Free Republic

Senior advisor to President Donald Trump, Jared Kusher -- who is also the president's son-in-law -- has officially lost the ability to review sensitive classified information after failing to obtain a permanent security clearance. Speculation surrounding whether Kushner's permanent security clearance, in addition to temporary clearances held by dozens of White House Staffers, would come through has been swirling for weeks. Last week President Trump said it was up to Chief of Staff John Kelly to determine whether his son-in-law would continue to review classified information. “That’ll be up to General Kelly. General Kelly respects Jared a lot and General Kelly will...

The White House has mapped out a plan in which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is replaced in the next few weeks with current CIA Director Mike Pompeo, according to a report. Senior administration officials told the New York Times Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., would then take over for Pompeo as director of the CIA. Cotton has indicated he would take the post if President Trump offered it to him, the officials said. However, it’s unknown whether the president has approved the transition plan. A spokesperson for Cotton said the senator’s “focus is on serving Arkansans in the Senate.” The...

Now that President Trump has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, what will the State Department do? It resents Israel and has been fighting the Jewish state for years. Is it ready to comply? Don’t bet on it. That’s my advice. Foggy Bottom is the worst swamp in Washington, haunted by the ghost of Loy Henderson, the diplomat who tried to defeat the very idea of Israel. He lost decisively 70 years ago, when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, clearing the way for a Jewish state. And, in May 1948, when President Harry Truman recognized Israel 11...

A pair of rogue regimes with a longing for nuclear weapons promise to dominate Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s second year atop Foggy Bottom. Tillerson, in following President Trump’s distaste for former President Barack Obama’s decision-making, declared in 2017 an end to the era of “strategic patience” with Iran and North Korea. As the nation’s top diplomat, he has to try to rally international support for Trump’s more aggressive posture. Diplomacy doesn’t stop at home, though. Tillerson has to persuade Congress to support his vision for reorganizing the State Department, while maintaining his position in the administration, which has seemed...

Deep State Swamp Hits Back The New York Times narrative engineers: Maggie Haberman, Peter Baker and Gardiner Harris are attempting to create division between President Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in an entirely manufactured hit piece against the Trump administration.According to their script, which again requires “anonymous or invisible sources“, the White House is considering a replacement for Secretary of State Tillerson.Nonsense.Beyond the customary pro-active contingency plans, that are always in place for succession planning amid top level leadership, the narrative as being distributed is 100% pure agenda-driven horsepucky.The media agenda here is clear. Secretary of State...

The White House has developed a plan to force out Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, whose relationship with President Trump has been strained, and replace him with Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, within the next several weeks, senior administration officials said on Thursday. Mr. Pompeo would be replaced at the C.I.A. by Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas who has been a key ally of the president on national security matters, according to the White House plan. Mr. Cotton has signaled that he would accept the job if offered, said the officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss...

In a long, rambling February 20, 2018, speech before the UN Security Council, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas fed fables to his audience — and continued to attack Israel’s legitimacy. The speech marked the third time in two months that Abbas has publicly distorted history, and shifted blame for the lack of a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And once again, Abbas had a key ally: An uncritical press, seemingly determined to present the Palestinian leader in the best possible light. In his opening remarks before the Security Council, Abbas claimed that Palestinians “are the descendants of the Canaanites...

Abbas, 82, will be returning to the West Bank on Friday after what officials described as "ordinary" checks in the US city of Baltimore. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Friday said he received “positive and assuring” results for medical examinations he underwent at hospital in the United States The PA president underwent routine medical checks on Thursday at a hospital in Maryland, according to a Palestinian official. “Praise God all of the results are positive and assuring,” Abbas said in an interview with official PA television. The Wafa report did not provide details about which examinations Abbas underwent. Abbas...

Of all the desperate and futile attempts at revisionist history, few are as careless as the attempt to destroy the reputation of one of the finest Supreme Court justices this country has ever produced. Now comes another volley. New York magazine has assembled "The Case for Impeaching Clarence Thomas." The author is longtime anti-Thomas journalist Jill Abramson. For more than 4,000 words, Abramson labors to relitigate Thomas accuser Anita Hill's dramatic loss in the court of public opinion. According to one poll at the time, 58 percent believed Thomas; only 24 percent believed Hill. Again the argument falls on its...

A New York economic development agency report meant to show the state's growth was illustrated with an 8-year-old photo showing construction cranes in South Africa.... The photo, showing seven towering heavy-lift cranes being used to build a stadium in Cape Town for the 2010 soccer World Cup, is a cropped version of one owned by Getty Images, available for licensing on its website for up to $575.... The gaffe comes as Gov. Andrew Cuomo's economic development programs face questions over their effectiveness. Cuomo, a Democrat, said the programs have brought hundreds of thousands of jobs to the state. Critics, though,...

