Free Republic

Syrian President Ahmed Sharaa has arrived in Washington for an official visit, just two days after the US formally revoked his status as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. The former Islamist militant will meet US President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday, 11 months after his rebel alliance ousted Bashar al-Assad. Hours before his arrival in the US capital it was announced that Syrian security services had detained dozens of suspected members of the so-called Islamic State group. Joint efforts to tackle what remains of the group in Syria are expected to be high on the agenda during...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Friday announcement that the U.S. will host a new Qatari air force facility in Idaho has drawn the ire of the Trump administration’s closest allies, including Laura Loomer, who said she felt “betrayed” over the matter. In a flurry of social media posts Friday afternoon, Loomer unleashed on the administration’s announcement that it had signed the letter greenlighting the building of a Qatar Emiri air force contingent at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in southwestern Idaho. The air arm of Qatar’s armed forces, Qatar Emiri air force pilots would train to fly F-15s in the...

So, about that Signal chat. On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.” At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic,...