Free Republic

Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s. President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade. Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974. “I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have...

…. It is also notably that, after insisting that these cases were politically motivated, Biden also pardoned for ANY crimes that may have been committed " from Jan. 1, 2014 to Dec. 1, 2024... That is precisely the type of sweeping immunity grant that the federal judge balked at in the hearing when the earlier sweetheart deal feel apart. The judge asked the prosecutor if he had ever seen such a deal and he admitted that he had not...

Pour one out for Jack Smith. After two years of fawning press coverage and promises that the international war-crimes prosecutor would finally put Donald Trump behind bars, the special counsel today hammered the final nail in his own battered coffin by dropping his four-count J6-related indictment in Washington against the incoming president. The move represents yet another failure by the Democratic apparatchik who once ran the Department of Justice’s public integrity unit under the Obama administration. Since then, Smith has been on a losing streak unmatched in DOJ history, suffering one loss after another before the Supreme Court and trial...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed US Secretary of State John Kerry’s upcoming talks in Rome on Sunday, during opening remarks for his weekly Cabinet meeting. “Tomorrow I will leave for Rome to meet with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and US Secretary of State John Kerry,” he said. “I will tell them that Israel, to a large degree, stands as a solitary island against the waves of Islamic extremism that are washing over the entire Middle East.” “Until now, we have successfully withstood and repelled these attacks and now we also stand against the possibility of a diplomatic assault, i.e....

Jews have been fleeing Russia in droves | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images As Vladimir Putin’s war rages on for the fifth month in Ukraine and repression suffocates civil liberties back home, Russian Jews are worried they’ll soon become the Kremlin’s targets. Jews have been fleeing Russia in droves; those who’ve stayed behind are terrified of directly criticizing the war, which Putin has cynically claimed he launched to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. “In our congregation, we don’t talk about any political issues,” said a Moscow rabbi who asked not to be named. He added that after a 2011 crackdown on protests linked...

A legal group headed by ex-Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller accused the Defense Department on Thursday of failing to answer a request for an Obama-era memo that may reveal pertinent information surrounding the 45th president’s classified documents indictment. America First Legal in January filed a Freedom of Information Act request to compel the DOD to submit information pertaining to a “secretive” technology committee created in 2014 under then-President Barack Obama in response to foreign cyberattack threats. Miller’s group argues that the Presidential Information Technology Committee “creates a presumption that the President controls all information he receives” and says that it...

PARIS — Marat Gabidullin's face is lined from years of exposure to the elements, and his hair is thinning. But at 56, he has the trim physique and muscular arms of a man 30 years younger. He wears a chunky ring bearing the image of a skull.The skull is the symbol of the Wagner Group — a private Russian mercenary force believed to be financed by an oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin. The group is fighting alongside the Russian army in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region. And it's widely believed that at least some of the "little green...

Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz says sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was killed as part of a ‘foreign operation’, but refused to divulge which government was responsible for his death. Gaetz made the comments during an appearance on Benny Johnson’s show. In August 2019, Epstein was found unresponsive in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City after supposedly committing suicide by hanging. Multiple violations of normal jail procedures allied with the convenient failure of two cameras in front of Epstein’s cell prompted conspiracy theories suggesting Epstein was murdered in order to keep his high profile client list...

Just ahead of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden made clear where the blame lay for Moscow's aggression: His predecessor Barack Obama. A new book by Bob Woodward describes Biden's frustration that his then boss did not take tougher action when Russian forces invaded Crimea almost a decade earlier. 'They f***ed up in 2014,' Biden said to a friend, according to Woodward. 'That’s why we are here.

For years, world leaders have accused Russia of funding environmental groups in Europe to steer nations away from energy independence and strengthen Russia’s iron grip over the continent. As nations across the globe begin shunning Russian oil in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. leaders are also questioning how deep Russia’s ties go in the environmental community. "The Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe because they sic them on the energy projects that aren’t Russian," James Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign...

Devon Archer was convicted of defrauding the Oglala Sioux Indian tribe out of bond-sale proceeds. Hunter Biden was not implicated in the scheme, which defrauded the Oglala Sioux Indian tribe out of the proceeds of bond sales. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File/AP Photo A federal appeals court reinstated the fraud conviction of Hunter Biden’s former business partner on Wednesday, reversing a lower court judge who had granted his request for a retrial. Hunter Biden was not implicated in the scheme, which defrauded the Oglala Sioux Indian tribe out of the proceeds of bond sales. But the scheme was committed under...

