Free Republic

In Tuesday morning’s impeachment inquiry hearing, in the questioning of Lt.-Col. Alexander Vindman of the White House National Security Council and Jennifer Williams of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff, Democrats are pressing three misleading themes. First, Chairman Adam Schiff and the Democrats’ counsel, Daniel Goldman, have attempted to frame a dichotomy between President Trump and what they call “official” US foreign policy. It’s a false framework. Official policy is not, as they suggest, made by the so-called policy community (comprised mainly of the NSC, the State Department and government agents from the intelligence community and the armed services). The president...

McCabe has indicated that, if charged, he would claim the Justice Department was under pressure from the White House. Federal prosecutors in Washington have recommended that criminal charges be filed against Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s former deputy director, and the Justice Department has rejected a last-ditch appeal by McCabe’s lawyers, according to a report on Thursday by Fox News. This clears the way for what appears to be McCabe’s imminent indictment.

People living in Palestinian territory are being denied rights and Tlaib was similarly denied the ability to visit her grandmother, Rivera claimed Monday on "The Story." "I also think it is absolutely outrageous that two sitting members of the Congress of the United States of America... were denied entry into the country. I'm shocked that the ambassador did not mention 52 years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories." Prior to Rivera's remarks, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon discussed the situation with host Martha MacCallum. In his interview, Rivera explained why he found it wrong for Israel...

The most effective way to spot The Indecent is to watch for those who incessantly peacock their own decency … which perfectly describes the increasingly reprehensible Never Trump publication National Review. Granted, there are still a couple of interesting contributors over there, chiefly Victory Davis Hanson and Andrew McCarthy, but this in no way mitigates National Review’s indecency anymore than a couple of innocent men wrongfully convicted turn a state prison into a Boy Scout camp. National Review’s fall has been breathtaking. What was once the premiere source of conservative thought has become one of the most hypocritical, anti-intellectual, feelings-first,...

This is Part Two of a two-part series. In Part One, we took a look at the OLC guidance that bars the indictment of a sitting president. (The OLC is the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.) In particular, we looked at (a) how, in investigating President Trump for purported obstruction, special counsel Robert Mueller’s staff distorted the guidance into a prohibition against even considering whether an offense occurred; and (b) the futile hope of congressional Democrats, during Wednesday’s hearings, that Mueller would contradict his final report on this point. In Part Two, we explore why Mueller’s staff of very...

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is quite the comeback for Quentin Tarantino. After the stillborn Hateful Eight and the loss of his mentor Harvey Weinstein into the maw of #MeToo, the writer-director is all on his own with his ninth film; he’s off-the-leash, flush with 90 million of Sony’s dollars, and what did he deliver…? A straight-up masterpiece. If this isn’t the movie Tarantino was born to direct (that was probably Pulp Fiction) OUATIH is unquestionably the movie his 27-year career has been chugging toward, the one where it all comes together: a passion for forgotten B-movies, for correcting history, for all things pop culture...

Almost from the start, Democrats and their media echo chamber have moved the goal posts on collusion. The original allegation – the political narrative that the Clinton campaign, through Obama administration alchemy, honed into a counterintelligence investigation – was that that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russia’s “cyberespionage” attacks on the 2016 election. But there was no evidence that candidate Trump and his surrogates had anything to do with the Kremlin’s hacking and propaganda schemes. And no supporting logic. The Russians are very good at espionage. They neither needed nor wanted American help, their operations predated Trump’s entry into...

Jan. 18, 2019 - 5:03 - Special counsel's office issues rare public statement to dispute Buzzfeed report; reaction from former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy.

Special Counsel Mueller is building a report, not a case. Right after Special Counsel Robert Mueller racked up yet another guilty plea to a false-statements charge on Thursday, a friend asked me, “Doesn’t this destroy Michael Cohen’s credibility as a witness?” Easier to destroy Satan’s conscience, I thought. Cohen would have to have some credibility before it could be destroyed, and how much could reside in a self-described “fixer” who openly compared himself to Tom Hagen, the lawyer-gangster in The Godfather? (I’ll stipulate that he has a law degree, but Cohen has always struck me as the Fredo of Trump...

Rest assured that if there’s a rumor that, in third grade, young Brett Kavanaugh yanked on the ponytails of the girl in the second row (war on women!), The New York Times, NBC News and phalanxes of their journalistic colleagues will be all over it. Meanwhile, Rep. Beto O’Rourke had a pair of felony arrests in his mid-to-late 20s, including a reckless drunk-driving incident in which he crashed into a car and allegedly tried to flee from the scene. The cases appear to have mysteriously disappeared without serious prosecution, notwithstanding that O’Rourke continues to deny basic facts outlined in at...

