Free Republic

'The only reason' for spying was to 'inform the president' Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy pointed out that counterintelligence operations by the FBI, Justice Department and are carried out for the president. So it would have been the responsibility of the Obama administration's counterintelligence investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign to make sure Barack Obama knew what was going on, he said in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. "What I'm saying is not that the president sits there and directs that there be counterintelligence investigations, McCarthy explained, according to BizPacReview. "What I'm saying is that...

Government watchdog Judicial Watch has uncovered and released hundreds of documents showing the Obama Justice Department working directly with Fusion GPS, a research firm hired by the Clinton campaign, to frame President Trump. The documents show Fusion GPS' Nellie Ohr, who was specifically hired in 2016 to dig up dirt on Trump and his children Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric, working directly with U.S. Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr on a spread sheet linking President Trump to a number of Russian operatives. Nellie and Bruce are married and while Bruce was demoted, he's still working at the Department of Justice in...

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) The folks at Project Veritas have done God’s work one more time. – This time they have gotten the smoking gun on Google’s Orwellian efforts to not only control Americans’ political opinions, but to actually control their entire thought processes to favor the Democrat Party and its candidates. Here is the video in its entirety: The video features two people: The first is Jen Gennai, head of Google’s “Responsible Innovation” team – an Orwellian name in and of itself, given what they actually do – bragging about how her team and indeed,...

“I’m worried about 2020, I think it’s 50-50. I think it’s a coin flip,” said Ted Cruz, the Republican U.S. Senator from Texas. The 2020 presidential race happens when the country is “deeply divided.” “It is an incredibly polarized country,” he said. “I think it all comes down to turnout.” “I think the Left is going to show up in massive numbers,” he continued. “And it all comes down to who shows up on the center-right.” Ted Cruz was on the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday when, 45-minutes into the interview, Shapiro asked Cruz for his assessment of the 2020 election...

The midterm elections may have been a sign of what's ahead for the 2020 presidential election: experts say the voter turnout could be the highest in a century. The big picture: According to Michael McDonald, an elections expert at the University of Florida, turnout for the 2020 presidential election could be as high as 67% — the highest it's been since at least 1916. If that happens, President Trump will have a tougher fight for a second term. •He's driving turnout among those most unhappy with him (younger voters and people of color) even when he's not on the ballot....

In November 2018 The Guardian reported on group of Google employees published an open letter on Tuesday calling on their employer to cancel its plans to build a censored search engine for China, the latest expression of worker unrest at a company that earlier this month saw thousands stage walkouts over its handling of sexual misconduct cases. The Google employees were very upset that Google’s Project Dragonfly would allow the Chinese government to blacklist certain search terms. The employees said, “Many of us accepted employment at Google with the company’s values in mind… After a year of disappointments … we...

Caramagna, who resigned Sunday, is accused of filling out some portions of mail-in ballots and primary election ballot certifications he Democratic mayor of a northern New Jersey town has resigned amid an election violation charge. The Bergen County prosecutor's office said Monday that former Elmwood Park Mayor Francesco Caramagna faces a charge of interfering with the secrecy of the election process. Caramagna, who resigned Sunday, is accused of filling out some portions of mail-in ballots and primary election ballot certifications

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., argued the special counsel's report "certainly" showed evidence of collusion and rejected the idea that President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign deserved an apology for the controversial surveillance conducted under former President Barack Obama's administration. When Fox News host Julie Banderas asked Swalwell about a potential apology, the California congressman said that special counsel Robert Mueller's report "laid out a multiplicity of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians." He contended that although special counsel Robert Mueller's report didn't declare collusion beyond a reasonable doubt, it still showed enough evidence of troubling contacts between Russia and Trump's...

President Donald Trump railed against special counsel Robert Mueller's now-completed investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on Wednesday, calling it an "attempted takeover of our government." "We can never allow this treasonous, these treasonous acts to happen to another President," Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity, in his first TV interview since Attorney General William Barr summarized the principal findings of Mueller's report in a memo to Congress on Sunday. This was an attempted takeover of our government, of our country, an illegal takeover," Trump said. "If it were the other way around, where I was doing...

There's no shortage of speculation on the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, much of it totally uninformed. But we don't need to speculate on the scope – the man who appointed Mueller has already given us a potential road map on what to expect from the special counsel. The bottom line: Do not expect a harsh condemnation of President Donald Trump or any of his associates if they have not been charged with crimes. The road map comes in the form a little-noticed 12-page letter written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last June to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley....

