Free Republic

The acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was replaced Friday, only three days after assuming the role, as his appointment triggered a power struggle between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Elon Musk of the Department of Government Efficiency, the New York Times reported. Gary Shapley was replaced after Bessent complained to President Donald Trump that Musk circumvented Bessent’s office to secure the position for Shapley, the NYT reported. The outlet cited people who said they were familiar with the situation. Shapley was a longstanding IRS agent who accused the Biden administration’s Department of Justice of dragging out its...

A former opinion page editor of the New York Times broke down in tears and apologized to Sarah Palin while testifying in court over a 2017 editorial that she says was defamatory. James Bennet testified on Thursday that he “blew it” when he falsely claimed in the editorial that the former Alaska governor’s political action committee had contributed to an atmosphere of violence in the weeks and months leading up to the 2011 assassination attempt on then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.). The Times has acknowledged the editorial was inaccurate but said it quickly corrected the “honest mistake.” Bennet got choked up...

Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur If @nytimes is right and Trump refused Israel's request to attack Iran, he deserves a ton of credit for that. Times reporting @TulsiGabbard made the argument against the strike - huge credit for that. @JDVance also spoke against. Not a lot of good news lately, but this is great. 4:24 PM · Apr 17, 2025

So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining. “We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters....

Daniel Wakin, the New York Times Deputy International Editor of Opinion, had an "Opinion Today" item in the paper's April 14th edition promoting a guest essay on the Op-Ed page entitled, "The U.S. Must Now Reckon With a Hegemon in the Mideast: Israel." The beginning of Wakin's item [emphasis added] reads: "Ancient Rome in the Mediterranean. The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. The United States in the Western Hemisphere, for that matter. History is rife with nations and empires seeking to become dominant in a region or larger swath of the world. It is called hegemony. Aaron David Miller and...

This weekend, the US and Iran will hold their first semi-direct talks in years, despite the previous insistence of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in barring such talks. What changed? First, the Iranian security situation has degraded rapidly over the last few months, thanks to their stupidity in attacking Israel directly as well as indirectly through their proxies. That has left the mullahs more exposed than ever before in their 46-year run as theocratic tyrants in Iran. That's not the only reason, the New York Times reports today. The Iranians may have finally realized that Donald Trump returned to office with the...

America is at risk of losing a generation of scientists. Amid sweeping cuts to federal research funding by the Trump administration, job opportunities for young scientists are being rescinded, postdoctoral positions eliminated and fellowships folded as labs struggle to afford new researchers. As countless scientific projects come to a halt, the researchers who will suffer the most are those just beginning their careers. Times Opinion has heard from more than 100 readers who have shared stories of how they’ve been affected. Kristen Gram is a 22-year-old graduate student researching the type of materials and hardware that might one day help...

President Donald Trump has fired several members of his National Security Council team. DailyMail.com confirmed an Axios report released Thursday morning. The dismissals come after National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally added The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat where top administration officials were discussing an attack on the Houthis in Yemen. Trump has publicly supported Waltz, a former Florida congressman, in the aftermath of Signalgate, despite some White House insiders labeling him a 'f***ing idiot.' However The New York Times reported Thursday morning that far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office on Wednesday and pressed...

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services in February, he promised “radical transparency” and declared that “both science and democracy flourish from the free and unimpeded flow of information.” But when the Trump administration laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday, the targets included the very people who communicated the health department’s work to Americans....

The Trump administration said on Monday that it was reviewing roughly $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard, accusing the school of allowing antisemitism to run unchecked on its campus. In a statement on Monday, the administration said it was examining about $256 million in contracts, as well as another $8.7 billion in what it described as “multiyear grant commitments.” “While Harvard’s recent actions to curb institutionalized antisemitism — though long overdue — are welcome, there is much more that the university must do to retain the privilege of receiving federal taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars,” Josh Gruenbaum, a...

President Donald Trump has begun his war against Democrat-dominated, left-wing California, according to the New York Times, enacting six policies against the state in the space of just 24 hours last week.The Trump administration waited to take on Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), initially, because of the devastation of the January 7 wildfires in Los Angeles.However, that did not stop Newsom from spending $50 million to fight Trump, even while asking for federal aid.The Times reports on what happened next — on Thursday, March 26:The U.S. Education Department announced early in the West Coast morning that it would challenge a major...

This is what DEI does in the real world. Democrats don't want you to know this, but the New York Times apparently managed to let this one get printed.

When I was starting out as a Chicago City Hall reporter for that big metropolitan paper—when we could smoke in newsrooms on deadline, curse, tell jokes, laugh and wore jackets and ties to work—I had one rule. I’d often discuss this rule with my political sources, elected officials, cops, city workers and others: Lie to me just once, just once, and I’ll burn you to the ground. It wasn’t an empty threat. Chicago politics wasn’t a cloistered convent. It was and remains a place of thieves protected by the laws and regulations that they themselves controlled. It is a Democrat...

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....

The New York Times published an opinion column claiming the scientific community "badly misled" the public in an effort to suppress the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, even after the paper's own science writer called the theory "racist." The March 16 piece, "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives," by Times columnist and Princeton Sociology Professor Zeynep Tufekci, argued that the scientific community long suspected COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab, but purposefully "hid or understated crucial facts," to mislead the public about the lab’s "terrifyingly lax" safety precautions. "We have...

After climbing into a Tesla Model S last week, President Trump pledged to buy one. The next day, the Fox News host Sean Hannity said he had bought a Model S Plaid to support the embattled company, saying a Tesla “has more American parts in it than any other car made in our country.” In a backlash to the backlash against the tactics of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, prominent conservatives are rallying to the side of the electric car company led by Mr. Musk. They are hoping to swing enough like-minded consumers to offset a boycott of the...

When Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, announced that he would vote with Republicans to clear the way for passage of a stopgap spending bill, he argued that a government shutdown would further empower President Trump and Elon Musk to defund government programs and shrink federal agencies.“Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies, programs and personnel nonessential, furloughing staff with no promise that they would ever be rehired,” Mr. Schumer said on Thursday.But many Democrats, who were stunned and enraged by Mr. Schumer’s stance, argued that it was...

Times are tough all over for the liberal media. CNN and MSNBC have lost a painful amount of their already small audiences, the Washington Post is retooling their approach because people stopped reading, and now the same whirlwind has reached the New York Times. The liberal paper is telling members of their editorial board to take new positions at the paper, or take a buyout, and a walk, presumably. Over the last eight years, vast swaths of the American media torpedoed whatever credibility they had left in their pursuit of Trump. They pushed countless lies and conspiracy theories and now...

The ruling paves the way for the discovery process, where Trump’s lawyers are seeking the board’s internal deliberations in its 2018 awards to the New York Times and Washington Post for Russia collusion coverage. A Florida circuit court judge has denied the Pulitzer Prize Board’s motion to delay President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against them on presidential immunity grounds, opening the door for the discovery of internal deliberations. Trump sued the board in 2022 for defamation after it refused to retract prizes awarded in 2018 to The New York Times and The Washington Post staffs for their coverage of the...

Simmering anger at the billionaire’s unchecked power spilled out in a remarkable Cabinet Room meeting. The president quickly moved to rein in Mr. Musk. Cabinet officials generally like the concept of what Elon Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the hacksaw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination. Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in...