Free Republic

Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: “I’m scared,” she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned “walkout” to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn’t want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel. Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her classroom. She was trying to project calm. A public-relations executive, Zolt Hara had moved her family from Chicago to Berkeley six...

Despite his status as the nation’s oldest president in history, Joe Biden feels he is “babied” by his staff, setting off the 80-year-old’s Irish temper, according to a new book peeling back the inner workings of the White House. The gaffe-prone president’s staff regularly scrambles to mop up the messes Biden makes with off-script comments, but the efforts are not always appreciated, according to Franklin Foer’s “The Last Politician,” which went on sale Tuesday. That tension came to a head in the early days of Russia’s war on Ukraine when Biden, through excitement, bombed what otherwise would have been a...

NEW YORK — Former Vice President Joe Biden was reportedly one of the few Obama administration officials who participated in secretive meetings during the early stages of the Obama-era intelligence community’s initial operations regarding suspected Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. The number of Obama administration officials who were allowed access to the Russia intelligence was also highly limited, The Post reported. At first only four senior officials were involved, and not Biden. Those officials were CIA Directir John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and then-FBI Director James Comey. Their aides were all...

John Haughey of The Epoch Times twitter feed with live updates John Haughey @JFHaughey58 · 1h Deliberations begin Tuesday morning at the E. Barnett Prettyman U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., in Michael #Sussmann's trial for allegedly lying to the FBI about the #Trump Organization's purported ties to a Russian BankThere will actually be 16 jurors seated during the trial with four not knowing that they are alternates and will not be "in the room" when the case goes to the jury for a verdict.Lengthy discussion regarding the infamous #SteeleDossier ...former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele cannot be compelled to...

A review of the data pertaining to the accusations in the phony Steele dossier about a Trump-Russia Bank connection discovered the sources used is most likely the same source the FBI used to obtain a FISA warrant to investigate the Trump-Alfa Bank connection. This person also just happens to be a radical Hillary Clinton supporter! It’s been more than two years since the 2016 election and Americans still don’t really know the sources for the phony Steele dossier used by the FBI and DOJ to obtain FISA warrants to spy on candidate and then President Trump. This nightmare for President...

Judge T.S. Ellis, a Reagan appointee to the Federal District Court for Eastern Virginia, is well-known for speaking his mind. Yesterday, in sentencing Paul Manafort, he rebuked Team Mueller’s harsh sentence recommendation of 19-24 years’ imprisonment as “excessive,” and instead set a lot of progressives’ hair on fire by imposing a sentence of 47 months, and recommended counting the nine months of time served (much of it in solitary confinement, imposed by Judge Amy Berman Jackson in a separate case in DC District Court) against that total, meaning just over three years of imprisonment. Paul Manafort's mug shot -...

Shortened title. Full title: BREAKING: Staunch Hillary Supporter is the Same Source Behind the Bogus Trump-Russia Bank Connections and Bogus Elements in Steele Dossier! A review of the data pertaining to the accusations in the phony Steele dossier about a Trump-Russia Bank connection discovered the sources used is most likely the same source the FBI used to obtain a FISA warrant to investigate the Trump-Alfa Bank connection. This person also just happens to be a radical Hillary Clinton supporter! It’s been more than two years since the 2016 election and Americans still don’t really know the sources for the phony...

ON MONDAY NIGHT, Slate’s Franklin Foer published a story that’s been circulating through the dark web and various newsrooms since summertime, an enormous, eyebrow-raising claim that Donald Trump uses a secret server to communicate with Russia. That claim resulted in an explosive night of Twitter confusion and misinformation. The gist of the Slate article is dramatic — incredible, even: Cybersecurity researchers found that the Trump Organization used a secret box configured to communicate exclusively with Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest privately-held commercial bank. This is a story that any reporter in our election cycle would drool over, and drool Foer did:...

A new report shows a Democrat senator contacted a former Feinstein staffer back in 2017, in hopes of continuing an investigation so-called "collusion" between Trump and Russia. The former Feinstein staffer operates a group called "Democracy Integrity Project" which is heavily funded by Soros and has connections with Fusion GPS, as well as dossier author Christopher Steele. The one thing that's still not confirmed is the identity of the senator that reached out to the former Feinstein staffer. Daily Caller A Democratic senator outsourced parts of the investigation into possible Trump-Russia collusion to a former Senate staffer with links to...

This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting. ...snip In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups...

Remember Scott Beauchamp? The soldier who wrote stories from the Middle East, about things like mocking a disfigured woman in a chow hall, running over a dog and wearing pieces of baby skull under helmets? The tales never rang true, but the editors of The New Republic ran with them like crack addicts looking for more baking soda. Now that TNR has posted a whinging, non-apology, Franklin Foer is your editorial man of the hour whose self-effacing pen is less mighty than his apparent ego. And that’s why there’s already a new movie out. See source for lotsa kewl links....

Shattered Diarist Ask Peter Arnett for advice next time. It was nice to see the Scott Thomas Beauchamp/New Republic scandal back up on the radar screen yesterday. There was never a satisfactory conclusion to the story; it just faded out over the summer. Now it is back in a big way, with the Drudge Report releasing internal Army documents related to the case, and a very revealing transcript of a conversation between Beauchamp, various luminaries from The New Republic, and Beauchamp’s TNR-supplied lawyer. Shattered Diarist 10/25 Divide and Concur 10/12 Osama, Take II 09/12 Not Osama’s Best Work 09/08 Iran’s...

Drudge: The Beauchamp transcripts; Foer to Beauchamp: “Let us control the way this story proceeds;” Foer exploits Beauchamp’s wife: “Ellie sent me an e-mail to tell you that it’s the most important thing in the world for her that you say that you didn’t recant;” Update: Foer whines, attacks the military again By Michelle Malkin • October 24, 2007 01:30 PM Update 6:50pm Eastern. Franklin Foer comes out from under his desk to whine to the NY Observer about the transcripts being leaked. All of this damning transcript evidence of TNR’s attempts to cover up, and what does Foer do?...

For several weeks now, questions have been raised about Scott Beauchamp's Baghdad Diarist "Shock Troops." While many of these questions have been formulated by people with ideological agendas, we recognize that there are legitimate concerns about journalistic accuracy. We at The New Republic take these concerns extremely seriously. This is why we have sought to re-report the story, in the process speaking with five soldiers in Beauchamp's company who substantiate the events described in Beauchamp's essay. Indeed, we continue to investigate the anecdotes recounted in the Baghdad Diarist. Unfortunately, our efforts have been severely hampered by the U.S. Army. Although...

Well, not so much a retraction because he says he didn't really say what TNR claims he did -- fully "confirming" a Bradley could do what Scott Beauchamp says it did. Confederate Yankee actually tracked down TNR's expert on this and asked him what the Bradley could do -- and, even more importantly, what exactly TNR asked him before reporting he'd fully corroborated the account. '...[T]he TNR researcher did not provide the text of "Shock Troops" for Mr. Coffery [the Bradley expert] to review, and only asked the vaguest possible questions. It seems rather obvious that this was not an...