Free Republic

Yuriy Lutsenko, the Ukrainian prosecutor who closed an investigation into Burisma -the Ukrainian gas company President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden worked for - said a lobbying company linked to Hunter Biden and Burisma had “pitched” him the offer of providing access to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, newly released emails revealed on Friday. In an email released via FOIA request to Citizens United and shared with American Military News, former Obama State Department official George Kent described a meeting with Lutsenko in September 2016 to discuss his contacts with Blue Star Strategies - the lobbying firm that helped represent...

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell bluntly warned Republican senators in a private meeting not to sign on to a bill from Sen. Josh Hawley aimed at limiting corporate money bankrolling high-powered outside groups, telling them that many of them won their seats thanks to the powerful super PAC the Kentucky Republican has long controlled. According to multiple sources familiar with the Tuesday lunch meeting, McConnell warned GOP senators that they could face “incoming” from the “center-right” if they signed onto Hawley’s bill. He also read off a list of senators who won their races amid heavy financial support from the...

Eloquence in litigation is an art form. Court motions and pleading that blend eloquence with deliberate and diplomatic snark are masterpieces. Thus, the exceptional nature of President Trump’s response motion to the demands of a gag order by Special Counsel Jack Smith is a master class in linguistic evisceration. I stand impressed.

The special counsel named by the Biden administration to investigate Donald Trump oversaw a Justice Department unit rebuked by the Supreme Court for its prosecution of a prominent Republican and was linked by Congress to the IRS scandal that targeted conservative groups. Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague and former chief of the DOJ public integrity section, was named Friday by Attorney General Merrick Garland to take over two investigations of Trump related to Jan. 6 and classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. In 2014, the House Oversight Committee concluded that during Smith's earlier stint at DOJ he...

In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents. The previously untold story of how highly anticipated declassified material never became public is contained in a memo obtained by Just the News from the National Archives that was written by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just hours...

This Fourth of July, watching people fight over what the Constitution means, I ask people, if you could change the Constitution, what would you change?"The forefathers knew what they were doing," said one woman.But the Constitution originally accepted slavery. It's good that we can amend it.So what should we change?"Add a balanced budget amendment," suggests Glenn Beck.David Boaz of the Cato Institute recommends 18-year terms for the Supreme Court. "Maybe confirmation fights would be less bitter and partisan."Others suggest term limits for Congress. Stossel TV's Mike Ricci takes the idea further. "If your father, mother, siblings, uncle, cousins were elected...

This article was sponsored by Citizens United Productions. The 2020 presidential election was one of the most hotly contested in history, and over 150 million votes were cast. But how many of them were influenced by outside entities? In its new film “Rigged,” Citizens United investigates the election and the corruption surrounding it, especially as it pertains to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Skolkovo, “Russia’s Silicon Valley,” the Putin project to transfer Western technology to Russia was championed and driven by Hillary Clinton Starting in May 2010, The Washington Examiner reported, drawing on emails obtained by Citizens United, “Clinton Foundation staff pushed Hillary Clinton’s State Department to approve a meeting between Bill Clinton and a powerful Russian oligarch as her agency lined up investors for a project under his purview.” His name was Viktor Vekselberg of Renova (a Clinton Foundation donor) and the project under his purview was the Skolkovo Innovation Center, which is being built near Moscow. The following month, Bill Clinton...

David Bossie, the president of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United and an advisor to Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, told Yahoo News on Tuesday he believes the president will win three states in the 2020 election that he narrowly lost in 2016 — and potentially clinch victory as a result. Bossie, who was deputy chairman of Trump’s successful 2016 campaign, was briefly ousted from the president’s inner circle after allegations last year that he was using one of his political groups to profit off the president. But Bossie, who denies the charges, has recently been welcomed back to Trump’s inner...

Who is to blame for the impeachment of President Trump? It has to be either Trump or the House that impeached him. Or maybe a combination of the two.But the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank claims that, somehow, the “mess” is Chief Justice Roberts’s fault. Milbank is the Post’s clown prince. He’ll say anything, usually with as much snark as he can muster, to try to score a point against one of his boogeymen — a class that includes anyone who stands against his leftism.In this case, Milbank has outdone himself.Why is the U.S. Chief Justice responsible for the impeachment mess?...

