Free Republic

Mike Howell was looking at his phone in an airport lounge this month when he saw a letter from the attorney general of Missouri questioning whether President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had the “mental capacity” to sign the pardons and executive orders he issued during his final months in office. Mr. Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project, a branch of the conservative Heritage Foundation, sensed an opportunity, he said in an interview. For months, he had been comparing Mr. Biden’s signature on dozens of official documents and noting that many of them appeared identical. Before boarding his flight, Mr....

President-elect Donald J. Trump is keeping secret the names of the donors who are funding his transition effort, a break from tradition that could make it impossible to see what interest groups, businesses or wealthy people are helping launch his second term.Mr. Trump has so far declined to sign an agreement with the Biden administration that imposes strict limits on that fund-raising in exchange for up to $7.2 million in federal funds earmarked for the transition. By dodging the agreement, Mr. Trump can raise unlimited amounts of money from unknown donors to pay for the staff, travel and office space...

Skewed polls and anonymous betting markets are building up Republicans’ expectations. Donald Trump could use that to challenge the result.The torrent of polls began arriving just a few weeks ago, one after the other, most showing a victory for Donald J. Trump. They stood out amid the hundreds of others indicating a dead heat in the presidential election. But they had something in common: They were commissioned by right-leaning groups with a vested interest in promoting Republican strength. These surveys have had marginal, if any, impact on polling averages, which either do not include the partisan polls or give them...

Late this summer, a prominent right-wing think tank invited conservatives from around the country to learn how to work in a second Donald J. Trump administration. In a series of training sessions in Washington, former Trump officials shared strategies with attendees for combating leftist civil servants in the federal government and dealing with the mainstream media. Participants were sent home with a thick binder of materials for further study. One section’s title: “Tales From the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump.” The classes could easily have been the work of Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint and personnel project...

The right-wing think tank has been pushing misinformation about voting into social media feeds. The Georgia secretary of state’s office called one video “a stunt.”In July, two men went door to door at a sprawling apartment complex in Norcross, Ga., an Atlanta suburb that is a hub for the region’s fast-growing Latino population, asking residents if they were U.S. citizens and whether they were registered to vote. Speaking in Spanish, often peeking from behind half-closed doors, seven people told the men that they were not citizens but that they were registered to vote. Although the two men claimed to represent...

Over his decades in the public eye, former President Donald J. Trump has a well-established history of making degrading and racist remarks about women, people of color and pretty much anyone else who crosses his path. It is a proclivity that dates to his days as a reality television star and that has only expanded in the meme-driven era of social media. In the words of Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, Mr. Trump is “an equal opportunity offender.” But in Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump has found a particularly complicated and risky target for his trademark brand...

When former President Donald J. Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity on Wednesday, he lifted a longstanding and false line of attack from the fringes of political discourse to the very center of a presidential campaign. For years, rivals and critics have lodged accusations that Ms. Harris shifts her personal identity to her political advantage, and that she is, in fact, not who she claims to be. Those attacks, based on falsehoods, misinformation and conspiratorial notions, have increased dramatically in the week and a half since she emerged as the Democrats’ all-but-certain standard-bearer. Just hours after President Biden...

In a fiery exchange last month, CNN anchorwoman Abby Phillip told GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that there was “no evidence” to support his claim that federal agents abetted protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Ramaswamy shot back that the FBI conspicuously has never denied that law enforcement agents were on duty in the crowd. He argued that federal officials have repeatedly “lied” to the American people about not only that investigation but one that has gotten much less attention: the alleged failed plot to kidnap and kill Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020.“It was entrapment,” Ramaswamy...

The G.O.P. contender’s campaign tried to take on Donald Trump’s online army. Now it just wants to end the meme wars. ---------------------------------- In early May, as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida prepared to run for president, about a dozen right-wing social media influencers gathered at his pollster’s home for cocktails and a poolside buffet. The guests all had large followings or successful podcasts and were already fans of the governor. But Mr. DeSantis’s team wanted to turn them into a battalion of on-message surrogates who could tangle with Donald J. Trump and his supporters online. For some, however, the gathering...

