Free Republic

In the feverish heyday of the “birther movement,” conspiracy-hungry readers swarmed to a website called WorldNetDaily for the latest on the specious yet viral theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The site’s founder, Joseph Farah — a former newspaperman with a dense, jet-black mustache and a cloak-and-dagger mystique — boasted in 2010 that he was well on the way to generating $10 million a year in revenue. His Northern Virginia-headquartered news site, known by the acronym WND, was having its moment by stoking rumors about Obama. But Farah — a conservative Internet pioneer who’d...

Complete title: "Witness in special counsel probe, former Stone associate, collected payments from Infowars through job Stone arranged" Over the past several months, author and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi has emerged as one of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s most vexing witnesses in his probe of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Corsi — perhaps best known for promoting the false idea that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States — has released internal special counsel documents, fulminated against alleged plea-deal offers and published a hastily written e-book outlining his account of interactions with his...

Conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi is in plea negotiations with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, according to Corsi and another person with knowledge of the talks. The talks with Corsi — an associate of both President Trump and GOP operative Roger Stone — could bring Mueller’s team closer to determining whether Trump or his advisers were linked to WikiLeaks’ release of hacked Democratic emails in 2016, a key part of his long-running inquiry. Corsi provided research on Democratic figures during the campaign to Stone, a longtime Trump adviser. For months, the special counsel has been scrutinizing Stone’s...

Marco Rubio seems to have been invented in a laboratory as part of an experiment to create the perfect Republican vice-presidential candidate. Former Bushie and torture enthusiast Marc Thiessen argues that there is some underground whispering campaign at work designed to deny Rubio his rightful place. The thing is, Thiessen is actually persuasive: In recent months, a whispering campaign has spread in Washington suggesting that Rubio may look good on paper, but he cannot “pass vet” for the vice-presidential nomination. The whispers became more audible last October following a hit piece by Washington Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia, who accused Rubio...