Hustle, a text-messaging startup that worked closely with several Democratic candidates in the 2018 elections, fired a third of its staff this week. CEO Roddy Lindsay announced the move via a blog post on Thursday. "While we are incredibly proud of our impact in the 2018 midterms, delivering more than 200 million text messages to and from voters, it was an enormous operational challenge supporting such an effort; one that required a team size that is not yet sustainable for us on an ongoing basis," Lindsay wrote. "And while we have an exciting set of initial commercial customers using Hustle...

Outgoing Republican Maine Gov. Paul LePage took a swipe on Friday at a Democratic candidate’s victory in a controversial House race, writing “stolen election” next to his signature on the certificate confirming the election result. LePage certified the victory of Democratic Rep.-elect Jared Golden after Rep. Bruce Poliquin, a two-term Republican congressman, conceded to his opponent on Christmas Eve following a contentious legal challenge. “I’ve signed off on the [Maine's 2nd congressional district] election result as it’s no longer in federal court,” LePage wrote in a tweet, attaching of the certificate with the phrase “stolen election” next to his signature....

Facebook's massive, secret rulebook for policing speech reveals inconsistencies, gaps and biases... A Message from Yahoo Search What is psoriatic arthritis? Look for symptoms, causes & more What is psoriatic arthritis? Look for symptoms, causes & more The rulebook's details were revealed Thursday night thanks to a Facebook employee who leaked over 1,400 pages of the speech policing rulebook to the Times because he "feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight — and making too many mistakes."

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Thursday that his office is exploring whether disinformation tactics deployed against Republican Roy Moore during last year's special election violated state campaign laws and said he was worried that the operation could have affected the closely fought Senate race. "The information is concerning," Marshall, a Republican, said in a phone interview. "The impact it had on the election is something that's significant for us to explore, and we'll go from there." Moore lost the election to his Democratic rival, Sen. Doug Jones. Marshall, who said he learned of the disinformation campaign called Project Birmingham...

As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results... One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times,...

David Kramer, an associate of Senator John McCain, invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not testify to Congress in connection to his role in distribution of the fake Russia dossier to the FBI. Kramer was briefed by the Russian dossier author Christopher Steele in London in 2016. The Russian dossier was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The junk dossier was used as evidence in a FISA court hearing as evidence to spy on Trump volunteer Carter Page — in October 2016. Kramer then returned back to the US and delivered the phony dossier...

Another top FBI official who helped oversee the Trump-Russia and Clinton email investigations is retiring, as the last traces of the bureau's embattled leadership team that once stood under Barack Obama's presidency disappear. The official, Bill Priestap, will retire from his post as assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division by the end of the year. “Assistant Director Bill Priestap became eligible to retire and has chosen to do so after 20 years of service,” an FBI spokesperson told Fox News on Wednesday. Priestap, who participated in the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and the FBI’s initial...

Broward County’s ballot recount hit yet another snag Saturday with 2,040 ballots lost or misplaced. The county’s eternally beleaguered Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes said they either misplaced, misfiled or mixed in with another stack. One thing she said she was sure of: “The ballots are in this building.” “There would be nowhere else for them to be,” Snipes said. “The ballots are in the building. The ballots are in the building.” With a noon Sunday deadline looming, the three-person Canvassing Board was nonplussed and uncertain what to do.

A federal judge on Monday ordered election officials to review thousands of provisional ballots that haven’t been counted in Georgia’s close election for governor. U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg’s order calls for a hotline for voters to check if their provisional ballots were counted, a review of voter registrations, and updated reports from the state government about why many voters were required to use provisional ballots. The court decision comes as votes are still being counted in the race for governor between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp. Abrams trails Kemp and would need to gain more than 20,000...

BREAKING: Radical Code Pink Activist Democrat Kyrsten Sinema Wins AZ Senate Race After Thousands of Votes Appear Post Election Radical code pink activist Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won the Arizona Senate race against Martha McSally several days after the polls closed. Republican Martha McSally was ahead Tuesday evening when the polls closed, but the Democrats produced tens of thousands of ballots out of no where post election. Democrat Kyrsten Sinema got 1,071,947 votes vs. Martha McSally who got 1,039,778 with 99.8% of the precincts reporting, according to Politico.