The New York Times ran a lengthy hit piece, titled, “Inside Ron DeSantis’s Politicized Removal of an Elected Prosecutor,” that demonstrates how fearful Democrats are of his appeal in an era when crime is on the mind of so many voters. So potent is the crime issue that President Biden and a significant number Congressional Democrats are overriding a soft-on-crime law passed the by the DC City Council over the veto of the District’s Mayor Muriel Bowser. Only a deep fear of voters’ wrath over spiraling crime would motivate these Democrats to anger their SJW pro-crime base. Thus, it fell...

When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida convened a round-table discussion about the news media this week, he spared no effort to play the part, perching at a faux anchor’s desk in front of a wall of video screens while firing questions to his guests like a seasoned cable TV host. But the panel’s message was as notable as its slick presentation: Over the course of an hour, Mr. DeSantis and his guests laid out a detailed case for revisiting a landmark Supreme Court decision protecting the press from defamation lawsuits. Mr. DeSantis is the latest figure, and among the most...

Soon after the FBI searched Donald Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend. Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000% in just a few hours as Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on radio programs and podcasts, as measured by Critical Mention, a media-tracking firm. Posts mentioning “civil war” jumped again a few weeks later, after President Joe Biden branded Trump and...

The New York Times announced Thursday that it has hired Buzzfeed News’s Ken Bensinger to “pioneer a new beat” covering right-wing media — the same Ken Bensinger, the Times omits in its announcement, who first reported the Steele Dossier. New York Times Politics Editor David Halbfinger declared in a splashy release that Bensinger would join the “democracy team” on the Politics Desk, covering right-wing media as his full-time beat. The statement provides an exhaustive list of topics and stories Bensinger has covered — from campaign finance, to “political disinformation,” to the Oath Keepers’ finances. Curiously absent, however, is any mention...

More than 15 journalists, several U.S. government officials and multiple lawmakers were shown or given the Steele dossier during the 2016 presidential campaign or shortly after. Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele disseminated the dossier far and wide in an apparent attempt to insert the document’s salacious allegations into the media. Newly unsealed court filings show how widespread this effort was. Court documents released last week in a lawsuit involving the Steele dossier revealed new details about the campaign to disseminate the infamous anti-Trump report to the press and within the U.S. government. Much was already known about Fusion GPS and...

David Kramer, the John McCain aide who leaked the discredited Christopher Steele dossier on President Trump, testified in a libel case that he spread the unsubstantiated anti-Trump material all over Washington during the presidential transition. Mr. Kramer, a former State Department official and a Trump detractor, leaked dossier material to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt, CNN’s Carl Bernstein, National Public Radio, McClatchy news service and others, he said. But his most momentous meeting was with Ken Bensinger of BuzzFeed. In Washington during the Christmas holidays, he let Mr. Bensinger read the dossier. He then stepped away....

[FULL TITLE] [ ‘Stand down!’ Obama’s orders to national security officials who wanted to hit back at election-meddling Putin revealed ] A new book, 'Russian Roulette,' details Donald Trump's business ties in Russia and Russia's efforts to meddle in the presidential election The interference was one of the greatest policy challenges for the outgoing Obama administration Advisors debated the pros and cons of hitting back at Russia, whether to go public with what they knew, and how to get it to stop One risk was fueling the chaos intelligence officials believe Russia was trying to sew Two security advisors prepared...

A longtime associate of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain provided a copy of the infamous Steele dossier to BuzzFeed News, according to an explosive court filing released Wednesday. David Kramer, a former State Department official who was an executive at the McCain Institute, met on Dec. 29, 2016 with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger, according to a filing submitted Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro. BuzzFeed published the dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, on Jan. 10, 2017. The disclosure was made as part of a final report ahead of Ungaro’s ruling in favor...