Free Republic

NEW YORK — President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday in his felony hush money case, but the judge declined to impose any punishment, an outcome that cements his conviction but frees him to return to the White House unencumbered by the threat of a jail term or a fine.Trump’s sentence of an unconditional discharge caps a norm-smashing case that saw the former and future president charged with 34 felonies, put on trial for almost two months and convicted on every count. Yet, the legal detour — and sordid details aired in court of a plot to bury affair allegations —...

WASHINGTON — Lawyers and pro-democracy advocates are in the early stages of building a nationwide network of specialists aimed at defending and protecting people who may be targeted for retribution once President-elect Donald Trump takes office, according to multiple people involved in the effort. The sprawling initiative is intended to go far beyond legal assistance for those potentially subjected to criminal or civil investigations in a new Trump administration. Those working to create the infrastructure said that in addition to lawyers, they are recruiting accountants to help people who may find their taxes under audit, employment experts to advise those...

Max Boot’s biography Reagan — His Life and Legend will have an importance beyond its worth because its author, once a Republican in good standing, is now a prominent member of the anti-Trump intelligentsia. As a result, Boot, more than an average historian, betrays an agenda. We get a hint of Boot’s ulterior motive in the front matter with a quote from Sherwood Anderson, a now obscure novelist and short story writer, “All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built.” Tellingly, one of Anderson’s first efforts at writing was a book titled, Why I...

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is linked throughout the Biden-Ukraine entanglements, from Trump’s first impeachment to Hunter Biden’s business dealings.Back in 2019, the then-National Intelligence Council analyst Eric Ciaramella anonymously accused Trump of demanding an investigation into Biden’s alleged corruption in Ukraine in exchange for military aid, according to Real Clear Investigations.Ciaramella was an adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s office when Biden threatened to stop aid to Ukraine unless it fired Viktor Shokin, Real Clear stated. Shokin was the prosecutor investigating the Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings. Hunter joined the board of Burisma in 2014 where he was making...

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has held multiple phone conversations with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban since winning the November 5 presidential election, according to sources who spoke to RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service. - snip- Preparations are reportedly under way for Orban to take a second crack at a peace mission in December to bookend Hungary’s rotating EU presidency after his first attempt in July when Budapest’s tenure started. -snip- Details of a potential peace mission in December are not clear, but sources suggested to RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service that it may involve delivering Trump’s messages to Zelenskiy, Putin, and Chinese President Xi...

Many news outlets have published Robert F. Kennedy Jr. profiles in the past 18 months, but The Washington Post’s in June was the only one to warrant a 20-page response from the Trump HHS nominee (This story is the first in a four-part series this month by Just the News on self-described watchdogs who push for censorship.) “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country,” President-elect Donald Trump said in a video posted to social media just day after winning reelection on Nov. 5. “Today, I’m announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship...

Brendan Carr @BrendanCarrFCCBroadcast media have had the privilege of using a scarce and valuable public resource—our airwaves. In turn, they are required by law to operate in the public interest.When the transition is complete, the FCC will enforce this public interest obligation.

SENATE PROBE ON ELON BASED ON WSJ’S UNFOUNDED CLAIMS? A WSJ article alleging Elon held “regular conversations” with Putin is now driving a Senate investigation—but where’s the accountability for WSJ’s reporting? Despite relying solely on unnamed “current and former officials,” the piece quickly sparked backlash, with both Elon and the Kremlin slamming it as “absolutely false.” Now, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Jack Reed are calling for a probe based on these unverified claims—so why isn’t WSJ facing scrutiny for publishing such an explosive story on shaky grounds? https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1857608109012783348?t=ns0BAkwpB0os0TDMCX-LeQ&s=19 Sources: Sky News, PBS

At the end of his first term in office, then-President Donald Trump sought to install Kash Patel, a hard-line MAGA loyalist, as deputy CIA director. But the head of the agency at the time, Gina Haspel, a career intelligence officer, threatened to resign in protest, and the appointment was scuttled. Now, four years later, Patel is considered a possible pick for CIA director or another high-level national security post in a second Trump administration. And there likely will be no one to stand in his way this time. Patel is one of several fiercely loyal political allies who President-elect Trump...

