Free Republic

In their final encounter during the transition following the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s incoming national-security adviser surprised Barack Obama’s outgoing national-security adviser. Susan Rice writes in her memoir that the Michael Flynn she was dealing with had nothing in common with the firebrand she had watched leading a “lock her up” chant against Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention a few months earlier. Flynn, a retired general and the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was respectful and subdued, eager for her advice. When Rice extended her hand and wished him the best of luck, Flynn asked her...

The millions donated to Ethiopia in 1985 thanks to Live Aid were supposed to go towards relieving a natural disaster. In reality, donors became participants in a civil war. Many lives were saved, but even more may have been lost in Live Aid's unwitting support of a Stalinist-style resettlement project Isn't it better to do something rather than give in to despair or cynicism and do nothing? This is the reproachful question familiar to anyone who has criticised organisations that view themselves as dedicated to doing good in the world. To those UN agencies, relief organisations and development groups working...

President Trump, in an interview on “Hannity” on Tuesday, slammed the World Health Organization (WHO) for its “China-centric” views, adding the global health agency’s projections and pronouncements about the coronavirus pandemic have been routinely wrong. One of WHO’s earliest flawed pronouncements, the president told host Sean Hannity, was to strongly recommend against the U.S. restricting travel from China. Earlier Tuesday at a news briefing, Trump said he may put a “very powerful hold” on U.S. funding to the WHO. Sen. Lindsey Graham also said that the World Health Organization (WHO) should not receive funding from the United States under its...

Both the corrupt democrats and corrupt republicans will do anything to get Trump out of office so they don’t lose their lifetime cushy corrupt jobs or end up in jail! Their impeachment coup is another way Dems showing just how desperate they are. But ait the end it could turn very bad for the people that planed the coup against President Trump. President Donald Trump last month sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a raging, six-page letter in which he tore into the impeachment process which was underway at the time, calling it an “illegal, partisan attempted coup.” He wasn’t far...

Barely two weeks after Donald Trump took office, Eric Ciaramella – the CIA analyst whose name was recently linked in a tweet by the president and mentioned by lawmakers as the anonymous “whistleblower" who touched off Trump's impeachment – was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to remove the newly elected president from office, according to former colleagues. Sources told RealClearInvestigations the staffer with whom Ciaramella was speaking was Sean Misko. Both were Obama administration holdovers working in the Trump White House on foreign policy and national security issues. And both expressed anger over Trump’s new...

The Obama Administration coerced the Ukrainian government into removing the prosecutor investigating Ukrainian firm Burisma and its ties to Obama’s Vice President Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry. Next they plotted with whistleblower Eric Ciaramella in the White House and then pushed the Steele dossier to the FBI. We know that Obama State Department Victoria Nuland was involved in numerous activities in the Obama White House while working for John Kerry. Nuland first was noted when she was caught lying to reporters about Obama’s Benghazi talking points. Nuland then came to light in 2014 when she was caught on...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department's watchdog is nearing the release of its report on the early stages of the FBI's Russia investigation, a document likely to revive debate about a politically charged probe that shadowed President Donald Trump's administration from the outset.

It could be a coincidence that so many key names in this timeline — from John Brennan and James Comey, to Ukraine and CNN — factor into the Trump impeachment push. And, further, it could be a coincidence that we have ended up where some Trump critics said they hoped to be, even before he was sworn in. On the other hand, in retrospect, the biggest surprise might be that, all things considered, it took them so long to get to this point.

Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004 1:09 p.m. EDT Billionaires Secretly Met in Aspen to Defeat Bush In the days following the Democratic National Convention in Boston this past August, several billionaire Democratic activists secretly met at the famed Aspen Institute in Colorado. The purpose of their clandestine meeting was "to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush," The New Yorker magazine reports in its most recent edition. Details of the meeting remain sketchy, but the magazine described the Aspen conference this way: "Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. federal court documents show Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández and some of his closest advisers were among the targets of a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation.</p> <p>A document filed by prosecutors on Tuesday in the Southern District of New York mentions Hernández as part of a group of individuals investigated by the DEA since about 2013 for participating “in large-scale drug-trafficking and money laundering activities relating to the importation of cocaine into the United States”.</p>

Former FBI Director James Comey said Thursday ... "With respect to Barr's comments, I really don't know what he's talking about when he talks about spying on the campaign," Comey said. "It's very concerning because the FBI, the Department of Justice conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance. I have never thought of that as spying."

