Free Republic

Charlotte’s revulsion over Huma Abedin’s calculated “stand by your man” routine is surely right. Still, it is amazing, as we speculate about Ms. Abedin’s political future, that the elephant in the room goes unnoticed, or at least studiously unmentioned. Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of...

For more than a year, PJ Media has been reporting on the corrupt press shop inside the Department of Justice. The unit is headed byPress Harpy Tracy Schmaler. We broke a story in July about this relationship after a PJ Media public records request revealed communications between Media Matters’ Matt Gertz and Schmaler about Fast and Furious. (More on the corrupt DOJ press shop: “ Tracy Schmaler’s (and Eric Holder’s) Trip to the Tropics ,” “ DOJ Leaks to TPM Muckraker Florida Will Be Sued Over Voter Rolls ,” “Tracy Schmaler – DOJ Shrieker in Chief.“) Tracy Schmaler Today,...

Please Tell Me These FBI/DOJ ‘Side Deals’ with Clinton E-Mail Suspects Didn’t Happen The ‘side deals’ are further evidence of a highly politicized Obama Department of Justice. By Andrew C. McCarthy— October 4, 2016 Just when you think it can’t get any worse . . . According to House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.), the immunity agreements struck by the Justice Department with Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two top subjects of the FBI’s Clinton e-mail investigation, included “side agreements.” Pursuant to these side agreements, it was stipulated that (a) the FBI would not scrutinize any documents dated...

Let’s give Iran, a certified state sponsor of terrorism, billions in cash. What could go wrong? The Obama State Department is convinced that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and his regime’s cronies are financing terrorism. How come? Well, because they conduct business in cash. In fact, in its most recent annual report on state sponsors of terrorism, State frets “that 60 percent of all business transactions [in Syria] are conducted in cash and that nearly 80 percent of all Syrians do not use formal banking services.” This has created a “vast black market,” the components of which are exploited by “some...

As David and Rich have already noted, the FBI-302 report of the interview of Hillary Clinton, along with the other notes of investigation released today, make for mind boggling reading. Most bracing is the fact that Mrs. Clinton had her server wiped clean sometime between March 25 and 31, 2015, only three weeks after the New York Times on March 3 broke the story of the server system’s existence. David notes that, at the same time the Democrats’ Janus-faced presidential nominee was outwardly taking the position that she “want[ed] the public to see my email,” she was having her minions...

Confidentiality”? Yes, that’s the State Department’s story on why the Obama administration is stonewalling the American people regarding the president’s illegal and increasingly suspicious Iransom payoff. The administration refuses to divulge any further information about the $1.7 billion the president acknowledges paying the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Grilled on Wednesday about how Obama managed to pay the final $1.3 billion installment — particularly given the president’s claim that it is not possible to send Tehran a check or wire-transfer — State Department spokesman Mark Toner decreed that the administration would continue “withholding this information” in order “to protect...

Looking ahead to the next installment of e-mails from WikiLeaks As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya — indeed, that ISIS is ISIS — thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton’s lying to Congress and the American people — this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of...

Of all the ignorant pronouncements in the 2016 presidential campaign, the dumbest may be that the Constitution forbids a “religious test” in the vetting of immigrants. Monotonously repeated in political speeches and talking-head blather, this claim is heedless of the Islamic doctrinal roots on which foreign-born Islamists and the jihadists they breed base their anti-Americanism. It is also dead wrong. The clause said to be the source of this drivel is found in Article VI. As you’ll no doubt be shocked to learn, it has utterly nothing to do with immigration. The clause states, “no religious Test shall ever be...

For these post-Reagan Republicans, conservative was passé. They needed to be “compassionate conservatives,” as if there were something vaguely inhumane about the liberty enterprise. Government was no longer the “necessary evil” envisioned by the Framers, the butt of the Gipper’s aforementioned quip. It was our beneficent guardian who “has got to move” whenever “somebody hurts.” These Republicans doubled the national debt before Obama came along to double it again. The new and improved GOP swelled the size and scope of government; created new entitlements even as the existing ones were bankrupting us; enacted “campaign-finance reform” well aware that it flouted...