In my column yesterday, I contended that the unverifiable sexual-assault allegation against Judge Brett Kavanaugh bore “all the hallmarks of a set-up.” I based that assessment on the patently flimsy evidence, coupled with Senate Democrats’ duplicitous abuse of the confirmation-hearing process. To repeat myself: If the Democrats had raised the allegation in a timely manner, its weakness would have been palpable, it would have been used for what little it’s worth in examining Kavanagh during his days of testimony, it would be put to rest as unverifiable, and we’d be on to a confirmation vote. Instead, we’re on to a...

Rudy Giuliani appeared this morning on Meet the Press on behalf of President Trump. Host Chuck Todd asked why President Trump won’t just sit for a friendly interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and tell the truth. What’s so hard about that? Truth is truth; Trump can avoid any alleged “perjury trap” by sticking to it. But it’s not that simple. “Truth isn’t truth,” Giuliani responded. “Mr. Mayor,” Todd countered. “the truth is the truth. This is going to be a bad meme.” Andrew McCarthy refuted the seemingly self-evident position advocated by Todd in his NR column “Of Course There...

I do not share my friend David French’s theoretical constitutional concerns about the president’s revocation of security clearances — at least when it comes to former government officials who become media commentators and have no demonstrable need for a security clearance. Like David and many other analysts, though, I think it’s a big mistake to politicize the revocation of security clearances. Still, I am even less of a fan of the politicization of intelligence itself. And that justifies the revocation of former CIA director John Brennan’s clearance. As is often the case with President Trump, the right thing has been...

Watch here.

Here is former U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy today analyzing the redacted FISA documents released by the Justice Department last night. He is very strong in saying he is “shocked” to find that, indeed, the FBI used the unverified and discredited Steele Dossier to justify their need for a FISA Warrant to spy on Carter Page. McCarthy said he really didn’t think they would do that – that he didn’t think something like this could happen here. But it has. . . .

On his nationally syndicated radio talk show Wednesday, host Mark Levin interviewed former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy on the topic of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s threat to subpoena and interview President Donald J. Trump, McCarthy suggesting that Mueller should not be permitted to subpoena Trump, nor even ask for an interview. “Well, I don’t think, Mark, that not only should a prosecutor not be permitted to subpoena a president by a court, I don’t think the Justice Department should allow a president to be even asked voluntarily to submit to an interview in the absence of evidence that there’s a...

Did Robert Mueller’s office withhold other evidence in Michael Flynn’s prosecution, either from the FISA court or from Flynn’s attorneys? There is reason to believe so. -------------------------------------------------------- On Friday, Judge Emmet Sullivan issued an order in United States v. Flynn that, while widely unnoticed, reveals something fascinating: A motion by Michael Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea based on government misconduct is likely in the works. Just a week ago, and thus before Sullivan quietly directed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to provide Flynn’s attorneys “any exculpatory evidence,” Washington Examiner columnist Byron York detailed the oddities of Flynn’s case. The...

The FBI and Justice Department hyped Trump–Russia collusion. Rod Rosenstein can right that wrong. The most bitter dispute over the Nunes memo involves Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. This might seem odd since the memo, published last week by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Devin Nunes (R. Calif.), does not address the Mueller investigation. Rather, it homes in on potential abuses of foreign-intelligence-collection authorities by Obama-era Justice Department and FBI officials, said to have occurred many months before Mueller was appointed. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456185/nunes-memo-rod-rosenstein-can-clean-mess

...the Justice Department has improperly assigned a prosecutor in the absence of grounds to believe a crime has been committed. “Collusion with Russia” is not a crime, and there are presently no grounds to believe the president conspired with Putin’s regime to violate any American law. And again, it is not criminal obstruction for a president to weigh in on whether a subordinate...should be investigated, or to fire a subordinate....Whether we think these are foolish things for the president to have done is beside the point. We are talking here about whether they are criminal actions, and they are not.......

There is no way to evaluate the trustworthiness of anonymous sources and unpublished documents, so why try?At this point, it’s safe to say the publicly available reports muddle the Mueller investigation so much that the only thing we “know” is all sides have more than enough circumstantial evidence to justify their pre-existing hopes and dreams. Left-wing partisans would have you believe that Mueller has the goods on Trump, and that conservative critiques of Mueller’s team or the Clinton campaign’s role in creating the so-called Steele dossier are nothing more than bad-faith attempts to discredit the investigation and undermine faith in...