 39% supporting him (Cruz has 20%) Cruz leads very slightly over Trump among Hispanics (22-20) On the question of whether you "strongly approve" or "somewhat approve" of Trump's proposal to ban new Muslim immigration, 70.5%. Wow.

A new Fox News poll finds 50 percent of voters favor Trump’s ban, while 46 percent are opposed. However, when Trump’s name is removed from the question, support for the plan goes up five points and opposition goes down six: 55 percent favor the unnamed proposal, while 40 percent oppose it. So while voters favor the “Trump” ban by a 4-point margin -- that increases to 15 points when the same ban is not associated with Trump. There are stunning shifts in the responses among Democrats: 45 percent favor banning Muslims if Trump’s name is not mentioned, yet when the...

"If you're in favor of World War III, you have your candidate." So said Rand Paul, looking directly at Gov. Chris Christie, who had just responded to a question from CNN's Wolf Blitzer as to whether he would shoot down a Russian plane that violated his no-fly zone in Syria. "Not only would I be prepared to do it, I would do it," blurted Christie: "I would talk to Vladimir Putin ... I'd say to him, 'Listen, Mr. President, there's a no-fly zone in Syria; you fly in, it applies to you.' "Yes, we would shoot down the planes of...

Man alive. You don’t see trend lines like this every day.I guess the spin for O fans is obvious. The sudden spike isn’t a “real” downturn in his counterterror approval, it’s just a reflex after the jihadi massacre in San Bernardino. Support for gun control bounced upward after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 but it came back down to earth in time. So will this, provided there isn’t another attack in the U.S. soon. Could be, but Obama’s been trending poorly on this subject for two years, ever since ISIS started creeping onto American voters’ radar. It was probably...

President Obama’s proposal raised immediate concerns that ISIS, which vowed to infiltrate refugee camps, could use forged documents to enter the U.S. White House assurances that refugees would be carefully screened met with renewed skepticism after it was revealed that terrorist Tashfeen Malik obtained a fiancée visa despite notable red flags. Malik, who together with her husband killed 14 and wounded 21 in a terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., Dec. 2, listed a phony Pakistani address and reportedly had a history of posting jihadist messages on social media platforms. Malik’s entry into the U.S., combined with so many Syrians...

Gaping holes in the K1 fiance visa interview process. Reckless bans on scrutinizing visa applicants' social media posts. Ignored alarms over marriage fraud. New details keep seeping out about all the "red flags" Obama's immigration officials missed in the case of the San Bernardino jihadists. Color me unshocked. The American public and Capitol Hill politicians should have been more vigilant about vetting Obama's vetters in the first place. What do you expect when you put crony know-nothings, political hacks and identity politics zealots in charge of our safety? In case you'd forgotten (or never paid attention), Obama campaign finance bundler...

GOP candidates debate for first time since terror attacks.

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush stood in the home of a Dallas fundraiser in mid-November and confidently declared: "Come December 15, [Donald] Trump will be in decline."Today is Dec. 15, and unless you count two recent polls that showed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) leading in Iowa, Trump still tops the GOP presidential campaign field. In fact, by several measures he's surging - there's no sign of decline.The New York businessman earned 38 percent support in a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday. That's an increase for Trump from previous Post-ABC polls, his highest mark in the survey's history and more...

UPDATE: It gets worse. ABC News is reporting that Homeland Security officials have been bound by a secret US policy not to scrutinize visa applicants' social media footprint because the Obama administration feared bad press over "civil liberties." This represents an stunning, intentional dereliction of duty -- all for PR: Fearing a civil liberties backlash and "bad public relations" for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end a secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, a former senior department official...