Free Republic

House Democrats just picked a successor for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has decided to give up the gavel at the end of this term. Their choice is Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), a progressive. On the surface, this choice makes sense. However, in one key way, going with Jeffries makes hypocrites out of the Democratic establishment. Why? Well, Democrats have rightly lambasted former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. They have decried, albeit often painting with far too broad a brush, Republicans as the party of “election deniers” and made the GOP out to...

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “most Americans” would think Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort giving inside polling data and battle strategy to an agent of Russian intelligence was Russian collusion. Anchor Dana Bash said, “As you well know, the man who was trying to be speaker, Republican Kevin McCarthy says that he wants to kick you off the intelligence committee, the committee that you now chair because of your handling of the Trump/Russia investigation, specifically that you repeatedly asserted there was direct evidence of collusion, direct collusion, which didn’t materialize.”

Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) said on this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday” that former President Donald Trump was not on the ballot in the midterms after the GOP underperformed. Anchor Shannon Bream said, “Let’s talk 2024 because it is already here. Trump is expected to make an announcement on Tuesday. You have been an ally and supporter of his.” Bream asked, “Is his announcement on Tuesday a good thing or bad thing for the GOP?” Banks said, “Donald Trump remains a very popular figure in the Republican Party in each corner of the country. And remember when he was...

Democrats have a lengthy history of refusing to accept the results of elections they lost.

Following President Joe Biden’s speech Wednesday, which the White House dubbed “Standing up for Democracy,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) declared that “If someone is willing to deny the clear results of an election, they shouldn't be running in an election.” But, on January 6, 2017, Raskin contested the results of the 2016 presidential election, in remarks on the House floor: “I have an objection because 10 of the 29 electoral votes cast by Florida were cast by electors not lawfully certified, because they violated Florida’s prohibition against dual office holding.” Then-Vice President Joe Biden denied Raskin’s challenge, noting it was...

The California Republican said that "we've now expanded our investigation, full blown investigation" into the think tank Rep. Devin Nunes during a television appearance on Fox News Channel said that "we've now expanded our investigation, full-blown investigation into the Brookings Institute." The congressman said that the two focuses of the investigation are whether Brookings, a tax exempt entity, had engaged in politics, which Nunes said that it has, and whether the institution, which receives foreign donations, took actions to benefit a foreign government. The California Republican's remarks on "Sunday Morning Futures" came as the identity of a Steele Dossier source...

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — A current FBI special agent and a former bureau analyst who both served on Robert Mueller’s team testified that the special counsel’s office declined to investigate and never interviewed Charles Dolan, the Clinton-allied business associate of the main source for Christopher Steele, despite their urging. Supervisory special agent Amy Anderson and former FBI intelligence analyst Brittany Hertzog both testified Friday that, as members of Mueller’s team who were specifically tasked with scrutinizing the allegations within the Trump dossier, they believed the FBI should interview and further investigate Dolan, a longtime ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, partly...

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — The FBI offered British ex-spy Christopher Steele an “incentive” of up to $1 million if he could prove the allegations in his since-discredited anti-Trump dossier, but the former MI6 agent was unable to back up his claims, according to new court testimony. The bombshell revelation came during special counsel John Durham’s false statements trial against Steele’s main dossier source, Russian-born lawyer Igor Danchenko, who has been charged with repeatedly lying to the bureau about his sourcing for information he provided for the dossier in 2016. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty. FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, who...

At the heart of the second trial to come out of Special Counsel John Durham's investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion probe is a story of disinformation. Marc Elias, general counsel for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, testified both during a House Intelligence Committee investigation in 2017 and recently during Durham's ongoing probe that he was the one who hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump. Fusion GPS went on to commission former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to create the infamous "Steele dossier," which purported to show collusion between Trump's...

The FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million if he could prove allegations recorded in his now-infamous dossier, a senior FBI analyst said in court on Tuesday.FBI analyst Brian Auten testified in the trial of Igor Danchenko, the primary source of allegations in Steele’s dossier, that the bureau placed a $1 million price tag on confirmation of the dossier’s outlandish allegations. Steele was unable to provide any evidence.Auten said he and a group of FBI agents met with Steele in October of 2021 and offered the former British spy $1 million for evidence supporting the dossier, according to Fox News. The...

The FBI team that was in communication with Facebook before the social media company censored the original Hunter Biden laptop story has been identified, according to a new court filing. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, identified the team as the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), according to an updated complaint entered late on Oct. 6. Meta named the team after receiving a subpoena in a case alleging the federal government pressured Big Tech firms to censor users. “Pursuant to the third-party subpoena, Meta has identified the FBI’s FITF, as supervised by Laura Dehmlow, and Elvis Chan as involved in the...