Senate Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment on Tuesday to undo the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision. A group of Democrats, led by Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), and progressive activists rallied outside the Supreme Court to unveil the amendment, which faces an unlikely path to being ratified. "Few decisions in the 200 and some odd years of this republic have threatened our democracy like Citizens United. People say they want to get rid of the swamp. Citizens United is the embodiment of the swamp," Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at the rally. Schumer added that "overturning Citizens United...

One of John Podesta's emails released by WikiLeaks this week exposes how progressive elites seek to exploit the unwashed masses. The email features one of Podesta's colleagues from the Center for American Progress admitting that the institutional left "conspires to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry," ostensibly to impose their radical agenda on us without much resistance. ....snip .. In the email from March of 2016, Ivey expresses concern about the rise of "opinionated blowhard" Trump and frets because the "citizenry" seems to be awakening. Well, we all thought the big problem for our US democracy was Citizens United/Koch Brothers...

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Wednesday introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, which eliminated restrictions on corporate campaign spending. The amendment would allow Congress and states to put forth limits on campaign contributions, according to a statement from Schiff's office. "The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United overturned decades of legal precedent and has enabled billions in dark money to pour into our elections," Schiff said in a statement. The amendment would also allow states to enact laws creating public financing of campaigns. "Amending the Constitution is an extraordinary step, but it is...

Ukrainian officials are confused. They don't understand why they are being thwarted in providing U.S. prosectors evidence that Democrats interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. Daily Wire reported that a senior Ukrainian official has launched an investigation into members of his government over an alleged plot to boost Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko told The Hill's John Solomon: "Today we will launch a criminal investigation about this and we will give legal assessment of this information." "Lutsenko is probing a claim from a member of the Ukrainian parliament that the director...

Hollywood's a bit inconsistent when the topic is the press. It was a righteous guardian of the truth against the Catholic Church in "Spotlight" and against Richard Nixon in "The Post." But now, in the new movie "The Front Runner," it is painted as the villain -- when its target was Gary Hart. He was expected to be the Democratic nominee in 1988 before those photos surfaced of him on the yacht Monkey Business with Donna Rice sitting on his lap. They surfaced after he challenged reporters to tail him and see he wasn't cheating on his wife. No matter....

I was transfixed by the Gary Hart movie The Front Runner: It has a lot of levels, and it’s a failure on every one of them. Mistake gets piled atop error atop cliché atop banality. It’s a skyscraper of wrong, an hour-and-53-minute lesson in how not to make a movie. Vigorously borrowing from The Candidate, Nashville, and The West Wing, The Front Runner covers the three weeks of Colorado Senator Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign, which ended in humiliation shortly after reporters staking out his D.C. apartment discovered a mistress, who turned out to be Donna Rice. Watching the co-writer and...

In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In a year he was dead. Atwater put some of that year to use making amends. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality. In South Carolina, where he grew up, he...

Full Title: Sen. John McCain's pallbearers to include Warren Beatty, Joe Biden, Gary Hart, plus billionaire Michael Bloomberg and FedEx CEO while his ushers include health and telecom execs McCain's office announced his pallbearers and other aspects of three days of services for hero Actor Warren Beatty will be among those serving as pall bearers Vice President Joe Biden, a friend from the Senate, also will be there Former Sens. Gary Hart, Phil Gramm, and Russ Feingold will join, as well Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Among those paying tribute to McCain at his memorial services will be Jeff Flake, Joe...

Hugh Jackman has been cast as former George McGovern campaign manager, Colorado senator, and failed Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart in director Jason Reitman’s upcoming political drama The Frontrunner. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the 48-year-old Logan star will play Hart, who was widely considered the frontrunner to secure the Democratic nomination for president in 1988 before news reports alleging an extramarital affair between the Colorado senator and Donna Rice sank his campaign. In May of 1987, Hart famously told the New York Times to “follow me around” after rumors had surfaced about the candidate’s alleged affair; the Miami Herald...

The prospect of a billion-dollar Clinton campaign “ought to frighten every American,” the two-time Democratic presidential candidate said......The post-Citizens United campaign finance environment has sullied the presidential process, benefiting establishment politicians who cater to financial backers. He pointed to his own experience; he and his wife mortgaged their home for $50-$75,000 — which made a significant difference in his 1984 primary campaign where he finished Hart finished second to Mondale. “If you need a billion dollars, how many people can do that? Only the Clintons and the Bushes and one or two others,” he said. Hart is alarmed by current...