Free Republic

CIA Management Pressured Analysts to Withdraw Assessment Director of National Intelligence ((DNI) John Ratcliffe assessed that (China) interfered in the 2020 federal elections, according to a letter transmitted to Congress.In the letter ((pdf), Ratcliffe alleges that intelligence about China’s ( election) interference was suppressed by management at the CIA, which pressured analysts to withdraw their support for the view.Citing a report by the Intelligence Community Analytic Ombudsman Barry Zulauf, the director of national intelligence said some analysts were reluctant to describe China’s actions as election interference because they disagreed with the policies of President Donald Trump.

Due to the irregularity of this current 2020 Presidential Election, this is a crowdsourcing tool for organizing anomalies and legal issues. Our desire is that more of the election process would be made transparent so there would be unquestionable confidence in our voting systems. This is for aggregating publicly available items of evidence that would be admissible in court, not general election news stories or updates.

The Supreme Court of British Columbia decided on Thursday that it has jurisdiction take on a case by billionaire philanthropist Frank Giustra against Twitter over defamatory tweets made on the platform which "allege involvement in a supposed conspiracy known as 'pizzagate.'" Giustra, a billionaire businessman living in Vancouver, brought a defamation case against Twitter after being accused of being involved in a pedophilia ring by promoters of the pizzagate conspiracy theory. The theory alleges that a number of high-profile business leaders and politicians, most of whom affiliated with the US Democratic Party, are involved in an elite pedophilia ring. The...

The National Guardsmen providing security in the U.S. Capitol ahead of the inauguration are soon getting cots, after images went viral last week of troops sleeping on the floor in the halls of Congress, according to four people familiar with the decision....Many officials believe the cots are unnecessary, but the photos of Guardsmen resting on the floor of the Capitol quickly became a “PR issue,”...

...Joe Biden will inherit Milley as his senior military adviser, and although Biden could replace Milley, he likely won’t.... ...The chairman of the Joint Chiefs does not command troops but advises a president and a secretary of defense on approaches to major military problems.... ...Milley seems amenable to the prospect of Biden seeking to find savings in defense budgets. “We in the Pentagon, civilian and military alike, have got to do a quick reality check on the national budget and what is likely to happen in the not-too-distant future,” Milley said recently. “I suspect that at best the Pentagon’s budgets...

Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, the presidential election of 2020 was a colossal political disaster, a catastrophe on the level of Dunkirk. However, the Dunkirk 1940 fiasco quickly turned out to be a Dunkirk miracle. Do conservatives, whose "root and core and brain" are currently in disarray, have a chance of performing a similar marvel? When the Dunkirk saga concluded, Prime Minister Churchill had occupied 10 Downing Street for a little less than four weeks. When the fiendishly clever (and practically undetectable for the untrained eye) 2020 election steal happened, President Trump was occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a little less than...

DENVER (AP) — A former state representative in Colorado sued Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert on Sunday after being blocked from the first-term federal lawmaker’s Twitter account. Attorneys for Democrat Bri Buentello of Pueblo filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Denver, claiming she was blocked after calling for the Colorado Republican to be recalled....The suit seeks a court order for Boebert to unlock Buentello on Twitter and a declaration that the Republican’s actions violated Buentello’s constitutional rights to free speech ....An attorney for Buentello said Boebert’s “stifling” of critics should be of concern to everyone.

Republican strategist Karl Rove said on this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday” that President Donald Trump will be convinced in the Senate with Republicans voting for impeachment if his defense is there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Anchor Chris Wallace asked, “Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell says that he is keeping an open mind about the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, a big difference, sharp difference, from his clear opposition from the very start of the first impeachment trial just a year ago. What do you think, Karl, are the chances that 17 Senate...

Vice President Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen Pence are scheduled to appear at Fort Drum outside of Watertown at 4:30 p.m. Sunday, where the vice president will deliver remarks to soldiers, according to the White House's release of Pence's schedule.... *snip* Soliders from the modern 10th Mountain Division, which was reactivated at Fort Drum in 1985, are designed for rapid mobility to respond to crises both in the U.S. and worldwide. Troops have deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, as well as to U.S. disasters like Superstorm Sandy....

Parler's website suddenly reappeared online Sunday afternoon with a message from its CEO, John Matze: 'Hello world, is this thing on?' The message, dated January 16, implies that the social network popular with members of the far right has found a new online hosting platform, after Parler was booted from Amazon Web Services on January 10 in the wake of the Capitol siege. Parler now appears to be hosted by Epik, according to a WHOIS search. Epik is a hosting platform that supports Gab, 8chan and other services often used by members of the far-right. Prior to hosting Parler, Epik...

