Free Republic

One of former CIA Director John Brennan’s ex-employees has called for him to be prosecuted after the agency released a bombshell report outlining how he sought to use the agency to promote the Russia collusion hoax. The report discussed the details surrounding the creation of an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help President Donald Trump win the 2016 election. The CIA noted how Brennan became intimately involved in the process of compiling the ICA. Despite protests from his underlings, the former CIA director insisted on including information from the debunked Steele Dossier, which...

A federal appeals court determined that the White House does not have the authority to issue binding environmental regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), upending several decades of the practice. NEPA is a federal law that requires federal agencies to conduct a review of environmental impacts before making any decisions and then issue a “detailed statement” of the environmental review. In a divided decision Tuesday, the D.C. District Court of Appeals ruled that the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), established to instruct agencies on NEPA compliance, does not have the power to issue regulations on other...

We now know the name of the Chinese defector who has been working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for a few months and what his position within the Chinese military and government was, among other details.Matthew Brazil and Jeff Stein at Spy Talk reported on the “rumor,” and gave the name and background of the rumored defector:Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei (董经纬) defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.Dong is, or was, a longtime official...

President Trump wanted to haul Dr. Anthony Fauci in front of a presidential commission to give evidence about funding the Wuhan laboratory suspected of leaking COVID-19. Advanced plans were underway for the special presidential panel, with an executive order even drawn up to hold China and its collaborators accountable and tally a reparations bill to fire off to Beijing. Trump’s senior advisers talked him out of the idea as it was about to be announced, according to insider accounts detailed in a soon-to-be-released book on the origins of COVID-19, “What Really Happened in Wuhan.” In another bombshell revelation from the...

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday finalized a rule to end a "secret science" regulation that was imposed under former President Donald Trump that excluded certain studies that didn't make all data publicly available. The agency announced the end of the rule on Wednesday. The move allows the EPA to consider studies that don't make available all data, which is sometimes done to protect privacy. Trump's administration billed the restriction as a transparency measure, but critics argued that it might ultimately do more harm than good for an agency that values such varying scientific data like the EPA. "This action...

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.” Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites. This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already...

The term “Fairness Doctrine” exemplifies what George Orwell called “Newspeak”: it uses language to mask the deleterious effects of its purported meaning. The Fairness Doctrine itself was in effect from 1949 until 1987. It required that radio broadcasts devote a reasonable amount of time to the discussion of controversial issues of public importance, and that the broadcaster do that fairly by offering reasonable opportunity for opposing viewpoints to be heard. If the Federal Communications Commission found a radio station in repeated violation of this Doctrine, it could take away the station’s license—a business form of capital punishment. One famous victim...