Free Republic

On Thursday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg from The New York Times published a nasty, highly inaccurate hit piece on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The title of the hatchet job is, "Kennedy Shows Minimal Engagement in Vast Health Portfolio" The entire hit piece was filled with attacks from former disgruntled employees many of whom are anonymous or fired for their performance in her leftist screed. In her NY Times hit piece Stolberg argues that HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy displayed minimal attention to the Ebola crisis in Africa. She uses fired employees in her attacks. It is the...

In the days before the latest flare-ups of violence in the Middle East, President Trump’s aides were negotiating with Tehran on four major elements of a nuclear agreement that U.S. officials contend would grind the program to a halt for 15 years or so. The negotiations, according to U.S. officials and diplomats who have been briefed on the confidential talks, have gone considerably beyond discussion about reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which the Iranians have all but shut down for 101 days. The result is what American officials describe as the hazy outlines of an accord — assuming the Islamic...

JD Vance suggested Israel may not be on board with a US-Iran peace deal as he was grilled over bombshell intelligence reports claiming Benjamin Netanyahu's spy agencies have been eavesdropping on American negotiators. US intelligence officials are alarmed by Israel's eavesdropping on American diplomats negotiating with Iran. The Pentagon now ranks Israel as a bigger counterintelligence threat than some of America's enemies, according to The New York Times.The report details concerns that Israel has been spying on senior Trump officials, including the President's top negotiator Steve Witkoff and Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, along with other American military and government...

Pelley has a big mouth and got introduced to a bigger mouth.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine arrived on Sunday afternoon in London for talks with the leaders of Britain, Germany and France as Europe considers taking a more active role in peace talks with Russia after more than a year of unsuccessful U.S. mediation. Ukraine and its European allies see a new opening to revive talks that have stalled as Moscow made uncompromising territorial demands and Washington shifted its focus to the war with Iran. They note that Russia’s recent battlefield setbacks and mounting economic strains could make a peace settlement more appealing to the Kremlin, a scenario that is also...

The Defense Department has increased the counterintelligence threat assessment to its highest level, and Israel is believed to have eavesdropped on American negotiations with Iran.

It is now so common for leftists, indeed most Democrats, to call Trump supporters Nazis that it's easy to shrug and move on. Unfortunately, as much as we would like to think it is a mere rhetorical flourish, it is not one at all. If you think that Democrats aren't serious when they propose what sound like insane measures, just remember what they did during COVID, what they are doing with alphabet ideology (literally sterilizing and mutilating kids and putting sex offenders into girls' locker rooms), and what they did to President Trump before his reelection. They are quite serious...

When it was first merely hinted at last year that Bari Weiss might be put in charge of CBS News, I was quite excited. Monitoring and calling out the old guard biased media monoliths like the broadcast networks and The New York Times has long been my thing. I knew that there would never be substantive change at any of these "news" outlets unless one of the boats got rocked until it almost capsized. If Weiss were to be entrusted with the calcified bias machine that was CBS News, some rocking was sure to happen. Weiss has that unique combination...

The remaining three correspondents at “60 Minutes” huddled this week to discuss their futures following the firing of Scott Pelley, according to a report, as former star Steve Kroft warned that the iconic newsmagazine “no longer exists” in the form viewers have known for decades. Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl and Jon Wertheim met on Wednesday for more than an hour amid growing turmoil at CBS News following Pelley’s ouster and the sweeping shakeup orchestrated by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, the Status newsletter reported on Thursday. The meeting came just hours after The Post reported that CBS insiders believed Whitaker...

AAmong the greatest early accomplishments of the second Trump Administration was the shuttering of USAID. It’s great in part because it’s saving billions previously supposedly spent on trans camel surgeries in the third-world, but also because it has shut down innumerable Democrat NGOs and non-profits, including the Democrat National Committee, which, within a month, went broke and had to borrow millions just to keep the lights on. It seems USAID’s money—taxpayer money—wasn’t just spent on bizarre, leftist boondoggles overseas. It largely funded the Democrat Party and their cronies in America. Smart, that Trump guy. A recent, tear-drenched New York Times...

