Free Republic

By Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Perry Stein November 22, 2024 at 5:43 p.m. EST The plans show how president-elect Donald Trump wants to use the Justice Department to address his own personal grievances President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition. Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the...

Sen. JD Vance refused to acknowledge that former president Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, setting off one of the most contentious exchanges in Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate with Gov. Tim Walz. Walz vigorously pressed Vance on the issue near the end of a debate that had otherwise been marked by unusual comity. “I would just ask, did he lose the 2020 election?” Walz asked. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance said, without addressing the question. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz responded. The Republican senator from Ohio and the Democratic governor of Minnesota offered sharply different perspectives on...

ATLANTA — The Georgia State Election Board approved a rule Friday requiring counties in the critical presidential battleground to hand-count all ballots this year, potentially upending the November election by delaying reporting of results by weeks if not months.The change was spearheaded by a pro-Trump majority that has enacted a series of changes to the state’s election rules in recent weeks and approved the hand-count requirement despite a string of public commenters who begged them not to. Critics included democracy advocates who accused the board of intentionally injecting chaos and uncertainty into the presidential contest, as well as election supervisors...

Five secretaries of state plan to send an open letter to billionaire Elon Musk on Monday, urging him to “immediately implement changes” to X’s AI chatbot Grok, after it shared with millions of users false information suggesting that Kamala Harris was not eligible to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot. The letter, spearheaded by Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon and signed by his counterparts Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania, Steve Hobbs of Washington, Jocelyn Benson of Michigan and Maggie Toulouse Oliver of New Mexico, urges Musk to “immediately implement changes to X’s AI search assistant, Grok, to ensure voters have...

Sad to report the death this morning of Fred Hiatt, the editor of the @washingtonpost’s editorial page and a wonderful colleague. Note to staff just sent by publisher Fred Ryan: pic.twitter.com/6Le9MIvhAx — Paul Farhi (@farhip) December 6, 2021 No word on what caused the death. Hiatt was 66 and in good shape. Hiatt was still working before the Thanksgiving holiday… At this rate, Biden is likely to be presiding over a dangerously unstaffed administration even halfway into his term. If the GOP wins the Senate next year, he’s likely to go an entire term without anything close to a full...

At least a third of Republican midterm candidates who have taken steps to run next year for the US Senate or House of Representatives have “embraced” former President Donald Trump’s “big lie” about his 2020 election defeat, according to a new report. In an analysis of the GOP contenders who have filed the early paperwork with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to run for Congress next year, The Washington Post’s Amy Gardner describes how a number of Republican candidates have become “increasingly focused on the last election”. Many of them, she said, have launched their campaigns running on Mr Trump’s...

Last week, the Wall Street Journal broke what should be viewed as the top media story of the past decade… at least. In a story headlined Trump Call to Georgia Lead Investigator Reveals New Details, the Wall Street Journal published a verbatim transcript of a telephone call between President Trump and the chief election fraud investigator for the office of the Georgia secretary of state, Frances Watson. The alleged contents of this conversation had been part of the national conversation ever since January 9 when Washington Post reporter Amy Gardner published a story claiming, based on a single anonymous source,...

The Washington Post anonymously printed fabricated quotes, attributed them to a sitting president, and used those quotes as a basis to speculate the president committed a crime.On Jan. 9, The Washington Post published a bombshell report about what President Trump reportedly said on a phone call to the Georgia elections investigator. The headline was “‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction.”A few days ago, on March 11, the Post quietly changed the headline and added this correction to the top of the story:Correction: Two months after publication...

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Georgia election officials to stop summarily tossing absentee ballots because of mismatched signatures, delivering a crucial win to voting-rights advocates — and to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams — less than two weeks before Election Day.

President Obama’s reelection campaign launched a national drive Friday to counter new restrictive voter-access laws, which advisers said threaten his electoral chances in November. Organizers will fan out in key swing states this weekend to teach volunteers and voters how to navigate a series of laws passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures imposing stricter identification requirements, limiting early voting and making it harder to organize voter-registration drives. It is the beginning of a months-long effort, campaign officials said, to combat what they described as a Republican effort to stifle voting among young people and minorities, two groups that traditionally tend to...

Things haven't gotten much better for Newt Gingrich ..... The former House speaker abruptly canceled a meeting with Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval ... Not even Gingrich's campaign advisers know why the campaign scheduler called it off, irking them and those in Sandoval's office who had helped set up the event. ..... Other signs of disarray appeared Wednesday. Gingrich's schedule called for a 1 p.m. rally in Reno, but volunteers put out word that the event would be at noon — and that supporters should show up at 11:30. .....