Free Republic

Rep. David Trone, D-Md., who was recently blasted for using a disparaging term for Black people during a House hearing, is officially the largest self-funded candidate of a Senate primary race in U.S. history. Trone contributed $18.5 million of his own money to his Maryland Senate campaign, Fox News confirmed. And he brought in a total of over $40 million, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). No candidate running in a Senate primary has contributed this amount in recorded Senate primary history. "David Trone has been crystal clear that he’s prepared to do whatever it takes to...

Many Americans are watching the situation unfold at the US border and can’t help but think that a disaster of this magnitude must be planned, right? While the media and the left dismiss the “Great Replacement Theory” as a wild conspiracy, it’s not a wild conspiracy; it’s very real. ... In fact, left-wing lawmakers are now openly acknowledging this plot on live TV. Rep. Yvette Clarke let the cat out of the bag when she explained how she needs more illegals in her state for “redistricting purposes.” What does that mean? Simple: Democrats are now openly admitting they’re importing third-world...

A group of 30 left-wing legislators on Tuesday withdrew a letter sent a day earlier calling on President Biden to negotiate directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end his war on Ukraine — after several signatories running for re-election objected to its release nearly four months after it was written.The Congressional Progress Caucus hereby withdraws its recent letter to the White House regarding Ukraine,” the group’s chairwoman Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote in a statement Tuesday. “The letter was drafted several months ago, but unfortunately was released by staff without vetting.” Though she blamed unnamed employees for the letter’s...

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Democratic New York Rep. Yvette Clarke were reportedly seen Tuesday night at a Washington D.C. bar violating the district’s mask mandate, a video obtained by the Daily Caller shows. In the video, both Pelosi and Clarke can be seen speaking to a small group inside the “crazy golf club” at Swingers in Dupont Circle. Others in the crowd can be seen not wearing a mask either. Pelosi appears to have her arm around Clarke, who is smiling without a mask. Democratic D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced Monday that the indoor mask mandate will...

**SNIP** “[I]n the July 2018 plea agreement,” writes Gingrich, “the DOJ stated that approximately 40 witnesses were interviewed throughout the duration of the investigation. Upon further examination, this number seems substantially inadequate for an investigation potentially involving so many individuals.” If investigators had simply interviewed all the members of Congress who Imran Awan and his crew worked for they would have had to speak with more than 40 people. As $120,000 in missing equipment is known to have been illegally written-off in just one member’s office Imran Awan was involved with (Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y.), investigators would have also clearly...

Rep. Yvette Clarke’s deputy chief of staff came into the office on a Saturday in December 2015 and caught the New York Democrat’s part-time IT aide, Abid Awan, rummaging through the congresswoman’s work area with new iPods and other equipment strewn around the room, according to a House document and interviews with Hill staff. Wendy Anderson told Abid to get out of the office, the document said. She told Capitol Hill investigators that she soon suspected Clarke’s chief of staff, Shelley Davis, was working with Abid on a theft scheme, multiple House staffers with knowledge of the situation told The...

Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Caller News Foundation, Chris Bedford, shed light on a hacking scandal Wednesday surrounding Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke and her possible ties to Pakistan. “These allegations bring a new kind of allegation to the whole Awan case. So far we’ve really been dealing with hacking and unauthorized access to networks, possibly ferreting information back to Pakistan,” Bedford said on Fox Business’ “Mornings With Maria.” “Now we actually have people who are implicating a chief of staff for a congresswoman, Yvette Clarke. Chief of staff Shelley Davis.”

Imran Awan, his brothers and their associates were merely doing what they were “ordered to do” by Democratic members of Congress when the IT aides allegedly falsified records on how the members’ office budgets were spent, according to lawyers for Awan. **SNIP** One of Imran’s lawyers, Aaron Page, who acknowledged the invoicing discrepancy on office equipment last month, told DCNF, “This is just how things have been done for forever. This is what experienced members of Congress expect: to expedite things, they adjust the pricing.” Luke Rosiak of DCNF’s Investigative Group noted that “If members or senior staff instructed IT...

House Democrats ordered the systematic falsification of records showing how they spend their taxpayer-provided office budgets, according to lawyers for two former House information technology (IT) aides.It’s a remarkable accusation that pits sitting lawmakers against the former aides, Imran Awan, his brothers Abid and Jamal, and his wife Hina Alvi. Imran was arrested in July while trying to board a flight to Pakistan, and then indicted on four counts of bank fraud involving moving money to that country. Imran and Hina, who was also indicted, face a court date Friday.One of Imran’s lawyers, Aaron Page, acknowledged the invoicing discrepancy Aug....

A former IT aide suspected of stealing equipment and data from Congress still has an active, secret email account on the House computer system, even though he has been banned from the congressional network because of a criminal investigation into the alleged cybersecurity violations, The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned. Imran Awan’s still-active email address is linked to the name of a House staffer who specializes in intelligence and homeland security matters for Indiana Democratic Rep. André Carson. Court documents and emails obtained by TheDCNF show Awan used the address 123@mail.house.gov in addition to his standard imran.awan@mail.house.gov...