NRO's Andy McCarthy on Rush's show still won't give Trump credit for being able to carry the "The system is rigged" message saying only his supporters agree. Well in that case we have to ask Mister McCarthy is still anti-Trump as we weigh his words. I don't trust anyone from NRO.

... Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services. Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States. In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that...

There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton...

Sharia supremacists are not only shielded from scrutiny by U.S. intelligence but welcomed into the national-security apparatus. Barack Obama has spent his presidency cultivating Islamists, particularly from the international Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates in the United States. As we saw this week, he chafes at the term “radical Islam” — as do his Islamist advisers. At their insistence, he had instructional materials for training government agents purged of references to Islamic terms that illuminate the nexus between Muslim doctrine and jihadist terror. Obama’s vaunted national-security strategy, “Countering Violent Extremism,” is Orwellian. The term CVE supplants identification of our jihadist...

He suggested: I think the Republican Congress has been derelict in that duty – but at the same time, I think it’s self-perpetuating in a way because I guess their ostensible reason for being derelict in their duty is that the President is popular. But perhaps the President is popular because they’re derelict in their duty.” McCarthy said the announcement by Attorney General Loretta Lynch that references to Islam and ISIS will be scrubbed from transcripts of jihadi Omar Mateen’s call to 911 during the Orlando attack was clear evidence that “the government is becoming sharia-adherent, and the Left is...

As we have noted here many times, military training is generally the key that separates competent terrorists from wannabes. But whether actual or would-be jihadists, these Muslims are motivated by Islamic supremacism, the belief that sharia, Islam’s ancient, totalitarian law, must be imposed on society. Based on all this, there is abundant Washington and media speculation that the attack is “ISIS-inspired.” This is consistent with the bipartisan, government-approved inanity we have been following for a quarter-century, what I often call the political class’s concoction of “An Islam of Their Very Own.” It goes something like this: Islam is a religion...

In his second speech on Sunday morning's terrorist massacre in Orlando, Florida, President Barack Obama said  on Monday that "the shooter was inspired by various extremist information that was disseminated over the Internet," that "we see no clear evidence that he was directed externally," and that "this is certainly an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been so concerned about for a very long time." The press, led as usual by the Associated Press, is certainly cooperating with those characterizations. Presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has clearly made up her mind that...

Prosecutor of jihadists Andrew McCarthy joined Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM Channel 125 Patriot with host Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon following the Orlando terror attack. McCarthy told listeners that Islamic Sharia law goes beyond Islamic terror group ISIS, and the problem of “massive migration by an assimilation-resistant Sharia supremacist culture” will ensure radicalization for years to come.

Last week’s shattering report by the State Department’s inspector general drew the conclusion that several of us at National Review have been urging for over a year: Hillary Clinton’s systematic conduct of government business over a homebrew e-mail system resulted in serious violations of federal law. Mrs. Clinton’s withheld tens of thousands of government records (the e-mails) for nearly two years after she departed the State Department. She failed to return all government-related e-mails upon demand. She destroyed (or at least attempted to destroy) tens of thousands of e-mails without consultation with the State Department. And she did it all...

I am afraid that grim reality requires choosing the second of David Pryce-Jones’s two ways of looking at London’s election of Sadiq Khan as mayor: By choosing an enabler of Muslim extremism, the British are losing control of their destiny. In the run-up to the mayoral election, the invaluable Daniel Johnson, editor of Standpoint, provided the essential backdrop: Indeed, what has emerged before our eyes in Britain is a kind of Islamist state within a state…. A new survey by ICM with the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, for Channel Four and the Sunday...

There was an extraordinary report in Tuesday’s Washington Post about the Clinton e-mail investigation. It involved the government’s interview of longtime Clinton consigliere Cheryl Mills. It details how Justice Department attorneys made an agreement with Mills’s attorney to cut off questioning about a key aspect of the case. Mills, who is a lawyer, was represented at the interview by a lawyer named Beth Wilkinson. As is customary in these situations, the questioning was conducted jointly by FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors. Yet when things got dicey, it seems the Justice Department prosecutors worked jointly with Ms. Wilkinson to block...