Free Republic

New FBI data confirms previous indications that crime in the U.S. declined significantly in 2023, continuing a post-pandemic trend and belying widespread perceptions that crime is rising. The new fourth-quarter numbers showed a 13% decline in murder in 2023 from 2022, a 6% decline in reported violent crime and a 4% decline in reported property crime. That’s based on data from around 13,000 law enforcement agencies, policing about 82% of the U.S. population, that provided the FBI with quarterly data through December. “It suggests that when we get the final data in October, we will have seen likely the largest...

The Justice Department’s assertions this week that a longtime FBI informant was seeking to “spread misinformation” designed to hurt President Joe Biden after speaking to Russian intelligence operatives has put a new spotlight on an old debate: To what extent, if any, has the Russian government manufactured or amplified unproven allegations of corrupt Ukraine dealings by Joe and Hunter Biden? In a request to revoke his bail, prosecutors said that former informant Alexander Smirnov, charged last week with lying to the FBI in 2020 when he said Joe Biden had received a $5 million bribe, “is actively peddling new lies...

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” NBC News Justice and Intelligence Correspondent Ken Dilanian argued that the signatories of the Hunter Biden laptop letter have “been proven correct” by the indictment of Alexander Smirnov because “we know now that Russian intelligence, at least according to the statements of this informant, bolstered somewhat by this indictment, were feeding him information, false information” even though the laptop’s contents “weren’t” made up and “Many of them have been now corroborated.” Dilanian stated, “[T]hose 51 former intelligence officials, they paid a steep price for signing that letter. The House Republicans conducted an investigation....

President Joe Biden lashed out at Robert Hur last week over one particular line in the special counsel's report on his handling of classified documents: that Biden "did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died." “How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden told reporters in an impromptu White House press conference. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.” But Hur never asked that question, according to two people familiar with Hur’s five-hour interview with the president over two days last October. It was...