Free Republic

Newly unsealed court documents put Harvey Weinstein’s Rolodex on full display. The fallen movie mogul - who is now a convicted rapist facing up to 29 years in jail and will be sentenced Wednesday - once tried to save his career by emailing his famous peers, including billionaires, powerful agents and Hollywood titans. In emails, reviewed by Variety on Tuesday afternoon at the New York City criminal courthouse, where roughly 1,000 pages of documents were unsealed, Weinstein wrote to the likes of Michael Bloomberg, Quentin Tarantino, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook and Eddy Cue. The...

Amazon is quietly canceling its Nazis. Over the past 18 months, the retailer has removed two books by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as several titles by George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Amazon has also prohibited volumes like “The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power” and “A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.” SNIP “Amazon reserves the right to determine whether content provides an acceptable experience,” said one recent removal notice that the company sent to a bookseller. SNIP “Amazon wants its customers...

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have evidence indicating Jeff Bezos ’ girlfriend provided text messages to her brother that he then sold to the National Enquirer for its article about the Amazon.com Inc. founder’s affair, according to people familiar with the matter. The text messages, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, were among the materials turned over to federal prosecutors as part of their investigation into whether American Media Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer, attempted to extort Mr. Bezos... ***** The evidence gathered by federal prosecutors includes a May 10, 2018, text message sent from the phone of...

Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s most powerful and richest men, is levelling severe allegations against the Saudis, and once again, he has nothing to show for them. The media has been set ablaze by an “exclusive” report in The Guardian, a United Nations report, and even a documentary film, all dropped at once, alleging that Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia is personally responsible for “hacking” into a personal phone belonging to Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men and the owner of Amazon and The Washington Post.The “bombshell” report in The Guardian, published Tuesday evening, was...

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has once again sounded the alarm on the environment, reportedly telling an audience in San Diego that all heavy industrial activity must be moved to space to save Earth. Bezos appeared at the San Diego Air & Space Museum on Saturday to be inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame for his work on Blue Origin, the space flight company he founded in 2000. The Times of San Diego reported that Bezos addressed a crowd of about 600 invitees at the private event. “I believe that, one day, Earth will be zoned residential...

Police officers who download videos captured by homeowners’ Ring doorbell cameras can keep them forever and share them with whomever they’d like without providing evidence of a crime, the Amazon-owned firm told a lawmaker this month. More than 600 police forces across the country have entered into partnerships with the camera giant, allowing them to quickly request and download video recorded by Ring’s motion-detecting, Internet-connected cameras inside and around Americans’ homes. The company says that the videos can be a critical tool in helping law enforcement investigate crimes such as trespassing, burglary and package theft, and that homeowners are free...

Congressional Republicans are sticking with their party leader in the face of thousands of pages of evidence showing President Trump leveraged foreign policy for political favors, raising the possibility that not a single House Republican will vote for his impeachment. As they prepare to hold the first open impeachment hearings this week, Democrats had hoped to peel off Republican support from a key bloc — retiring lawmakers who need not worry about internal blowback or primary challenges. Yet many are refusing to break with Trump. Rep. Peter T. King of New York made a point of stating his intention to...

The woman alleged to have been a procurer for accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was reportedly a guest in 2018 at an exclusive literary retreat hosted by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. Vice.com, citing two sources, reported Friday that the woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, attended the "Campfire" retreat last year. One of those sources said that Maxwell had attended three such Campfire retreats hosted by Bezos and Amazon. Vice reported that Maxwell, 57, went to the 2018 iteration of the highly secretive retreat with Scott Borgerson, a tech-firm CEO

Readers of the Washington Post and similar news media outlets know little-to-nothing about business deals secured by Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s second son, in China and Ukraine, noted Peter Schweizer during a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. Schweizer highlighted the Jeff Bezos-owned news media outlet’s broad omissions in reporting on Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings during his father’s tenure as vice president. “If you are a reader of the Washington Post, and that is really your main source of news, you would have absolutely no idea what this whole Biden thing and his son...

Tech moguls Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos all scored on the bottom half of the scale for trustworthiness, according to analysis conducted by global brand consultancy Landor. The CEOs of major tech companies face an interesting and challenging public perception. They can sometimes seem like celebrities, generating a certain buzz and excitement among people. But business scandals and other issues can prompt that same public to see them as untrustworthy. A study by consultancy group Landor looks at some top tech moguls and their companies to learn how consumers view them. . . . Among the tech moguls...

arly last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides. Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.

