Free Republic

KYIV, Ukraine — Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.

WASHINGTON — The limping conclusion to John Durham’s four-year investigation of the Russia inquiry underscores a recurring dilemma in U.S. government: how to shield sensitive law enforcement investigations from politics without creating prosecutors who can run amok, never to be held to account. At a time when special counsels are proliferating — there have been four since 2017, two of whom are still at work — the much-hyped investigation by Durham, a special counsel, into the Russia inquiry ended with a whimper that stood in contrast to the countless hours of political furor that spun off from it. Durham delivered...

In little over an hour, Donald Trump suggested the United States should default on its debts for the first time in history, injected doubt over the country’s commitment to defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion, dangled pardons for most of the Capitol rioters convicted of crimes and refused to say he would abide by the results of the next presidential election. The second-term vision Trump sketched out at a CNN town hall event Wednesday would represent a sharp departure from core American values that have been at the bedrock of the nation for decades: its creditworthiness, its credibility with international allies...

When the former secretary of state and C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo, a man who had dealt firsthand with autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, described Randi Weingarten as “the most dangerous person in the world” last November, it seemed as though he couldn’t possibly be serious. Weingarten is 65 and just over five feet tall. She is Jewish and openly gay — she’s married to a rabbi — and lives in Upper Manhattan. She is the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is not even the country’s biggest union of public-school educators. (The A.F.T. has 1.7...

As the 2024 presidential race heats up, Democrats are taking a cold hard look at their running mates compared to the GOP's team. The Left has President Joe Biden, an 80-year-old senior who doesn't know up from down, and a meditating hippy who preaches the "politics of love." Their only real chance of taking the crown at this point is the newly announced presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and even that is a long shot. So it makes sense that Democrats are starting to panic that Republicans will secure the vote. On Saturday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman...

"New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman discusses his latest piece "Why Kamala Harris Matters in 2024" with CNN host Michael Smerconish."

In settling with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has avoided an excruciating, drawn-out trial in which its founding chief, Rupert Murdoch, its top managers and its biggest stars would have had to face hostile grilling on an embarrassing question: Why did they allow a virulent and defamatory conspiracy theory about the 2020 election to spread across the network when so many of them knew it to be false?

Note: This article may contain commentary reflecting the author's opinion. Over the Easter weekend, Saturday Night Live (SNL) released a hilarious new skit mocking Democrats’ obsession over the Trump indictment that occurred earlier this week. The clip, which has already received hundreds of thousands of views, features liberals obsessed with the news of Trump’s arrest so much so that the clip acts as a commercial for a fake app called “CNZen.” HomeCommentaryWATCH: SNL Releases Hilarious Skit Mocking Democrats’ Trump Derangement Syndrome Following Indictment Note: This article may contain commentary reflecting the author's opinion. Over the Easter weekend, Saturday Night Live...

It is ironic to hear Democrats frequently emphasize the principle of “no one is above the law,” given that they often evade consequences for wrongdoing.While there are many voices on the left that saw the indictment of Trump after it was unsealed and realized there’s no “there” there, there are still plenty of radical leftists who couldn’t care less. They hate Trump and want him punished, regardless of the evidence. And one need not look further than the New York Times to see an example.On Thursday, the so-called paper of record published an article headlined, “Trump’s Indictment Is Karmic Justice,...

Twitter has removed the verification check mark on the main account of The New York Times, one of CEO Elon Musk's most despised news organizations. The removal comes as many of Twitter’s high-profile users are bracing for the loss of the blue check marks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors on the social media platform. Musk, who owns Twitter, set a deadline of Saturday for verified users to buy a premium Twitter subscription or lose the checks on their profiles. The Times said in a story Thursday that it would not pay Twitter for verification of...

A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict Donald J. Trump on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to four people with knowledge of the matter, a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges.

The New York Times and USA Today complied with radical gender ideology by apologizing for correctly identifying the Nashville Christian School shooting suspect as a woman. Soon after the shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School on Monday, in which three students and three adults were shot and killed, police identified the suspected shooter as 28-year-old Audrey Hale. A little while later, officials stated that Hale, who was killed by police during the attack, identified as transgender — meaning Hale allegedly believed she was a man. Following the revelation that Audrey was a woman who identified as a man, both USA Today...

A Texas politician has claimed that he worked with a senior member of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign to convince Iran to delay releasing its hostages during the crisis of 1979 in a bid to derail Jimmy Carter's re-election bid. Ben Barnes, Texas's former lieutenant governor, has claimed in an interview with The New York Times that John Connally Jr – once a governor of the same state and a high-ranking member of Reagan's election team – took him on a secret diplomatic tour of the Middle East as part of a scheme to damage Carter by convincing Iran to...

WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.

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...

Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who represented President Donald J. Trump after his loss in the 2020 election, admitted in a sworn statement released on Wednesday that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud led to Mr. Trump’s defeat. The admissions by Ms. Ellis were part of an agreement to accept public censure and settle disciplinary measures brought against her by state bar officials in Colorado, her home state. Last year, the officials opened an investigation of Ms. Ellis after a complaint from the 65 Project, a bipartisan legal watchdog group. The...

WASHINGTON — House Republicans have spent months promising to use their majority to uncover an insidious bias against conservatives on the part of the federal government, vowing to produce a roster of brave whistleblowers who would come forward to provide damning evidence of abuses aimed at the right. But the first three witnesses to testify privately before the new Republican-led House committee investigating the “weaponization” of the federal government have offered little firsthand knowledge of any wrongdoing or violation of the law, according to Democrats on the panel who have listened to their accounts. Instead, the trio appears to be...

Give this article ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story OPINION GUEST ESSAY What Ford’s Pardon of Nixon Means (and Doesn’t Mean) for Trump Feb. 20, 2023 President Richard Nixon and Vice President Gerald Ford smile at each other as they sit side by side at a desk. President Richard Nixon and Vice President Gerald Ford in the Oval Office in 1973. Ford pardoned Nixon soon after his resignation a year later.Credit...Associated Press Give this article By Garrett M. Graff Mr. Graff is the author of “Watergate: A New History.” Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of...

Chris Rufo, the man who orchestrated the attack on critical race theory, underscored a new focus earlier this month. “Conservatives must move the fight from ideology to bureaucracy,” he tweeted. “We’ve won the debate against CRT; now it’s time to dismantle DEI.” ***What Rufo is proposing is the distorting and demonizing of legitimate practices and areas of academic inquiry. He admitted as much in a 2021 tweet, back when he was still focused primarily on critical race theory: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’ ” he wrote....

Israel's UN envoy accuses New York Times of 'overt anti-Israel bias' By Haley Cohen February 22, 2023 Erdan called asymmetry in The Times' coverage of Israel "libelous narratives" and demanded that reporting in the paper that serves the largest urban Jewish community in the world be rectified NEW YORK –Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan on Wednesday sent a letter to The New York Times' executive editor in which he sharply condemned the newspaper's "overt anti-Israel bias." Addressed to Joseph Kahn, Erdan called asymmetry in The Times' coverage of Israel, from opinion columns to news stories, "libelous narratives"...