Free Republic

Current and former officials say the crackdown is creating a climate of fear and harming national security.National security agencies across the Trump administration are ramping up investigations into alleged leaks to the news media, in some cases using polygraph tests that current and former officials say are creating a climate of fear and intimidation.At FBI Director Kash Patel’s direction, the bureau in recent weeks has begun administering polygraphs to identify the source of information leaks, an FBI spokesperson said. The new use of polygraphs at the bureau, which are commonly known as “lie detector” tests, has not been previously reported.“The...

A senior executive who objected was marched out of his office and put on leave, while earlier warnings about the agency’s deaths database were ignored... Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts, had pushed back on the Trump administration’s plan to move the migrants’ names into a Social Security death database, eliminating their ability to legally earn wages... ...on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave.

Somewhere on a grocery shelf, or in a restaurant, or on a food-factory floor in America, lurk bacteria that haven’t been detected yet. Perhaps E. coli, which is linked with food poisoning, or more of the cronobacter that led to infant illnesses, sparked a nationwide shortage of infant formula in 2022 and led to major reforms at the Food and Drug Administration.The task of finding those bacteria rests on FDA inspectors, whose jobs have been mostly preserved amid the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal government. But the people who help support those inspections haven’t fared so well. More...

KINGSPORT, Tenn. - Matthew Hawn checked his phone to see if the wait was finally over. It had been five months since he was fired for teaching about White privilege at a high school in rural Tennessee. Two months since he had fought to regain his job at an emotional three-day hearing, becoming a symbol of the acrimonious debate over the way race, racism and history should be taught in America's schools. A lifelong resident of Kingsport, Hawn was well aware his liberal views made him an outlier in his overwhelmingly White, mostly conservative community. But that had never mattered...

When it comes to his sister, Curtis Ingraham doesn’t exactly hold back. Over the past year or so, Ingraham has won a reputation — and a significant Twitter following — for attacks on his high-profile sister, Fox News host Laura Ingraham. At different times and on a wide variety of platforms, he has called his sibling “a monster,” “a Nazi sympathizer” and a “racist.” But after the controversial pundit compared Greta Thunberg and other youth climate activists to Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” on Monday night, Curtis Ingraham took things to the next level. “Clearly my sister’s paycheck is...