Amazon-owned Whole Foods will be withdrawing medical benefits for hundreds of its part-time workers starting Jan. 1, 2020, the company said Thursday. In the past, employees needed to work at least 20 hours a week to buy into the health-care plan. Now they will need to work at least 30 hours. Less than 2% of its workforce, or 1,900 employees, will no longer be eligible for medical coverage, under the new policy, the company said.

Jennifer Rubin, a neo-conservative who writes commentary and the "Right Turn" blog for The Washington Post, said on MSNBC that she and people opposed to President Donald Trump must "collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party." She also said that former White House staffers such as Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders are not fit for "polite society," must be shunned, and should not be hired by news, entertainment, or academic outlets. On MSNBC's AM Joy on Sunday, Aug. 25, a panel of liberals were discussing the recent hiring of Spicer and Sanders in the private sector. Rubin, also an...

The Washington Post’s ties to Islamic terrorists are a national security risk. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is not only the richest person in the world, with an estimated $156 billion, but is a heavyweight political donor who has outspent other S&P 500 CEOs by a factor of 10. Bezos was the 12th biggest political donor of the 2018 cycle, coming in behind Bloomberg and Soros. And, even more importantly, Bezos owns the Washington Post. The powerful political tabloid sets the agenda in the government city, but it’s also raising questions about whether Amazon is a security risk for reasons that...

Among the many consequences of Donald Trump’s ascendancy in modern American politics is a renewed and deepened hostility for the press, not only among his far-right base, but within the general electorate. In recent decades, trust in media has plummeted from a high of 72% who had a great deal or fair amount of trust in 1976, thanks in large part to Watergate coverage, down to a historic low of 32% in 2016. Trust has ticked back up to 45% in 2018 and, among Democrats, is actually the highest it’s been in 20 years. You might not know it to...

The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who is also the CEO of Amazon, released an editorial this week blasting the enforcement of national immigration law as “cruel” and said U.S. businesses should not be deprived of employing illegal alien workers. In an editorial in the Washington Post, the editors wrote that the recent raids on seven Mississippi food processing plants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were “cruel” and “pointless” despite arresting and identifying 680 illegal workers, including more than 200 who had previous criminal records. About 300 of the illegal workers arrested were released that same...

The Pentagon is slamming the brakes on its mega-competition to award a $10 billion cloud computing contract after President Donald Trump suggested the Defense Department might have rigged the contest in favor of Amazon, a frequent target of his criticism. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who assumed his post July 23, is now reviewing accusations of unfairness in the fiercely fought competition, the Pentagon announced Thursday, marking the president's latest incursion into the arcane world of Defense Department contracting. Oracle has reportedly waged an aggressive lobbying campaign to push back on the competition, now pitting Amazon against Microsoft, including talking with...

He’s still in rarefied air, but Bill Gates is no longer the world’s second-richest person. For the first time in the seven-year history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the Microsoft co-founder dropped to the No. 3 slot — giving way to France’s Bernard Arnault on Tuesday, Bloomberg News reports. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos still occupies the top spot in the exclusive club. Arnault, the CEO of luxury goods maker LVMH, has a net worth of about $107.6 billion, having added $39 billion to his fortune in the past year — the largest individual gain by far among the 500 people...

Amazon and Microsoft are battling it out over a $10 billion opportunity to build the U.S. military its first “war cloud” computing system. But Amazon’s early hopes of a shock-and-awe victory may be slipping away. Formally called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure plan, or JEDI, the military’s computing project would store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the Pentagon to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities. The Defense Department hopes to award the winner-take-all contract as soon as August. Oracle and IBM were eliminated at an earlier round of the contract competition.

MacKenzie Bezos has promised to give at least half of her fortune to charity, just months after finalizing her divorce from the world's richest man. The newly minted billionaire has signed the Giving Pledge, which encourages the world's richest people to dedicate a majority of their wealth to charitable causes, either during their lifetimes or in their wills. The initiative was launched by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates in 2010 and has so far attracted the support of 204 individuals and families. MacKenzie Bezos became one of the richest people in the world following her divorce from Amazon...