Free Republic

The State Department has informed Congress that it plans to shutter its last two consulates in Russia over caps set by Moscow on the number of diplomats that are allowed in the country. In a letter to congressional leaders sent Dec. 10 and obtained by The Hill, the administration said it will permanently close its Vladivostok consulate and temporarily halt work at the consulate in Yekaterinburg. The letter confirming the closures was sent three days before news broke of a major hack of U.S. government agencies that is believed to have been conducted by an elite Russian cyber espionage unit....

In an explosive new op-ed, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) claimed that at least 15 separate federal agencies knew that attempts to create a COVID-19-like coronavirus were being undertaken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as early as January 2018. Yet, heads of these agencies did not reveal this information to the public; for years, they actively refused to release information on the project to lawmakers such as Paul, who were attempting to provide congressional oversight. “For years, I have been fighting to obtain records from dozens of federal agencies relating to the origins of COVID-19 and the DEFUSE project,” wrote...

In a fiery exchange last month, CNN anchorwoman Abby Phillip told GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that there was “no evidence” to support his claim that federal agents abetted protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Ramaswamy shot back that the FBI conspicuously has never denied that law enforcement agents were on duty in the crowd. He argued that federal officials have repeatedly “lied” to the American people about not only that investigation but one that has gotten much less attention: the alleged failed plot to kidnap and kill Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020.“It was entrapment,” Ramaswamy...

TACOMA, Wash. — A jury acquitted three Tacoma police officers of all criminal charges in the March 2020 death of Manuel "Manny" Ellis, a 33-year-old Black man who was shocked tased, choked, beaten and hogtied with a spit hood placed over his head. After more than three months and two mandatory restarts of jury deliberations, verdicts were delivered Thursday in the trial of Matthew Collins, 40, Christopher Burbank, 38, and Timothy Rankine, 34. Collins and Burbank, who are white, were facing first-degree manslaughter and second-degree murder charges. Rankine, who is Asian American, was charged with first-degree manslaughter. Judge Bryan Chushcoff...

Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Inside” that “everybody should vote for” President Joe Biden if they wanted democracy to survive. Partial transcript as follows: HUTCHINSON: Donald Trump isn’t a Republican. And, yes, maybe, by name, he considers himself a Republican, but Donald Trump cares more about authoritarian rule than he does our rule of law. He doesn’t care about preserving our Constitution. He cares about leveraging it for his own power and his own gain. So, when we look at this next election, we need to think about, if we want our democracy to...

Ex-CDC director Robert Redfield said during a CNN interview that he believed the coronavirus was made in a lab and escaped. Since then, he received death by fellow scientists, including some he used to call friends, he told Vanity Fair ... 'I expected it from politicians. I didn't expect it from science,' Redfield said.. The coronavirus origin has been at the forefront of debate since last week when Biden ordered intelligence officials to 'redouble' efforts to establish the origin.. It heated up on Tuesday when Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails were published on the Washington Post and Buzzfeed .. The former...

Evidence continues to point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) as the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Meanwhile, based on the now publicized emails sent to and from Dr. Fauci, it has become evident that there was a strong push to downplay this theory and convince the world the virus evolved naturally. The story grew thicker on Thursday. According to a report from Vanity Fair, last March, leading scientists aggressively tried to silence former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield after stating his belief on CNN that the virus originated from a lab in Wuhan. Following his public...

I’ve seen a lot of this material before but never in such detail and concentration. This lengthy article walks though the behind the scenes machinations which led to the creation and publication of a scientific paper designed to dismiss the lab leak theory. That paper was then cited by Dr. Fauci and others as proof that COVID-19 had a natural origin (but Fauci didn’t reveal he had helped organize the effort to write the paper). What we’ve known for some time is that the academics who were recruited for this task had significant doubts about it. Again, you’ve probably seen...

Ruben A. Verastigui was arrested last night for allegedly soliciting, possessing, and distributing extremely violent child pornography depicting infants being raped by adult men, police say. Prior to his arrest, Verastigui worked for a Republican policy group, and prior to this, worked for establishment Republicans in the Senate. The last tweet he sent before being arrested lauded the 11 Republican Congressmen who joined with Democrats to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee posts. “Between March 2020 and February 2021, an investigation revealed the suspect distributed, received, and possessed images of child pornography,” the D.C. Metropolitan Police said in...