President Trump suggested Monday night that former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe committed treason, making his case in a tweet that cited Fox News’s Sean Hannity, hours after lobbing similar claims at Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. Trump sent the tweet during Hannity’s nightly show, in which the host assailed McCabe for claiming that he and Rosenstein discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power. Quoting Hannity, Trump wrote, “’The biggest abuse of power and corruption scandal in our history, and it’s much worse than we thought. Andrew McCabe (FBI) admitted to plotting a coup (government overthrow)...

Today, it is tempting to imagine that Trump’s impeachment and removal would take the country back to a saner, simpler time. This illusion ignores the enduring forces that brought Trump to power as well as the risks of impeachment itself... [Jeffrey] Engel warns that impeachment “disrupts the American political landscape as few other events do, leaving scars for generations.” A failed impeachment drive could encourage the president’s most dangerous impulses, and even if it succeeds, impeachment only kicks out an offending leader, “it doesn’t fix the democratic decline that brought [him] to power,” [Laurence] Tribe and [Joshua] Matz remind. Catch...

While trekking the internet I came across this article from March 2018 by David Faris in the Washington Post about packing the Supreme Court: Democrats must consider court-packing when they regain power. It’s the only way to save democracy. I did a search and came up with the book he wrote, "It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics: It’s Time to Fight Dirty How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics The American electoral system is clearly falling apart—as evidenced by the 2016 presidential election. In It’s Time to Fight...

Damn, I hate it when I've been had and I've been had big time. In 1982, while I was working for Congressman Manuel Lujan of New Mexico, a man came up to a me during a gathering in Albuquerque and introduced himself as Terrance J. Wilkinson. He said he was a security consultant and gave me a business card with his name and just a Los Angeles phone number. A few weeks later, he called my Washington office and asked to meet for lunch. He seemed to know a lot about the nuclear labs in New Mexico and said he...

President Donald Trump’s former attorney John Dowd told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade that he believes the president is facing a ‘coup’ and the recent reports regarding the president’s relationship with Russia prove that. Appearing Monday on Fox News Radio’s “Brian Kilmeade Show,” Dowd accused special counsel Robert Mueller, former FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe of conspiring against the president. “Little did I know that it appears that they were all in it together,” Dowd said. “I mean Rosenstein, Comey, Mueller, McCabe, the whole crowd and they were out to...

He bet a quarter billion on something maybe worth 60 Million, to bully, damage, and hopefully to destroy this president, and paid $18 billion for it. Who is laughing now? Bezos, a virulent Trump hater, used the Washington Post, a paper of repute at one time, to perform regular, predictable and malevolent daily blitzkriegs on the candidacy, and after he was elected, on the presidency of the man We, the People, elected to the nation’s highest office, his family, his associates, his policies, and his ideas. In other words, Bezos and the Washington Post colluded, cooperated and conspired with the...

Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan is coming to Washington, DC, on May 16 loaded for bear.  He has an ambitious agenda and apparently feels he can achieve it all because he holds “trump” cards against the President of the United States. Erdogan and his proxies have publicly said they want to convince the United States to jettison its budding alliance with the Syrian Democratic Union (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Kurdish group that has become the tip of the spear in the fight against ISIS in Syria. On this point, they will encounter resistance...

One thing that that has puzzled a lot of people since the selection of Pope Francis two years ago is how a left-leaning Pope could succeed two very serious conservative Popes—John Paul II and Benedict XVI—who you would have thought had stacked the ranks of the Cardinals with clergy that would perpetuate their theological and philosophical outlook. Was Benedict hounded out of office by some kind of internal Vatican scandal perhaps? Was there some ecclesiastical version of a coup?There’s no evidence that I’m aware of—until now. Three days ago the National Catholic Register ran a very curious article about...

VATICAN CITY — Five years ago, Pope Francis was elected to be an agent of change within a church shaken by scandals and the historic resignation of Benedict XVI. He quickly became a global force in geopolitics, setting the agenda on climate change and care for migrants. World leaders wanted to be near him. Even non-Catholics adored him.Today, Francis is increasingly embattled. The political climate has shifted abruptly around the world, empowering populists and nationalists who oppose much of what he stands for. Conservative forces arrayed against him within the Vatican have been emboldened, seeking to thwart him on multiple...