I would not be surprised to read that Daily Caller's ace reporter, Luke Roziak, has laughed himself to death. Luke had the unenviable job to seek out cowering Democrats, none of whom seemed eager to respond to Luke's probing questions about the massive security breach conducted by Democrats' IT staffers. Democrats have claimed that they deplore computer hacking and view cyber-attacks as a "dangerous new frontier" that tends to upset their leisurely, do nothing, wealth-producing lives as elected members on Capitol Hill. <><>For instance, take Cong Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She introduced an amendment aimed at the Trump administration---Jared Kushner, in...

A chief of staff for Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke quietly agreed in early 2016 to sign away a $120,000 missing electronics problem on behalf of two former IT aides now suspected of stealing equipment from Congress, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.Clarke’s chief of staff at the time effectively dismissed the loss and prevented it from coming up in future audits by signing a form removing the missing equipment from a House-wide tracking system after one of the Awan brothers alerted the office the equipment was gone. The Pakistani-born brothers are now at the center of an FBI investigation...

**SNIP** On Wednesday, four members of Congress sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and California Attorney General Kamala Harris requesting that they launch an investigation into the Center for Medical Progress. In a joint statement about the letter, Reps. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., say the “elaborate scheme” merits investigation. “We are writing to request that you investigate whether any laws were broken by individuals who participated in an elaborate, multi-year scheme to impersonate corporate officials from a fake biologics company, secretly filmed video of a Planned Parenthood physician...

Washington • The state-owned oil company of Azerbaijan secretly funded an all-expenses-paid trip to a conference at Baku on the Caspian Sea in 2013 for 10 members of Congress and 32 staff members, according to a confidential ethics report obtained by The Washington Post. Three former top aides to President Barack Obama appeared as speakers at the conference. Lawmakers and their staff members received hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of travel expenses, silk scarves, crystal tea sets and Azerbaijani rugs valued at $2,500 to $10,000, according to the ethics report. Airfare for the lawmakers and some of their spouses...

There’s fallout from the July 27 Houston Chronicle exposé of a trip to Azerbaijan by 10 member of the House that violated House rules. The trip was ostensibly sponsored by nonprofit groups but was actually funded by oil companies BP, Conoco Phillips and SOCAR, the national oil company of Azerbaijan. According to the New York Post today: Rep. Gregory Meeks pushed to let an Iran-backed natural-gas project dodge US sanctions — after attending an illicit junket paid for by energy companies. Also from the Post: “Congressman Meeks went on a 2013 Congressional trip to Baku, Azerbaijan, subsidized in part...

ACORN’s former CEO Bertha Lewis urged Africans-Americans to support increased immigration as a strategy to gain political power. “We got some Latino cousins, we got some Asian cousins, we got some Native-American cousins, we got all kind of cousins,” said Lewis, who spoke Thursday at the annual political conference of the Congressional Black Caucus. “Cousins need to get together because if we’re going to be [part of the non-white] majority, it makes sense for black people in this country to get down with immigration reform,” said Lewis, whose ACORN group was formally disbanded in 2010 after a series of scandals....

As of right now, Bill de Blasio is the man to beat in the race to be the next mayor of New York City. The latest polls put him at 43%, which is enough to avoid a run-off in the Democratic primary, and it is widely believed that whoever wins the Democratic primary will sail into office. For the most part, sitting mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has stayed out of the race, but in an extensive interview with New York Magazine the term-limited Independent ripped de Blasio's campaign as "class-warfare and racist":

A member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Yvette Clarke, said Monday evening that the George Zimmerman acquittal proves one thing: America puts less value on black lives than on white lives. “The tragic death of our young man, Trayvon Martin, followed by the acquittal of the man who pursued him and killed him, has reminded us that although it may seem as if African-Americans and other minorities have achieved full equality in our civil society, we are still victims of racial profiling in violation of our laws and our morals,” Ms. Clarke said, from the House floor, The Hill...

A member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) said Monday night that the Trayvon Martin trial is the latest evidence that America does not value the lives of blacks and whites equally. "The tragic death of our young man, Trayvon Martin, followed by the acquittal of the man who pursued him and killed him, has reminded us that although it may seem as if African Americans and other minorities have achieved full equality in our civil society, we are still victims of racial profiling in violation of our laws and our morals," Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) said on the House...

A Democratic congresswoman from Brooklyn appears to believe that slavery existed in her district until 1898. Against the advice of her party’s leadership, Rep. Yvette Clarke appeared on “The Colbert Report” on Tuesday for one of host Stephen Colbert’s occasional “Better Know a District” segments. After getting in a few digs at Brooklyn, Colbert asked Clarke, who is currently serving her third term in the House, what she would say to her district if she could go back to 1898 in a time machine. “Set me free!” Clarke said. “From?” Colbert asked. “Slavery.” Trying to hold back his laughter, Colbert...