I have praised the Trump administration’s accomplishments many times, but there is one huge blot on Trump’s record: his administration’s response to the covid epidemic. Via InstaPundit, Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute comments on Megyn Kelly’s interview of Trump. Kelly, to her credit, began the process of asking Trump the tough questions about covid: We need to know why the churches, schools, and businesses were closed at the urging of the White House. We need to know why we faced travel restrictions, why government printed and spent multiple trillions that produced crushing inflation, why the hospitals were shut to...

The announcement that came from the White House is spooky in its brevity. It was just one sentence announcing the end of the COVID emergency. The 15 Days announced on March 16, 2020, which implemented the national emergency declared a few days earlier, ended up lasting 1,135 days. What resulted? National ruin. We see it in every aspect of our lives: cultural, economic, educational, public health, familial, community, and trust in institutions. Life expectancy is in free fall, not from COVID but from the fallout of the response. Cities are wrecked. Millions have been professionally and demographically displaced. It’s not...

Don’t Let Them Memory-Hole This On a video podcast the other day, I made reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics. Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business model. I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that talking about what happened to us is verboten on...

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn said he was provided information that foreign intelligence agencies were monitoring the U.S. election on Nov. 3 and are willing to provide evidence to President Donald Trump. “We have evidence now of foreign countries … were watching the attacks on our election system, our election process, on the 3rd of November,” Flynn told Fox Business on Friday. “So we now have that evidence and we received that today,” he said. He didn’t elaborate on what foreign intelligence agencies were involved, how he obtained that information, or the nature of the alleged attacks on the...

Chris Krebs has stated in the past and testified yesterday that there was no voter fraud through “hacking” that occurred during the 2020 election. For complete transparency, I did not watch his testimony nor have a read a transcript. Why would I? This is the same guy who didn’t notice the largest cyber-attack in world history happening against multiple federal agencies for months.Krebs was fired last month from his position as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The agency is tasked with preventing the exact type of massive cyberattack that has been underway since March, perhaps earlier....

Today, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced an agreement on a shared vision for reopening their economies and controlling COVID-19 into the future. Joint statement from the governors: COVID-19 has preyed upon our interconnectedness. In the coming weeks, the West Coast will flip the script on COVID-19 – with our states acting in close coordination and collaboration to ensure the virus can never spread wildly in our communities. We are announcing that California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies – one that...

The possibility of U.S. lockdowns—never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics—was already in the air in early March 2020. The theory of lockdown had been floating around for 15 years but now China was first to try it, and claim enormous success, however fraudulently. Incredibly, the United States was set to try it out too but getting Trump on board was going to take some doing. The federal government had the quarantine power since 1944. That much we knew. But just how expansive could its exercise be? Would they dare quarantine the well with the sick? How...

Two more senators made hefty stock sales before the coronavirus pandemic tanked global markets, records revealed as two other lawmakers who dumped millions in shares faced mounting calls to resign. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Jim Inhofe sold as much as $6.4 million worth of stock in the weeks before panic about the coronavirus sparked a worldwide selloff, according to disclosure filings first reported by the New York Times. The additional revelations came amid widespread outrage toward GOP Sens. Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler, who reportedly sold shares after getting briefings on the coronavirus threat.

Share Article via Email Hiding behind his lawyers and hoping to avoid questioning about his role in SpyGate, former confidential human source Stefan Halper implies in his most recent court filing that the Russia collusion story peddled during the 2016 election and after was “substantially truth.” Later this morning, a federal judge in Virginia will consider Halper’s latest attempt to toss the lawsuit Svetlana Lokhova filed against him in December of 2020, which claims that the former confidential human source defamed her and alleges tortiously interference with a book contract she had. This lawsuit represents the second case Lokhova filed...

Senate Democrats say they were able to eliminate a “bailout for Big Oil” to help secure a bipartisan agreement on a $2 trillion coronavirus economic relief package Wednesday. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer released a summary of the agreement that says it no longer contains $3 billion to fulfill President Trump’s order to buy low-priced oil to restock the nation’s emergency Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Today, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Appeals Chamber authorized an investigation into the alleged activities of the Taliban and U.S. and Afghan personnel related to Afghanistan. This is a truly breathtaking action by an unaccountable political institution, masquerading as a legal body. It is all the more reckless for this ruling to come just days after the United States signed a historic peace deal on Afghanistan – the best chance for peace in a generation. Indeed, the Afghan government, itself, pleaded with the ICC to not take this course. But the ICC politicians had other goals. The United States is...