Free Republic

A high-profile documentary on first lady Melania Trump now has a release date, with Amazon MGM Studios saying it’ll premiere in theaters in January. “Melania” will be released on Jan. 30 in U.S. theaters before streaming on Prime Video, the media giant announced Thursday. The documentary will offer “unprecedented access to the 20 days leading up to the 2025 presidential inauguration — through the eyes of the first lady-elect herself,” Amazon MGM Studios teased on Thursday. The first lady served as an executive producer on the big screen project. Plans for the Brett Ratner-directed doc were originally announced in January....

Agencies have been shuttered going on three weeks with no end in sight as the White House and congressional Democrats continue their standoff.The ongoing government shutdown will collide with the U.S. economy this week, as missed paychecks and the absence of billions of dollars of government services reverberate beyond federal workers and sting the broader public.President Donald Trump and lawmakers in Congress remain deadlocked heading into a third week of shuttered federal agencies. Republicans control both chambers of Congress, but lack the votes in the Senate to defeat a filibuster of legislation to fund ongoing operations. Democrats insist that Trump...

The New York state attorney general was indicted on charges related to alleged mortgage fraud — but the case looks like an unconstitutional selective prosecution.In the same jurisdiction in which the Trump Justice Department indicted former FBI Director James Comey more than a week ago, the same prosecutor who brought that case has now gone after another Trump enemy: New York Attorney General Letitia “Tish” James. (Disclosure: I worked as a volunteer member of James' transition team after her election in 2018.)The reason for the indictment? James is accused of having falsified a mortgage application on a property purchased in...

The president and his Maga allies have used the rightwing influencer’s killing to justify attacks on critics, experts sayDonald Trump and Maga allies have capitalized on the killing of rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk to expand attacks on liberal groups, donors, Democrats, and others by tarring many critics as the “enemy within” and “radical left” in a move that legal scholars and historians call authoritarian and anti-democratic. Kirk’s killing by a lone gunman spurred Trump and top allies to quickly launch conspiratorial charges against a bevy of political foes and an investigation of billionaire liberal donor George Soros. They also threatened...

Recent moves reflect commander in chief who has seemingly faced little resistance to his ambitious agendaPresident Trump began mass layoffs of federal workers. He threatened a dramatic increase in tariffs on China. And he flexed his control over the Justice Department once again, as his newly appointed U.S. attorney in eastern Virginia obtained an unusual indictment against the New York attorney general that Trump had demanded over the objections of career prosecutors.That was just in the past 48 hours. On Sunday, Trump heads to the Middle East to sign a deal he helped clinch to end the fighting in Gaza.All...

Dominion Voting Systems -- the voting machine company at the center of false 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories -- has been sold to a seemingly new election company run by a former Republican election official, according to a person familiar with the sale. John Poulos, the former Dominion CEO, confirmed the sale in a statement. "Liberty Vote has acquired Dominion Voting Systems," Poulos said.

Posing as a TV reporter clad with body armor, Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday mocked the Trump administrative narrative that National Guard troops are needed to quell chaos in “war-torn Chicago” in a bit for ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “This is JB Pritzker, reporting from war-torn Chicago. As you can see, there’s utter mayhem and chaos on the ground. It’s quite disturbing,” he says on a downtown Chicago bridge. “The Milwaukee Brewers have come in to attack our Chicago Cubs. “We’ve seen people being forced to eat hot dogs with ketchup on them, and our deep dish pizza, well, has...

Critics cringed hard over what was slammed as a “creepy” exchange between President Donald Trump and a self-described recovering “Trump Derangement Syndrome” sufferer during a White House roundtable on Trump’s favorite boogeyman, Antifa, on Wednesday. Brandi Kruse, a conservative content creator from Seattle, told Trump she was “living proof that you can recover” from so-called “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which isn’t an official medical diagnosis but just a partisan insult that Trump fans often derogatorily hurl at critics of the president.

When you gaze at politics through the left tinted lenses of New York magazine, you might conjure up some mighty bizarre observations. Such was the case Tuesday in an Ed Kilgore story entitled: "Republicans See an Upset in Violent Texts From Virginia Democrat."Kilgore's conclusion in his final paragraph about the "violent texts" from Virginia Democrat Attorney General candidate Jay Jones was to slam Republicans for "cynical manipulation." Nevermind the texts were authentic. New York magazine has determined the reaction to them is the issue:

On May 21, Black author Dr. La’Tonya Rease Miles appeared at a book talk to promote her new memoir, “Smart Girl: A First-Gen Origin Story.” Attendees gathered at the quaint James M. Duncan Branch Library in Alexandria, Virginia, hoping to get their books signed and to hear Miles’ inspiring story of being the first in her family to attend and graduate from a four-year university. Instead, they got an earful from a belligerent Trump supporter who crashed the reading. “This is not Nazi Germany! I don’t need to do anything. Stop telling me what to do,” shouted the older white...

