Free Republic

UPDATE, 09/30/19, 11:52 a.m. Eastern: According to The Washington Post's Joe Heim, Amari Allen and her family have admitted that her whole tale about being the victim of an alleged racist bullying case was completely false. Heim said that she and her family would be releasing a statement admitting to concocting this fable and apologizing to the white students they falsely accused of harming her.

President Trump continued to escalate his scorched-earth campaign against a whistleblower who accused him of pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, even as new evidence emerged Monday that he and his administration are urging other governments to provide assistance to a related Justice Department inquiry that has been pushed by the president. Trump said he was trying to “find out about” the whistleblower Monday, the latest move in an increasingly frenetic counterassault targeting the anonymous intelligence officer and top Democrats leading the impeachment inquiry. The comments came as his allies struggled to coalesce around a clear strategy to respond...

Three white boys held down an African American girl and cut her hair at recess, and somehow, it’s Karen Pence’s fault. Oh, except it didn’t actually happen. And in fact, the story was pretty fishy right from the beginning, and people should have known. First, an accusation was made by a black female student at Immanuel Christian School in Virginia. She alleged that three white boys had held her down at recess, insulted her, and cut her dreadlocks off with scissors. This alleged incident supposedly happened at Immanuel Christian, a private Christian school where Second Lady Karen Pence happens to...

GOP senators attack whistleblower's credibility GOP senators attack whistleblower's credibility BY ALEXANDER BOLTON - 09/30/19 06:00 AM EDT 13,753 Republican senators scrambling to protect President Trump from a formal impeachment inquiry are attacking the credibility of the whistleblower who filed a complaint. GOP lawmakers are asserting the whistleblower did not have firsthand knowledge of the actions detailed in the complaint and question whether the person had a political agenda. “It doesn’t come from a person with personal knowledge. It’s like I heard these people say this, and now I’m reporting it. I think that is pretty bizarre,” said Sen. John...

While the climate strike and Greta Thunberg may have the limelight this week, the unwavering truth of climate and energy policy remains: people are unwilling to pay the costs associated with reducing carbon dioxide emissions. A recent poll from the Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation shows that support for reducing carbon dioxide emissions withers under the slightest bit of scrutiny. The poll shows people favor taxing the wealthy to pay for increasing electricity costs, which is pretty much par for the course on every issue, and raising taxes on energy, even if that leads to higher prices. ... when people are...

The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email, reviving a politically toxic matter that overshadowed the 2016 election, current and former officials said. As many as 130 officials have been contacted in recent weeks by State Department investigators — a list that includes senior officials who reported directly to Clinton as well as others in lower-level jobs whose emails were at some point relayed to her inbox, said current and former State Department officials. Those targeted were notified that...

WASHINGTON — Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO caught in the middle of a whistleblower complaint over the President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, resigned Friday from his post as special envoy to the Eastern European nation, according to a U.S. official. The official said Volker told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday of his decision to leave the job, following disclosures that he had connected Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani with Ukrainian officials to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his family over allegedly corrupt business dealings. Giuliani has said he was in frequent contact...

Another potential scandal has cast a pall over Trump’s presidency, and as has become a learned behavior in the Republican Party, the vast majority of GOP officials are declining to speak out against him. But their non-responses also speak volumes. After a whistleblower complaint released Thursday alleged President Trump’s misdeeds with regard to Ukraine, reporters set about getting reaction from Republican elected officials. They ran into a stone wall. As CNN’s Ted Barrett summarizes, many Republican senators claimed they hadn’t even read the relatively brief document, despite it having consumed the political world. But even those who said they had...

You think you’re going to find support for impeachment, do you? You dare suggest that this presidency is embroiled in chaos? Well, I am at a truck stop right now to wait out an electrical storm, and nobody here agrees. I’ve been interviewing for what I figure is at least an hour — the clock on the wall is broken — and everyone I speak to still supports the president just as much as they did the day he was elected. They are happy to say so, even if it means talking to folks like me on a daily basis....