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) This past week saw the fake news media have what probably was its fakest week ever – which is saying an awful lot – and here a few of the highlights: The fake news media, lacking any other negative story on which to focus in order to avoid reporting on the massive, mushrooming scandal of corruption at DOJ and the FBI, spent the first several days of the week hammering the Rob Porter story. While Porter’s likely a wife-abusing turd who needed to be fired and needs to be punished, that hardly...

On Friday, the office of special counsel Robert Mueller announced that a grand jury indicted 13 Russian nationals, along with 3 Russian entities, accused of “supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump … and disparaging Hillary Clinton.” Investigators also found the Russians organized rallies against Trump in New York City and Charlotte. According to court documents, “At the same time, Defendants and their co-conspirators, through another ORGANIZATION-controlled group, organized a rally in New York City called “Trump is NOT my President” held on or about November 12, 2016. Similarly, Defendants and their co-conspirators organized a rally entitles...

In the wake of the Friday indictments of Russians by special counsel Robert Mueller, several media outlets have found a highly disingenuous way to continue attacking President Donald Trump as claiming collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign is a "hoax" or "fake news." Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosensteini explicitly stated they presented no evidence of collusion in the indictment, but somehow, he made trump's "hoax claim harder to sell."  An example of an MSM story ignoring the specifics of Trump's "hoax" charges appeared in the Friday New York Times in Indictment Makes Trump’s Hoax Claim Harder to Sell:

President Trump on Wednesday called on lawmakers to oppose a series of bipartisan efforts to address immigration and resolve the fate of the so-called “Dreamers,” demanding fealty to his hard-line approach even as more moderate senators converged on a narrower approach. Senators in both parties are racing against a self-imposed, end-of-the-week deadline to write legislation that could win broad support by increasing border security while at the same time offering a path to citizenship for immigrants brought to the United States as children. Members of a bipartisan group calling itself the Common Sense Coalition said they have reached a deal...

Quinn Norton Twitter ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The New York Times decided to sever ties with the newest addition to their editorial page on Tuesday — just hours after they announced her arrival. Tech writer Quinn Norton ended her very short tenure at the newspaper after controversy erupted over her use of racial and homophobic slurs on Twitter. “Despite our review of Quinn Norton’s work and our conversations with her previous employers, this was new information to us,” read a statement from editorial page editor, James Bennet. “Based on it, we’ve decided to go our separate ways.” In a series of tweets,...

The Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot has slipped over the last few weeks. But Republicans have gradually lost advantages of their own. Slowly but surely, the considerable structural advantages — like incumbency, geography and gerrymandering — that give the Republicans a chance to survive a so-called wave election are fading, giving Democrats a clearer path to a House majority in November. The Republicans still retain formidable advantages, enough to win the House while losing the popular vote by a wide margin. But their edge has shrunk considerably over the last few months, and even more over the last...

GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, a frequent critic of the media and a diehard supporter of President Trump, created his own news site to promote pet issues and take shots at his detractors.

Journalist Carl Bernstein on Sunday expressed doubts that President Trump would sit down for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, citing the president’s “compulsive, continual lying.” “I think many of us will believe it when we see him sit down with Mueller. Look, we have no reason to believe almost anything that DT says. What is so extraordinary about him and his presidency is the incessant, compulsive, continual lying,” Bernstein said on CNN. “We’ve never had a president who lies like this, certainly in the modern era. Even Nixon,” the Watergate reporter added.

ANALYSIS/OPINION: One of the more disconcerting revelations from the long-anticipated FISA memo released by the House Intelligence Committee Friday was that the FBI had barely begun a verification process of the Russian dossier when they used it to justify a FISA surveillance warrant on Carter Page. Meanwhile the media refused to publish the dossier allegations because they could not be verified. In short: The media had higher standards than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The dossier, a compilation of political opposition research compiled at the behest of the Hillary Clinton for President campaign, was peddled to multiple media outlets in...

Wealthy New Yorkers are furious that Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to open a homeless shelter in their ritzy Manhattan neighborhood.Dozens of wealthy residents packed into a community meeting to voice their anger over the decision to move 150 homeless men into the former Park Savoy Hotel, NY1 reports. The residents are concerned that the move will increase crime and decrease property values in their neighborhood on “billionaires row.”“How are these poor people, whose only livelihood is in one bag, deal with a $6 coffee and a $15,000 dress on the windows of Fifth Avenue?” asked one resident, a middle-aged man...