Summary BLS loses senior leaders as Trump targets agency's integrity About 12 of 35 senior leaders have left amid Trump's criticism Modernizing data collection suggested to improve response rates WASHINGTON, Oct 8 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's unwarranted attacks on the integrity of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics were undermining trust in economic data and had accelerated retirements of key personnel at the agency, former BLS commissioners said on Wednesday. During a discussion at the libertarian Cato Institute, Erica Groshen and William Beach, who headed the agency under presidents of both parties, said the BLS had lost 12...

MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) — Mohammed Taher clutched the lifeless body of his 2-year-old son and wept. Ever since his family’s food rations stopped arriving at their internment camp in Myanmar in April, the father had watched helplessly as his once-vibrant baby boy weakened, suffering from diarrhea and begging for food. On May 21, exactly two weeks after Taher’s little boy died, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: “No one has died” because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program. Rubio also insisted: “No children are dying on my watch.” That, Taher...

Republican senators are increasingly uneasy about President Trump’s standoff with Democratic governors over deploying National Guard troops from other states to Portland, Ore., and Chicago. The conflict between federal and state authorities escalated dramatically over the weekend when Trump moved to send National Guard soldiers to Oregon and Illinois despite opposition from their respective governors, Tina Kotek and JB Pritzker. Trump’s use of military forces was all the more controversial because a Trump-appointed federal judge for the District of Oregon ruled Saturday that the administration could not federalize Oregon’s National Guard to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in...

Hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers may not automatically receive back pay once the government reopens, the White House indicated in a draft memo, prompting broad fears that the Trump administration might try to circumvent federal law to maximize the pain of the shutdown. The memo, which was shared by a White House official, could presage a radical break from a policy adopted during President Trump’s first term. It appeared to contradict some of the administration’s own guidance, which by Tuesday still indicated that furloughed employees would receive retroactive pay shortly after Congress strikes a funding deal. Following the...

Police arrested a New Jersey man who allegedly had a Molotov cocktail near St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC, on Sunday.The arrest occurred just before the church was set to hold its Red Mass to celebrate the beginning of the new Supreme Court term.The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) said it “engaged an individual who set up a tent on the steps of the Cathedral,” according to a press release.SNIPThe suspect, identified as 41-year-old Louis Geri of Vineland, New Jersey, is preliminarily charged with Unlawful Entry, Threats to Kidnap or Injure a Person, and Possession of a Molotov Cocktail. SNIPhttps://x.com/_ellepurnell/status/1975037735816908980

Next year, the United States will observe the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. To begin a year of celebration, Donald Trump appeared at the Iowa State Fairground in early July. “We’ve saved our country,” he proclaimed to the crowd of supporters. Trump then announced a “giant patriotic festival” on the National Mall for next summer, and suggested an Ultimate Fighting Championship event could take place on White House grounds. UFC is one of the corporate sponsors of ­America250, the nonprofit organization that will be overseeing the country’s semiquincentennial celebration. Other sponsors represent different parts of Trump’s corporate coalition:...

WASHINGTON, Oct 3 (Reuters) - An FBI agent was relieved of duty for declining to arrange a "perp walk" of the bureau's former director, James Comey, in front of news media cameras after Comey was federally charged last month, four people briefed on the matter said on Friday.Comey was charged on September 25 with making false statements and obstructing a congressional investigation, in a dramatic escalation of President Donald Trump's retribution campaign against his political enemies.An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment on personnel matters.Reuters could not immediately determine how or when senior FBI officials wanted to stage bringing Comey into...

It seems to really bother Julia Reinstein of New York magazine's The Cut section that there could be even the slightest hint of thought diversity among the late night talk show hosts on television. Her ire on this matter was directed towards Jimmy Fallon, not so much because he demonstrated any sympathy for the Trump administration but because he seemed to exhibit insufficient hostility towards the President.You can see Reinstein's irked attitude over Fallon's lack of perceived antipathy towards Trump right in the first paragraph of her story on Monday, "Jimmy Fallon Doesn’t Want to Be ‘That Political’."

The Mamdani momentum is taking the country by storm. After his big New York City primary win shocked the Democratic establishment, socialists like Zohran Mamdani are not just gaining popularity, but are actually being recognized as serious candidates in elections across the nation. One of those key elections is the Minneapolis mayoral race, where Democratic Socialist State Senator Omar Fateh is now just 5 points behind incumbent Democratic mayor Jacob Frey, who is seeking reelection for a third term. Fateh joins Mehdi to discuss the mayoral race, the racist and Islamophobic attacks he’s received, and how he plans to stand...

NEW YORK (AP) — Army veteran Samuel Port couldn’t believe what he was reading in his latest weekly newsletter emailed from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.It blamed Senate Democrats for the federal shutdown, saying they were blocking a stopgap bill to fund the government “due to unrelated policy demands.” It then listed various disruptions to veterans’ resources.In Port’s view, the finger-pointing was inappropriate from a federal agency and lacked the context that Republicans, too, could have taken steps to keep the government funded. He said it wore away any trust he had left in the VA to offer services...