Free Republic

Who knew that when the declassifications we’ve been waiting for got rolling they’d seem like a distractor? Not that we should give them short shrift. Long shrifts only, please. ... The ones that are coming out Friday (I’ve seen initial takes pop up in the last couple of hours) are important in their own right, and we’ll all be grateful to whoever has the time to parse them out for us. But in context – the big picture – they make a nice departure point for the main-stage drama that is only beginning to coalesce. They’re a leading element of...

Bill Barr started his term as President Trump’s second attorney general maligned by the left and is ending it under attack from both sides. But the man is a class act who has consistently done the nation great service. Barr announced his resignation, with a departure date of Dec. 23, in a classy letter to the president. Barr has done all he can to ensure those who abused their power to harm first candidate and then President Trump will be held accountable. In October, he made John Durham, the former US attorney he’d tasked with investigating the origins of the...

Attorney General William Barr announced his resignation on Monday in a letter to President Trump. In the letter, Barr massaged Trump's ego and announced he "will spend the next week wrapping up a few remaining matters important to the administration, and depart on December 23." The Wall Street Journal reported over the last few days that Barr personally ordered the DOJ to keep the Hunter Biden investigation under wraps. From the WSJ on Monday, "Barr Kept Hunter Biden Probes From Public to Avoid Election Politics": Attorney General William Barr, in the weeks before November's election, instructed prosecutors and senior colleagues...

Overnight President Trump responded to the Supreme Court’s action to threw out his case with Texas and twenty states over the absolutely rigged election of 2020: No court will judge the President’s case on its merits:

AG Barr just walked into @senatemajldr’s office— John Bresnahan (@BresPolitico) November 9, 2020

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he has told his administration’s negotiators to end coronavirus stimulus talks with Democrats until after the Nov. 3 election. The declaration, if the White House follows through on it, would halt an ongoing push to send trillions of dollars more in relief to Americans as the outbreak rampages through the U.S. and the economy struggles to recover from virus-related shutdowns. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke for an hour about a relief package on Monday and planned to talkagain Tuesday. “I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the...

"I hope they're not going to be politically correct,' Trump said Following Mueller’s investigation, Barr appointed Durham to then investigate the origins of the FBI’s original Russia probe, which began in July 2016, through the appointment of Mueller in May 2017. Durham’s team includes a number of federal prosecutors, including Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri who was tapped by the DOJ in February to review the case against Michael Flynn. In May, Barr also tapped U.S. Attorney for Western Texas John Bash to launch a more focused review on the process of unmasking. The...

In his first official press briefing on the coronavirus pandemic since April, President Trump on Tuesday admitted that the public health crisis is likely to worsen as cases surge across the country and asked all Americans to wear masks in public. While Trump hailed his administration’s response to the pandemic and the work toward developing a vaccine, he bluntly disclosed what many Americans already know: that the crisis is likely to spread more before it can be contained. “It will get worse before it gets better,” Trump said of the pandemic that has infected close to 4 million Americans. “That’s...

"I'm going to do a big executive order. I have the power to do it as president and I'm going to make DACA a part of it," Trump responded....Asked whether the executive order would provide temporary relief for DACA recipients, Trump said its scope would be much wider..."But one of the aspects of the bill is going to be DACA. We're going to have a road to citizenship," he [Trump] added.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that existing federal law forbids job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, a major victory for advocates of gay rights — and a surprising one from an increasingly conservative court. The decision said Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate because of a person's sex, among other factors, also covers sexual orientation. It upheld rulings from lower courts that said sexual orientation discrimination was a form of sex discrimination. Across the nation, 21 states have their own laws prohibiting job discrimination based on...

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley on Thursday apologized for accompanying President Donald Trump on his walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church earlier June. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics,” Milley told National Defense University graduates in a pre-recorded speech. “As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.” Milley, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and Attorney General William Barr accompanied President Trump to Lafayette Square after protesters were cleared from...

The nation's top general said Thursday he was wrong for taking part in President Donald Trump's controversial church photo op last week. "I should not have been there," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said in an address during a National Defense University commencement ceremony. "My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics."

Even Trump supporters have wondered about Trump’s tweets implying that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had something to do with a young intern’s death in his office when he was still a Florida congressman. It’s true that Scarborough and his co-host and wife Mika Brzezinksi have spent three years accusing Trump of treasonous collusion with the Russians, but Trump’s venom still seemed strange. I, however, don’t think it was strange at all. Trump is one of the most calculating, rational people ever to occupy the White House. He’s been faced with a serious problem, which is the fact that the immensely powerful...

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump · 39m Mitch, I love you, but this is 100% true. Time is running out. Get tough and move quickly, or it will be too late. The Dems are vicious, but got caught. They MUST pay a big price for what they have done to our Country. Don’t let them get away with this! @LindseyGrahamSC

First it was fake news and now we have fake test results! I am trying to understand why President Trump, Fauci, Birx, the CDC and the W.H.O. keep saying the Covid-19 testing is what matters? At the very same time we are hearing and reading the "test results" for Covid 19 are being artificially inflated and extremely unreliable? For instance, it is admitted in States like New York and Ohio that everything is being labeled Covid-19. This includes people that were never tested! Even with this artifactual inflation of the numbers, the death count numbers are 20 times lower than...

Robert Mueller's Russia probe never would have happened if now-Attorney General William Barr was picked for the position in 2017 instead of Jeff Sessions, President Trump said Friday. In a phone interview on "Fox & Friends" with host Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Ainsley Earhardt, the president said that Sessions was a "disaster" in his role and that, initially, he did not want to make him attorney general. "I didn't want to make him Attorney General, but he was the first senator to endorse me. So, I felt a little bit of an obligation," Trump recalled. "He came to see...

Attorney General William Barr made a last-minute push Monday to persuade the administration to modify its position in the Obamacare dispute that will be heard at the Supreme Court this fall, arguing that the administration should pull back from its insistence that the entire law be struck down. ... Barr and other top advisers have argued against the hard-line position for some time, warning it could have major political implications if the comprehensive health care law appears in jeopardy as voters head to the polls in November. According to four sources familiar with the meeting, Barr argued for modifying the...

Did we see a serious political stumble by President Trump in his spat with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp last week? While some may wonder, he seems over all to be handling the coronavirus crisis deftly enough. He’s been giving due deference to the medical brain trust of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx -- perhaps too much, some fear. At the same time, he’s hammering away at the need to limit the brutal economic consequences of the lockdown as soon as possible. All this while parrying relentless attacks from the press and, of course, from an opposition party desperate to...

Former Attorney General-turned-Alabama Senate candidate Jeff Sessions is calling for a moratorium on all employment-based immigration until the U.S. unemployment rate reaches pre-coronavirus pandemic levels. Sessions made the announcement during a Thursday press release, saying the federal government should not take on more foreign workers until the country’s unemployment level falls below 3.5%. The declaration appears to be the most dramatic call for employment-based restrictions since the pandemic began.

National Public Radio is planning significant cost cuts as the coronavirus pandemic hits sponsorship and donation revenue, the public broadcaster's chief executive, John Lansing, said in a memo to staff. NPR is facing a budget deficit of between $30 million and $45 million through its 2021 fiscal year, Mr. Lansing said in the Wednesday memo. Sponsorship money is drying up amid "a very tough marketplace," he wrote, and donations could also take a hit as foundations and individuals "will be thinking hard about gifts as they watch the swings in the values of their own portfolios." NPR will need to...