Former officials fear Trump would force out DOJ and FBI officials who defy him and replace them with loyalists. Chaos, division and paralysis could ensue. Since he entered the 2024 race, Donald Trump has called for the criminal prosecution of at least 16 rival politicians and 15 law enforcement, military and intelligence officials — according to an NBC News review of his public comments — not to mention workers at two federal public health agencies, two tech billionaires, Google and as any lawyers, campaign donors and political operatives who engage in what the former president has called “unscrupulous behavior” in...

The young CIA analyst waited anxiously for Fiona Hill to pick up her phone. He had dialed her, he recalled, because he wanted to hear a familiar voice and make sure he wasn’t doing something “colossally stupid.” Five years later Hill’s memories of the call are still vivid: the CIA analyst’s voice, which sounded uncharacteristically emotional; the annoying clatter of the Frappuccino machine inside the Starbucks where she was waiting for her morning coffee. Hill stepped into the parking lot. She was on vacation in Hawaii, having just resigned a week earlier from her job in Donald Trump’s White House...

Oh look, it's Big Tech being evil again! According to research from NewsBusters, Google is burying conservative news on search results ahead of the 2024 election. When using the search term "donald trump presidential race 2024," researchers had to scroll through 23 pages of results before they come to a U.S.-based right-leaning news source, a single Fox News video six results down on the 23rd page. According to one study, only 3.9% of users even visit page two of Google results, which suggests almost zero people bother to go to page 23. When using the search term "kamala harris presidential...

James O'Keefe strikes again. Undercover video with MSNBC producer admitting they are helping Kamala

Good morning. It is Wednesday, Sept. 18. Here’s what’s happening in Opinion.Over the weekend Donald Trump was the apparent target of a second assassination attempt as he played golf at his West Palm Beach, Fla., club. Who knows what might have happened had the Secret Service not spotted the suspected gunman hanging out at the edge of the course before he could take a shot or even get a line of sight.Unsurprisingly, Trump and his allies immediately put the blame for the incident on Democrats since they will not stop talking about what might happen if a self-proclaimed wannabe dictator...

Donald Trump faces a biblical battle to hang on to evangelical voters, as some stray from the Republican base to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris despite her liberal views. Surveys suggest about 8 in 10 white evangelical voters cast a ballot for him in the 2020 election, with two in 10 voting for Joe Biden. However, Biden performed better with evangelicals of all faiths, winning about a third of those voters. Now, groups like evangelicals for Harris have run advertisements and Zoom calls in an attempt to argue she is the better choice this election despite serious policy disagreements....

The State Department sought to denigrate two reporters and a member of Congress as part of damage control attempts over having helped fund an advertisers’ “blacklist” of The Post and other outlets allegedly spreading “misinformation,” according to internal documents. In March 2023, the department distributed press guidance about how to counter bombshell reports by “Twitter Files” scribe Matt Taibbi and Washington Examiner investigative journalist Gabe Kaminsky concerning the State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC). Taibbi’s first report about the GEC, in a lengthy Twitter thread published Jan. 3, 2023, revealed efforts to pressure US social media platforms early in the COVID-19...

ABC News anchor Linsey Davis revealed in a post-debate Los Angeles Times puff-piece profile how she, ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir and ABC producers schemed to ambush President Trump with ‘fact checks’ at Tuesday night’s presidential debate in Philadelphia with Kamala Harris after watching Trump crush and knock Joe Biden out of the race in their June debate. The fact checking at the debate was one-sided, with Trump being interrupted by Muir and Davis several times with ‘fact checks’ while Harris was not ‘fact checked’ once. Going into the debate, there was concern about Harris’ friendship with a...

If you watched Tuesday’s ABC debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, you saw that the moderators were doing everything they could to help Harris. A recent fluff piece on ABC’s Lindsey Davis in the LA Times not only proves this to be fact, but she’s bragging about their behind-the-scenes plan to ensure Trump was not able to end Harris’s campaign the same way he did President Joe Biden’s at the CNN debate in June. If you watched Tuesday’s ABC debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, you saw that the moderators...

Google prohibits ads with the image of Donald Trump. Change the image to Kamala Harris and it works. Election interference. "Google, you guys are nasty people."

Where did the Biden administration end and Twitter begin? The latest batch of the Twitter Files, reported by former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker from records turned over by the Elon Musk-owned company now called X, shows a curious timeline in the first couple months of Democratic President Joe Biden's term. Within two weeks of the inauguration, the company covertly hired a "global strategic advisory and commercial diplomacy services" firm cofounded and chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to seek State's help dealing with censorship pressure from India. On the two-month anniversary of the Biden administration, Politico...