House Democratic leaders are eyeing a fast-paced investigation into the possible impeachment of President Trump, instructing the committees handling the probe to wrap up their findings within weeks in hopes of concluding before the holiday season. Some Democratic lawmakers and aides said Thursday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations, that they believed impeachment articles could be ready for a House vote around Thanksgiving.

The New York Times and the Washington Post selectively cut up the transcript of a July phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the newspapers’ front pages to fit each paper’s misleading headline accusing Trump of requesting a favor that he never asked.“Trump offered Justice’s aid for a probe of Biden,” reads the Washington Post front page.“Trump asked for ‘favor in call, memo shows,” blares The New York Times.Each paper prominently displays selectively edited passages of the transcript between the two leaders below the primary headlines, each omitting key text that shows each statement...

We don’t yet know whether President Trump delayed some military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine’s president to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden. But if we are concerned about U.S. officials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do. It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the...

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump struck a stance of defiance Wednesday, proclaiming his innocence and leveling distortions and falsehoods after the publicly released notes of his phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart turbocharged the push on Capitol Hill for his impeachment. The five pages of a rough transcript of Trump's call asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Attorney General William Barr and personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden landed like a hand grenade on Capitol Hill and led House Democrats to recalibrate their strategy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her fellow Democratic...

We don’t yet know whether President Trump delayed some military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine’s president to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden. But if we are concerned about U.S. officials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do. It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the...

Something big happened to President Trump this week, and it’s not the Ukraine scandal. His job approval ratings have returned to where they were before his big August slump — and that’s bad news for the Democrats. Trump clearly had a terrible late summer. Starting with his tweet that the four progressive Democratic House members who call themselves “the Squad” should “go back” to the countries they purportedly were from (only one of the four, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, is an immigrant), Trump’s job approval ratings declined significantly. From a pre-tweet high of 45.1 percent in the RealClearPolitics average on...

When it comes to his sister, Curtis Ingraham doesn’t exactly hold back. Over the past year or so, Ingraham has won a reputation — and a significant Twitter following — for attacks on his high-profile sister, Fox News host Laura Ingraham. At different times and on a wide variety of platforms, he has called his sibling “a monster,” “a Nazi sympathizer” and a “racist.” But after the controversial pundit compared Greta Thunberg and other youth climate activists to Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” on Monday night, Curtis Ingraham took things to the next level. “Clearly my sister’s paycheck is...

Readers of the Washington Post and similar news media outlets know little-to-nothing about business deals secured by Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s second son, in China and Ukraine, noted Peter Schweizer during a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. Schweizer highlighted the Jeff Bezos-owned news media outlet’s broad omissions in reporting on Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings during his father’s tenure as vice president. “If you are a reader of the Washington Post, and that is really your main source of news, you would have absolutely no idea what this whole Biden thing and his son...

Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, who is challenging President Trump for the Republican nomination next year, on Monday accused him of “treason” for pressing the leader of Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son. Weld’s comments came in response to reports that Trump repeatedly brought up investigating Biden, who is seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination, and his younger son, Hunter, in a July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Talk about pressuring a foreign country to interfere with and control a U.S. election,” Weld said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It couldn’t be clearer,...

<p>WASHINGTON — Everyone here is keyed up for the Big One.</p> <p>The One that’s going to finally bring Donald Trump down.</p> <p>As soon as the news broke Wednesday night in The Washington Post that a whistle-blower had accused the president of making some sort of nefarious “promise” during a call to a foreign leader, the hive erupted.</p>

When the July 24 congressional testimony of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III deflated the impeachment hopes of Democrats, President Trump crowed “no collusion” and claimed vindication from accusations that he had conspired with Russia in the 2016 election. Then, the very next day, Trump allegedly sought to collude with another foreign country in the coming election — pressing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up what he believed would be damaging information about one of his leading Democratic challengers, former vice president Joe Biden, according to people familiar with the conversation. The push by Trump and his personal attorney,...