President Barack Obama reflected just days before leaving office on the many causes of Hillary Clinton's upset 2016 loss – and considered how things might have turned out had key actors including Bill and Hillary Clinton made 'different decisions.' Obama made the comments off the record during a meeting with progressive columnists just three days before being succeeded by Donald Trump following the bitter election, where Clinton won the popular vote but Trump prevailed in the Electoral College. A transcript was included in a cache of documents the Justice Department provided to Bloomberg as part of a FOIA request –...

When John Durham was assigned by the Justice Department in 2019 to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, President Donald Trump and his supporters expressed a belief that the inquiry would prove that a “deep state” conspiracy including top Obama-era officials had worked to sabotage him. Now Durham appears to be winding down his three-year inquiry without anything close to the results Trump was seeking. The grand jury that Durham has recently used to hear evidence has expired, and while he could convene another, there are currently no plans to do so,...

"[O]ne of the biggest revelations in the motion is that Danchenko himself was a confidential paid human informant!" Special Counsel John Durham's request to unseal a motion in limine pertaining to the trial of Igor Danchenko, who has been identifed as the "primary source" behind ex-British spy Christopher Steele's dossier, has been granted. A motion in limine is a "pretrial motion asking that certain evidence be found inadmissible, and that it not be referred to or offered at trial," according to Cornell's Legal Information Institute. The Special Counsel's motion to include the evidence against Danchenko reveals that the FBI was...

Now, a grand jury is alleging that Dolan, 71, was behind at least some of the claims included in the dossier, according to a 39-page indictment obtained by John Durham, the special counsel probing the Justice Department’s Russia investigation. The indictment also suggests that Dolan, who worked on both Bill and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns and on a State Department advisory board during the Clinton administration, was so partisan that any information he provided would be suspect. Dolan is left unidentified in the charges against Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who, the indictment claims, provided the core allegations included in...

Joe Biden is getting all kinds of backlash from the despicable speech he delivered last night at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, attacking millions of Americans who want to “Make America Great Again” and supporting President Donald Trump.We covered some of the hot takes, with many people comparing his unprecedented attacks to Communist or Nazi-like tactics, Biden acting like the fascist he was accusing others of being. They also hit on the visuals with the improper use of the Marines and the evil blood-red backdrop.Among the hot take was Trump who chastised Biden for essentially threatening Americans and saying if Biden...

Look, these frothy conspiracy theories about the Clintons, Jeffrey Epstein, the Mena Airport in the 1980s, Vince Foster, etc., etc., have had a longer half-life that a melted-down Russian nuclear reactor, and make for many comic memes on TWiP, and in any case, such purported conspiracies violate Hayward’s First Law of Implausible Conspiracies, which runs as follows: Cp=1/[t(N*K)2] where Cp represents the probability of an actual conspiracy as the product of t (time) multiplied by the product of N (the number of people necessary for a conspiracy) and K (number of killings) squared. But then you see news stories like...

The Justice Department has released a 2019 memo that put to rest any prosecution of former President Donald Trump over allegations contained in the Mueller report. Special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation was criticized by Trump, was hired to probe allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. He found no such connections. However, Mueller’s report cited 10 instances in which he believed there could have been possible obstruction of justice, without saying if they merited prosecution, according to NBC News. That prompted a DOJ review, which culminated in the nine-page memo released Wednesday. The memo said there...

Ever expanding democracy has long been the Progressive’s means to their fuzzy, yet dangerous social justice ends. Our national experience has shown that the explosion of the democratic element since the direct election of senators, voting by women, repeal of Jim Crow, abolition of poll taxes, lowering the voting age to eighteen, extension of voting from a single day to a couple of weeks, same day registration, motor voter, voting rights for ex-convicts, and judicial overthrow of state voter ID laws . . . have all served to extend the franchise to an ever expanding portion of the public. But,...

A cache of Russiagate documents President Donald Trump wanted released during his final days in office contained information about a pair of former leading FBI officials infamous for their private exchanges disparaging Trump, according to a new report.Never-before-seen text messages between ex-FBI special agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, as well as unreleased information about the FBI's investigative steps, were part of this binder of Crossfire Hurricane investigation materials, the New York Times reported on Saturday.White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had a plan to give the binder to at least one conservative journalist, but he...