Pennsylvania Sen. Dave Arnold died Sunday at home with his wife and daughter by his side, ending a 15-month battle with brain cancer.

On Dec. 8, a French cryptocurrency account transferred 28.15 bitcoins, or more than $500,000, to 22 different virtual accounts belonging to prominent right-wing activists and Trump supporters, according to evidence found by researchers at the software company Chainalysis. Right-wing organizations and personalities, including VDARE, the Daily Stormer and Nick Fuentes, received significant donations that researchers believe were meant to bolster their far-right causes./// ...Dozens of people who participated in the insurrection last week were on a terrorist watch list.

Federal agents arrested a self-admitted anarchist and “hardcore leftist” on Friday on suspicion of plotting to violently disrupt planned election-related protests at the Florida state Capitol. Prosecutors said they “averted a crisis” at the Capitol by arresting 33-year-old Daniel Baker, taking him into custody on a charge involving making a threat to kidnap or injure, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Florida announced in a news release. “Baker issued a call to arms for like-minded individuals to violently confront protestors gathered at the Florida Capitol this Sunday,” prosecutors said. “He specifically called for others to join him...

Assuming nobody shows up to burn down Capitol Hill on Wednesday (still a big assumption, I know), Joe Biden’s team, leading with Ron Klain, is trumpeting a “blitz” of executive orders that the incoming president plans to sign on the day of his inauguration, with many more to come over the course of the first ten days. Many of these plans went almost unmentioned during Joe’s basement campaign, while others received a bit of air time, but are going much further than what he mentioned on the campaign trail. Should we be taking the time to point out that Biden...

House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that there was “no circumstance” under which President Donald Trump should receive intelligence briefings once he leaves office. Schiff said, “There is no circumstance in which this president should get another intelligence briefing, not now, not in the future.” He added, “I don’t think he can be trusted with it now, and in the future, he certainly can’t be trusted. Indeed, there were any number of intelligence partners of ours around the world who probably started withholding information from us because they didn’t trust the president...

GUATEMALA CITY—Guatemalan soldiers blocked part of a caravan of as many as 9,000 Honduran migrants on Jan. 16, at a point not far from where they entered the country seeking to reach the U.S. border. The soldiers, many wearing helmets and wielding shields and sticks, formed ranks across a highway in Chiquimula, near the Honduras border, to block the procession of migrants. Guatemala’s immigration agency distributed a video showing a couple of hundred men scuffling with soldiers, pushing and running through their lines, even as troops held hundreds more back. Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei issued a statement calling on Honduran...

Rep. Jamie Raskin on Sunday described balancing the trauma of his son’s recent death by suicide with the horror of the US Capitol riot and his duty as lead impeachment manager against President Trump. “I’m not going to lose my son at the end of 2020, and lose my country and my republic in 2021,” the Maryland Democrat vowed in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It’s not going to happen.” Raskin’s 25-year-old son, Thomas, took his own life on Dec. 31, following a long battle with depression. “He had overwhelming love for humanity and for our country...

By On his final day in office, Jan. 20, 2001, President Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of a pair of radical leftists serving time for bombing the U.S. Capitol building, where a 1983 blast shattered the second floor of the Senate wing. Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg each served 16 years of lengthy sentences, with Rosenberg escaping 42 years of a 58-year sentence and Evans cutting short a 40-year sentence by 24 years. The FBI landed formal indictments on Evans and Rosenberg in the 1988 “Resistance Conspiracy” case for their involvement in the bombing of the Capitol along with five...

In the aftermath of the deadly siege on Capitol Hill nearly two weeks ago, vice-president-elect Kamala Harris took some time to call her aunt and uncle in Canada to let them know she was safe. "These days her life is so busy, they are very brief conversations, but she wanted to show me everything was OK," said Chinni Subash, the younger sister of Harris's late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, on Rosemary Barton Live. The vice-president-elect was in Washington, D.C., when a mob of pro-Donald Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as Congress voted on president-elect Joe Biden's...

Obviously in an ideal world, the "base" would assert control over the Republican Party and flush out the swamp creatures who seem to form the majority of its executive and prominent elected representatives. But assuming that movement never takes off or gains any traction, what third party options exist and what are their chances for electoral success by 2024? The range of possibilities would seem to include these: (a) Declare the existence of an alternative GOP, calling it something very similar to the Republican Party (with the word Republican in the name, such as Conservative-Republican, Constitutional-Republican, Free Republican? hmm) ......