Free Republic

-snip- “The Russian demand that Ukraine give up parts of the Donbas would be, just to illustrate the scale, comparable to asking the United States to give up Florida,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told reporters after the White House meeting. During the closed-door meeting, Finnish President Alexander Stubb called the eastern Ukrainian cities of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk “a bastion against the Huns,” a description that appeared to impress Trump, according to the officials. Zelensky didn’t reject land swaps out of hand during the discussions with Trump, but he said it would be difficult to move populations and override Ukraine’s constitutional...

(Sub-headline: Bondi also told president at the meeting that Justice decided to not release more Jeffrey Epstein documents because of the presence of child pornography and the need to protect victims) When Justice Department officials reviewed what Attorney General Pam Bondi called a “truckload” of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein earlier this year, they discovered that Donald Trump’s name appeared multiple times, according to senior administration officials. SNIP

President Trump finally blinked. It took a week for the plunge in the stock and bond markets—along with a sustained campaign by executives, lawmakers, lobbyists and foreign leaders—to prompt Trump to roll back for 90 days a major element of his sweeping tariff plan. The president said that the reaction to the tariffs was getting a bit “yippy”—like a nervous athlete unable to perform—and he relied on his instincts to change course as he watched the bond market tank and listened to business leaders including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon express fears of a recession. The episode was classic Trump:...

Matt Gaetz's past behavior isn't role-model material. By his own admission, Gaetz, in his 30s was "playing too hard....womanized, drank, and smoked more than I should have." But that doesn't excuse CNN for its double standard on the subject. At the end of a segment on today's CNN This Morning regarding the House Ethics Committee's impending release of its report on its investigation of Gaetz, host Kasie Hunt, speaking of Gaetz's activities, dubiously wondered, "in his 30s?" Hunt was apparently suggesting that the 30s are too old to still be a hard partier. Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal...

Standing near a tractor draped with the Betsy Ross flag, Jane Timken, a former state GOP party chair, told a small crowd here this week how she was different from the other Republicans running for U.S. Senate. “They wake up every day and try to get canceled on Twitter,” Timken said during a question-and-answer session. “At the end of the day, I’m a ‘get things done’ kind of person.” Later, in a brief interview, she went further: “Who’s not going to embarrass the state? That’s me.” But Timken is getting little traction ahead of Ohio’s Senate primary election on Tuesday,...

NANTUCKET, Mass. - The Biden administration has taken pains in recent days to show it is working to ease the pain of inflation for Americans. The emphasis comes after months of pleas from worried Democrats, who have pressed White House officials to do more to acknowledge inflation as a central concern for voters and toutwhat they are doing to combat it. Any suggestion that the White House focus on inflation is new is a "false narrative, to put it bluntly" said one top White House economic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to...

ROME — President Biden sought to reverse key policies and approaches of former president Donald Trump during this weekend’s summit of the Group of 20, and attempted to ensure those reversals would stay in place even if there is a change in American leadership.... ...“The United States of America is the most critical part of this entire agenda,” Biden said at a Sunday news conference, responding to a suggestion that the U.S. return to global leadership remains in doubt. “Everyone sought me out...." ...But Biden’s top advisers acknowledged that world leaders approached the talks with a concern that Trump, or...

McSweeney's had a wry, Onion-like tongue-in-cheek response to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) entering the 2020 presidential arena: "I Don't Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary And Coincidentally I'm Starting To Hate Elizabeth Warren." But it was anchored in reality. "The 2020 presidential campaign is expected to include the largest field ever of female candidates, all of them campaigning in the wake of the defeat of the first female nominee of a major party," say Annie Linskey and David Weigel at The Washington Post. And like Warren, they'll probably all "feel compelled to come up with an answer" to...

**SNIP** The Globe examined hundreds of documents, many of them never before available, and reached out to all 52 of the law professors who are still living and were eligible to be in that Pound Hall room at Harvard Law School. Some are Warren’s allies. Others are not. Thirty-one agreed to talk to the Globe — including the law professor who was, at the time, in charge of recruiting minority faculty. Most said they were unaware of her claims to Native American heritage and all but one of the 31 said those claims were not discussed as part of her...

Chris Matthews has come close to calling a liar an Alabama woman who said her grandmother was 16 when she married a man in his 30s. On this evening’s Hardball, Boston Globe reporter Annie Linskey said that a woman she interviewed in Alabama told her that her grandmother had married at 16. Matthews retorted, “yeah, but her grandfather was 17.” Linskey replied, “no, no, he was in his 30s.” Shot back a skeptical Matthews: “No! Are they dreaming this up just to win the case down there? That seems very convenient.” Get the rest of the story and view the...