Song Binbin, who has died, probably aged 77, became a poster girl for the bloody Chinese “Cultural Revolution” when on August 18 1966 she was photographed overlooking an immense rally in Tiananmen Square, pinning a red armband, symbol of the Red Guards, on the arm of the Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. Two weeks earlier she had taken part in the murder of Bian Zhongyun, deputy principal of the Beijing high school she attended, one of the first – and one of the most notorious – of the murders that inaugurated a decade of slaughter in which between one and...

A fireball that blazed through the skies over Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another star system, according to a recent memo(opens in new tab) released by the U.S. Space Command (USSC). The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth's atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) — a speed that far exceeds the average velocity of meteors that orbit within the solar system, according to a 2019 study of the object published in the preprint database arXiv. 2019...

The missing American who’d traveled to Ukraine years ago to aid Russian separatists in Donbas was found dead in the country’s war-torn eastern region. The body of Russell Bentley, a 64-year-old U.S. Army vet, was recovered in the Russian-controlled region of Donetsk Oblast, Reuters reported. -snip- The former pothead, who used “Texas” as his military call-sign, left behind a yoga instructor girlfriend to travel to Ukraine. He utilized crowdfunding sites to finance his trip, and had since become a Russian citizen. He also got married after moving to Ukraine, where he began working as a reporter for the state-owned Sputnik...

Russell Bentley, a self-described “Donbass Cowboy,” joined Russian forces soon after they created a proxy state in eastern Ukraine in 2014. He quickly became one of Russian propaganda’s favorite Americans, receiving a Russian passport and a gig with state-run Sputnik TV. On April 8, the 64-year-old Austin native better known under his call sign “Texas” was detained by Russian soldiers in the city of Donetsk, occupied by Russia for the past decade, according to his wife. Eleven days later, he turned up dead. He is the latest in a string of figures involved in Russia’s 2014 takeover of parts of...

Russell Bentley, 64, who fought alongside pro-Putin rebels in eastern Ukraine, was tortured and murdered by Russian servicemen, Kremlin investigators said on Friday. Bentley, a self-described communist from Dallas, Texas, went missing in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk in April and was later found dead. Nicknamed “Texas”, he regularly appeared on pro-Kremlin social media channels, backing Moscow’s full-scale military offensive.

Hopes were high that the International Wine and Spirits' first-ever Global Judging event of North American whiskey on home soil would unearth some fantastic bottles. Well, it didn’t disappoint. An expert panel sampled almost 500 bottles in Kentucky in early September, and the results were just announced. Over 430 medals were awarded, including 30 golds and four outstanding golds. The judges were wowed, to say the least.

As the Cold War ended in the late 1980s and early ’90s, a new fear arose amid the rejoicing and relief: that atomic security might fail in the disintegrating Soviet Union, allowing its huge stockpile of nuclear warheads to fall into unfriendly hands. The jitters intensified in late 1991, as Moscow announced plans to store thousands of weapons from missiles and bombers in what experts viewed as decrepit bunkers, policed by impoverished guards of dubious reliability. Many officials and scientists worried. Few knew what to do. That is when Thomas L. Neff, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,...

While Moscow hails him for being an efficient mediator, Kyiv insists that Lukin sent the order to militiamen in Sloviansk from their Russian bosses. Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) released a transcript of an intercepted telephone conversation between Lukin and Igor Strelkov, head of the pro-Russian self-defense of Sloviansk. According to the SBU, Strelkov’s real name is Igor Girkin, a Russian national and colonel of Russian Military Intelligence. “I’m in Donetsk right now, in good company… You do sort of have a general idea about the task that I’ve been given, don’t you?” Lukin said. “Yes, I know, I’ve been warned…...

The Ukrainian government needs to find a “fine line” that would allow it to both protect free speech and fight Kremlin propaganda, a top official of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe said in an interview with the Kyiv Post. There has been a debate in Ukraine on whether pro-Kremlin media, which are inciting Russia’s war against Ukraine and fabricating lies, should be banned. While some argue that they are a threat to national security, others condemn such measures as an attack on free speech. “The Ukrainian government needs to find a very fine line with the help...