Free Republic

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol sent a number of subpoenas Monday, including to top 2020 Trump campaign aides and the lawyer responsible for crafting the strategy of how the former president could seek to overturn the election results in Congress. Among the six subpoenas released is one for John Eastman, who drafted a memo advising the Trump campaign both to use supposed vice presidential authority to push back on election results and to get state legislatures to reject electors from certain states in order to deny President Biden a majority of the Electoral College...

President Biden and a third of his Cabinet will be at the United Nations Climate Change conference in Scotland that starts Sunday, a high-profile show of force amid pressing domestic issues. Attendees at the conference include Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, USAID Administrator Samantha Power, NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Eric Lander, and EPA Administrator Michael Regan. Biden climate advisers John Kerry and Gina McCarthy will...

At least 34,000 home health workers in New York appear to have missed a deadline to get vaccinated under a new state mandate, according to preliminary state data, rendering them unable to work and deepening a shortage of home health aides. At the same time, the vaccination rate among home health workers as the deadline arrived on Thursday - 86 percent - exceeded the expectations of some union and industry leaders, and suggested that thousands of workers decided to get their first shot at the last minute to stay employed. Some industry leaders had predicted that as few as 70...

The sexual harassment scandal engulfing Gov. Andrew Cuomo escalated Wednesday with the emergence of allegations that he reached under a female aide’s blouse and groped her while they were alone in a room inside the Executive Mansion in Albany. The incident allegedly unfolded after the much younger woman was summoned to help the 63-year-old governor fix a problem with his cellphone, the Albany Times Union reported.

President-elect Joe Biden is expected to unveil a major Covid-19 relief package on Thursday and his advisers have recently told allies in Congress to expect a price tag in the ballpark of $2 trillion, according to two people briefed on the deliberations. The Biden team is taking a "shoot for the moon" approach with the package, one lawmaker in close contact with them told CNN, though they added that the price tag could still change. The proposal will include sizable direct payments to American families, significant state and local funding -- including for coronavirus vaccine distribution and other emergency spending...

WASHINGTON — Vice President Mike Pence plans to maintain an aggressive campaign schedule this week despite an apparent outbreak of the coronavirus among his senior aides, the White House says. Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, and “a couple of key staff surrounding the vice president” have tested positive for the virus, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Sunday. The vice president, who along with his wife, Karen, tested negative on Sunday, according to his office, is considered a “close contact” of the aides under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria but will not quarantine, his spokesman...

Multiple former aides to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have cashed in on their connections by lobbying on coronavirus-related spending bills. According to a report Wednesday in the Washington Free Beacon, at least seven Pelosi aides are now on the other side of the revolving door of influence for such clients as Delta Airlines and Uber that have sought to cash in on the trillions of dollars of recovery spending sloshing around Washington this spring. “The former aides lobbied on policies related to the coronavirus pandemic for over 50 clients in the first quarter of 2020. Their firms received over $2...

In “Donald Trump Is a Hostage to 1979” (Sunday Review, Jan. 12), Stephen Metcalf argues that President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani stems from his obsession with being the anti-Jimmy Carter. But the image of Jimmy Carter as a weak president defies reality. As a former submarine officer, Mr. Carter considered a naval blockade of Iran’s ports, but his national security and military advisers were concerned that it would enhance the influence of the Soviet Union and lead to the hostages being returned in coffins. As president he reversed the decline in post-Vietnam War defense spending. All the weapons...

A number of longtime aides to failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton are still being paid from her campaign committee nearly one year after her defeat, Federal Election Commission filings show. The aides—who have remained close to Clinton, some working with her as a private citizen—have through the end of the third quarter collected thousands of dollars in payments from Hillary for America, Clinton's presidential campaign committee, the most recent filings show. Huma Abedin, Clinton's longtime friend and aide who acted as vice chair of the campaign, has been paid nearly $65,000 between mid-November to the end of June. From...

Hillary Clinton and seven of her top aides have retained their State Department security clearances a year after the FBI concluded they were "extremely careless" handling sensitive information. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed Clinton's current security clearance status on Friday. Grassley released the information to express concern about the State Department's slow bureaucratic process, Circa reported. "The State Department confirmed that it is continuing to review the mishandling of classified information that passed through Secretary Hillary Clinton's unauthorized email server as she and seven former aides retain access to sensitive information," Grassley's office...

Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” network correspondent Ed Henry reported Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) had revealed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the 2016 presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, and six of her aides retained their access to top secret and classified information after leaving the State Department in 2013. “We’re learning from Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley that she and six staffers in 2013 retained clearances where they still had access to top secret and classified information,” Henry said. “Why? They were titled ‘research assistants.’ So the assumption on Capitol Hill is it was because she...

WASHINGTON — With his first two key personnel appointments, President-elect Donald Trump made an overture to Republican circles by naming GOP chief Reince Priebus as his White House chief of staff and fired a shot across the Washington establishment's bow by tapping Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon as chief strategist and senior counselor. The two men had made up the president-elect's chief of staff shortlist, and while Priebus received that job, Bannon's post also is expected to wield significant clout. The media executive with ties to the alt-right and white nationalist movement was given top billing in the press release...

I have seen several reports of Clinton aides calling hillary incompetent, or having poor instincts, or having mental problems. Does anyone know who these aides are and how many there are.

The fact that Hillary Clinton aides used a hammer to destroy some of the 18 mobile devices the candidate used with her private server didn't surprise people who have been following the Clintons for decades. It did, however, shock CNN host Brooke Baldwin, who fact-checked the claim on the air.

State Department officials have determined that classified information was sent to the personal email accounts of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the senior staff of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, NBC News has learned. The IG came upon the material during the course of a review of how current and past secretaries of state deal with classified material and with email. The review was prompted by the current controversy over Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a personal computer server to conduct government business while secretary of state. Linick's findings will be seen as helpful to...

Does Bill Clinton have Parkinson’s disease? While campaigning in Iowa Saturday to rescue Hillary’s floundering presidential campaign, the former president’s hand could be seen trembling while he was making a point. As he was explaining his wife’s rationale for invoking 9/11 to defend her ties to Wall Street, Clinton said, “She was making the point that the people devastated on 9/11 were people to her, not categories.”

For President Barack Obama, it’s now personal. A new book cites Obama aides saying the president has a “genuine disdain” for Mitt Romney. “One factor made the 2012 grind bearable and at times even fun for Obama: he began campaign preparations feeling neutral about Romney, but like the former governor’s GOP opponents in 2008 and 2012, he quickly developed a genuine disdain for the man,” author Glenn Thrush writes in the soon-to-be released e-book “Obama’s Last Stand.” Thrush — a reporter for Politico, which published book excerpts Sunday – writes that Obama’s feelings for Romney are different from how he...

The book won’t be out until Tuesday, but Sarah Palin’s team is already pushing back hard against former aide Frank Bailey’s “Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin,” telling POLITICO that the purported tell-all “belongs on the fiction shelves.” In their first comments about the book since several media outlets obtained a leaked manuscript in February, two sources close to Palin disputed several of the anecdotes in the book, including his claims of illegal coordination with the Republican Governors Association and that he has seen Palin’s deposition in the so-called “Troopergate” case, which is sealed. Palin’s camp also insists that some of...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Aides to U.S. President Barack Obama will aim on Wednesday to lift sagging confidence in their economic leadership by arguing that their policies are creating millions of jobs and spurring private investment. A report to be released at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) will estimate that Obama's $862 billion economic stimulus package, which passed last year, has saved or created 3 million jobs and is on track to meet its goal of 3.5 million jobs by the end of this year.

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