I was speaking the other day with Scott Pelley of CBS News's "60 Minutes" about the mood in Iraq. He had just returned from filming a piece there and he told me something disturbing. Scott had gone around and asked Iraqis on the streets what they called American troops - wondering if they had nicknames for us in the way we used to call the Nazis "Krauts" or the Vietcong "Charlie." And what did he find? "Many Iraqis have so much distrust for U.S. forces we found they've come up with a nickname for our troops," Scott said. "They call...

Insipid former New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman is batting a thousand with the level of maniacal things he’s spewed onto the internet within just a 24-hour window. Krugman released a YouTube video of himself May 31 ironically calling President Donald Trump “mentally ill” before monotonously calling for a “thorough purging of the United States” tantamount to a “de-MAGA-fication” of the populace. He must have had some kind of inkling that what he said was cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs, because he had to assure viewers that he’s “not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the ‘de-Nazification’...

Ukrainian drones on Wednesday attacked St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, on the opening day of an annual economic conference that President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to cultivate into a showcase of a modern and prosperous country. It was the second time in a month that Ukraine had struck a major Russian city before an event important to Mr. Putin, as Kyiv expands a campaign of long-range strikes aimed at inflicting economic damage on Russia and demonstrating its vulnerability to attacks. In early May, Ukrainian forces hit sites in Moscow, including a high-rise apartment building near the city center, days...

President Trump likes his military and diplomatic victories quick, clean and decisive. (snip) But now, Mr. Trump has hit the stalemate phase of his presidency. The war with Iran is clearly at that stage. When he declared a cease-fire on April 7, Mr. Trump said on social media that the end of combat operations would be conditional on “the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.” It wasn’t. Even if commerce now resumes across the strait under a memorandum of understanding still under negotiation, it will still leave the future of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs exactly...

Graham Platner exchanged sexually explicit texts with multiple women while married to his wife, Amy Gertner, his campaign confirmed to POLITICO on Saturday, the latest scandal he has faced since launching his Maine Senate campaign last year.In a statement, Gertner slammed a former friend for spreading “malicious gossip” in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report that she had informed her husband’s campaign of the texts in late August.“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” she said. “In the months since, I have had to watch as she spread malicious gossip to...

In recent conversations with aides and allies, President Trump often interjects with a question about his vice president: Does JD Vance have what it takes to go all the way? He usually answers his own question: He’s not so sure. It is not that Mr. Trump is abandoning Mr. Vance. He involves him in major decisions, has given him high-profile opportunities to position himself for 2028 and trusts the 41-year-old vice president to wage partisan warfare on his behalf. In a cabinet meeting this week, Mr. Trump compared Mr. Vance to Eliot Ness, the mob-busting federal agent, for working to...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stole the show at a recent congressional hearing with two jars of brown water. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) explained that the dirty water had come from Morgan County, Ga., where a Meta data center is allegedly tainting the water of local residents. It was an image perfectly suited to driving the intensifying opposition to data centers in that it was photogenic, easy to understand — and misleading. According to reporting in the New York Times last year, the water problem has affected four homes in the vicinity of the data center, not the entire county, as AOC implied. It...

The social media post by President Trump made it sound straightforward. The United States would orchestrate a deal to end the war with Iran and, in exchange, a slew of countries across the Middle East and South Asia would join an agreement, called the Abraham Accords, establishing relations with Israel. In fact, he said, that “should be mandatory.” But half of the countries he named — such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey — already have relations with Israel. And the other half — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan — have no interest in establishing them anytime soon. As a...

The negotiations between the United States and Iran to end their war are following President Trump’s familiar playbook for resolving a Middle East crisis: agree to a cease-fire and deal with the toughest problems later. Analysts say the approach has had mixed results in the Gaza Strip, where Mr. Trump brokered a truce last year between Israel and Hamas, the Iranian-backed militant group. Plans for a so-called Phase 2 agreement — under which Hamas was to lay down its arms and Israel would allow Gaza to be rebuilt after a devastating war — have stalled. A similar approach in U.S....

In 1974, New York Times humorist Russell Baker identified a “pig in the python” working its way through the economy: the bulge of 76 million Baby Boomers squeezing through America’s economic system, distorting everything they passed through. When Boomers flooded the labor market in the 1970s, they created a competitive squeeze that never fully released — leaving the generations behind them without the wage rebound economists had predicted. When they bought homes, prices soared. When they took the top jobs in business, culture, and civic life, they held them — and held them, and held them. For half a century,...