Free Republic

Vice President Kamala Harris got off to a rocky start in office. She is now at the heart of a political drama that could make her the first woman of color to become a major party presidential nominee. Vice President Kamala Harris, who has struggled for nearly four years in President Biden’s shadow, was thrust on Sunday into the center of a remarkable political drama that could culminate with her becoming the first woman of color at the top of a major-party presidential ticket. Mr. Biden’s decision to abandon his re-election bid and endorse Ms. Harris to succeed him puts...

The decision by President Biden and his top advisers to keep the discovery of classified documents secret from the public and even most of the White House staff for 68 days was driven by what turned out to be a futile hope that the incident could be quietly disposed of without broader implications for Mr. Biden or his presidency. The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a...

The dizzying events of the past week have pushed to the sidelines the congressional squabbling over President Biden’s domestic agenda, and are already redefining the arc of his presidency.WASHINGTON — Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, gave a pep talk early on Feb. 18 at the daily gathering of the president’s most senior aides: The next 10 days, he said, will be the most consequential of the Biden presidency.President Biden’s military and intelligence chiefs had told him that a Russian invasion was all but inevitable. Mr. Klain, a veteran of Washington and one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers,...

A report Wednesday from the New York Times about a top vaccine expert at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who claims he was fired for opposing hydroxychloroquine has quickly fallen apart. Rick Bright, former director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority [BARDA], said he was dismissed from his position because he opposed hydroxychloroquine. This is the anti-malarial drug that has been touted by President Donald Trump as a possible coronavirus treatment. NYT reporters Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman pushed Bright’s “scorching statement” following his dismissal, but heavily downplayed...

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.” A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Donald Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to...

WASHINGTON — Almost from the moment that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants decided this fall to pursue the impeachment of President Trump, they made a fateful judgment: If the president intended to do nothing but stonewall and subvert their inquiry, they were not going to be the ones politely sticking to lofty traditions. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have made a similarly cold calculation. After a year of defying without consequence Congress’s attempts to investigate the president’s conduct, they have no intention of taking part in what they view as an illegitimate impeachment, initially conducted without a formal House vote in...

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday shrugged off the brutal dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, just days after a United Nations report described how a team of Saudi assassins called Mr. Khashoggi a “sacrificial animal” before his murder. The U.N. report urged an F.B.I. investigation into the slaying. But in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Trump said the episode had already been thoroughly investigated. He said the Middle East is “a vicious, hostile place” and noted that Saudi Arabia is an important trading partner with the United States. “I only say they spend $400...

The deal to avert tariffs that President Donald Trump announced with great fanfare Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.

WASHINGTON — The deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations. Friday’s joint declaration says Mexico agreed to the “deployment of its National Guard throughout Mexico, giving priority to its southern border.” But the Mexican government had already pledged to do that in March during secret talks in Miami between Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of homeland security, and...

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s closing argument is now clear: Build tent cities for migrants. End birthright citizenship. Fear the caravan. Send active-duty troops to the border. Refuse asylum. Immigration has been the animating issue of the Trump presidency, and now — with the possibility that Republicans could face significant losses in the midterm elections on Tuesday — the president has fully embraced a dark, anti-immigrant message in the hope that stoking fear will motivate voters to reject Democrats. In a rambling speech on Thursday afternoon that was riddled with falsehoods and vague promises to confront a “crisis” at the border,...

Senate Republican leaders pressed on Tuesday to wrap up the confirmation of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, seizing on word from the F.B.I. that it would complete its investigation into allegations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct as early as Wednesday. “We’ll have an F.B.I. report this week, and we’ll have a vote this week,” an emphatic Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, told reporters after the Republicans’ weekly policy luncheon. But Mr. McConnell’s promise was as much about bluffing as it was about confidence, giving the nomination an air of inevitability even as five...

WASHINGTON — James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, confirms in his new book that the bureau had already begun a criminal investigation focused on Hillary Clinton’s handling of her email in 2015 when her campaign and its allies excoriated journalists for reporting that such an inquiry was being contemplated. The New York Times reported in July 2015 that two inspectors general had made a criminal referral to the Justice Department recommending an investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton had mishandled sensitive information by using a private email server as secretary of state. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, relying on a statement from...

Mr. Obama calls himself a "night guy," and as president, he has come to consider the long, solitary hours after dark as essential as his time in the Oval Office. Almost every night that he is in the White House, Mr. Obama has dinner at 6:30 with his wife and daughters and then withdraws to the Treaty Room, his private office down the hall from his bedroom on the second floor of the White House residence. There, his closest aides say, he spends four or five hours largely by himself. He works on speeches. He reads the stack of briefing...

WASHINGTON - Many of President Obama's Democratic allies in Congress say they do not believe he is being aggressive enough in confronting the terrorist threat of the Islamic State after last week's attacks in California, undermining Americans' sense of safety, especially among voters who will decide the party's fate in elections next year. The concerns began to surface last month, when senior administration officials went to Capitol Hill to urge Democrats to reject a bill to curb a Syrian refugee program and were rebuffed. That hostility grew with their increasingly uncomfortable efforts to defend Mr. Obama's strategies in the Middle...

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had a poisonous relationship long before Mr. Netanyahu swept to victory on Tuesday night in elections watched minute-by-minute at the White House. But now that Mr. Netanyahu has won after aggressively campaigning against a Palestinian state and Mr. Obama’s potential nuclear deal with Iran, the question is whether the president and prime minister can ever repair their relationship — and whether Mr. Obama will even try. On Wednesday, part of the answer seemed to be that the president would not make the effort. In strikingly strong criticism, the White...