Free Republic

The federal indictment of New York’s attorney general centers on a home she purchased for a relative. It is an act that rings deeply familiar to many.To some Black families, it was an intimately familiar arrangement.A woman whose parents fled a life of sharecropping in the South was among the first in her family to achieve a prestigious career. She extended her help to relatives who had less, even buying a home for a grandniece in need of stability.The house sits at the center of the indictment of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, by the Justice Department. She...

A growing number of Republicans on Capitol Hill have raised concerns about President Trump’s expanding war against drug cartels carried out without consultation or authorization by Congress, and are pressing for more information and involvement in a campaign whose legal basis remains murky. Most in the group have not expressed explicit opposition to the strikes that have been carried out so far against boats in the Caribbean Sea and, this week, expanded to the Pacific. The vast majority of Republicans have enthusiastically rallied behind them, and this month, all but two of them voted to block a measure that would...

A Republican measure that would pay essential government employees faltered in the Senate, and the G.O.P. blocked a pair of Democratic bills to pay a broader swath of workers.Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked legislation to pay federal employees who have been working without compensation during the government shutdown, thwarting Republicans’ latest effort to weaken their hand in the federal spending fight. The defeat was part of a series of failed partisan votes on the 23rd day of the government shutdown that underscored the depth of the prolonged impasse, with neither Republicans nor Democrats showing any indication that they planned to...

Was it only weeks ago in mid-September that I wrote a column about Democrats embracing the assassination culture that took the life of young Christian evangelist Charlie Kirk? And now in Virginia they’re doubling down. Virginia Democrats are endorsing the murderous candidacy of Jay Jones, who comes from a prominent black Virginia Democrat family. You see Jones in the photograph above, applauding the Democrat candidate for governor, former U.S. Rep Abigail Spanberger. You’ve heard of Jones and his dark fantasies over texts to a colleague, seeking the murders of his Republican opponents. And their children. Yes, their kids who he...

We’ve just received yet another dispatch from the Imaginarium of Dr. Faux-nassus — otherwise known as Paul Krugman — who had the chutzpah to accuse President Trump of lacking a grip on reality. Do you really want to go there? In one his most oblivious pieces of bloviating word salads to date, Krugman declared to his Substack subscribers October 21 that “Donald Trump Has Lost Touch With Reality.” In Krugman’s 20/200 vision, “it’s getting worse. When will we acknowledge the obvious?” We’re still waiting for him to acknowledge that the detached-from-reality Bidenomics snake-oil he sold to his former New York...

President Trump has repurposed money to fund military salaries during the government shutdown. He has pledged to find ways to make sure many in law enforcement get paid. He has used the fiscal impasse to halt funding to Democratic jurisdictions, and is trying to lay off thousands of federal workers.Government shutdowns are usually resolved only after the pain they inflict on everyday Americans forces elected officials in Washington to come to an agreement. But as the shutdown nears a fourth week, Mr. Trump’s actions have instead reduced the pressure for an immediate resolution and pushed his political opponents to further...

Ms. Machado’s efforts to reclaim a stolen election by any available means, including military intervention, has long galvanized her supporters. Her opponents say these hard-line policies have a political cost.Last year, María Corina Machado, the leader of Venezuela’s opposition, was forced into hiding by the country’s autocrat after he stole a presidential election Ms. Machado’s movement had won.Now, Ms. Machado is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, U.S. warships are floating near the Venezuelan coast and the United States is calling President Nicolás Maduro a “narco-terrorist” and a fugitive from American justice.The Nobel award has galvanized Ms. Machado’s movement....

The CIA’s operations abroad are usually shrouded in secrecy, but President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had authorized the spy agency to take unspecified action in Venezuela, an extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgement from a commander in chief. “Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela?” a reporter asked Trump at the White House. “I authorized for two reasons, really,” Trump said. “Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America." The second reason, the president said, was narcotics trafficking. “And the other thing are drugs. We have a lot of drugs coming in...

If you’re old enough to have admired CBS in its heyday, watching its decline has been painful.Decades ago, it was dubbed the Tiffany Network – home of the great journalist Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America”), and innovator of the top-flight magazine program, 60 Minutes.Even outside its news division, the network was a place where the variety-show host Ed Sullivan could break down racial exclusion by inviting outstanding Black entertainers to his Sunday night program; that was controversial in an era of intense racial turmoil. The CBS news department had some of the best journalists in the nation,...

Hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers may not automatically receive back pay once the government reopens, the White House indicated in a draft memo, prompting broad fears that the Trump administration might try to circumvent federal law to maximize the pain of the shutdown. The memo, which was shared by a White House official, could presage a radical break from a policy adopted during President Trump’s first term. It appeared to contradict some of the administration’s own guidance, which by Tuesday still indicated that furloughed employees would receive retroactive pay shortly after Congress strikes a funding deal. Following the...

Recently declassified documents indicate leaks of classified information to reporters were designed to portray Trump as in league with Russia. ================================================================== Recently declassified documents indicate that people close to former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff were connected to leaks of classified information to prominent reporters designed to portray Donald Trump and his allies as being in league with Russia. Written in 2017, the FBI documents expose how selected Washington reporters, including Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post and Michael Schmidt of The New York Times, scored a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning scoops in 2017 by repeating...

Paramount Skydance is poised to name Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News in the coming days — giving the hard-charging journalist unusual clout to revamp the struggling network as it also acquires her scrappy news site the Free Press, The Post has learned. Weiss — a 41-year-old former New York Times opinion writer who has built the Free Press into a buzzworthy site with a contrarian bent — is expected to be named to the top post in a Monday announcement, although the talks are in flux and the timing could change, a source close to the...

Tomorrow, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth brings hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals to Quantico for what amounts to a mass leadership formation. The agenda is opaque, the logistics unusual, and the stakes high. With President Trump now planning to attend, the gathering risks becoming as much a signal about civil-military relations as it is about readiness. What should Americans take from it — and what should our flag officers hear? First, let’s dispense with the novelty. Large, in-person convocations of nearly the entire general/flag officer corps are rare. Reporting indicates Hegseth intends to hammer “warrior ethos,” grooming and standards...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday said that Medals of Honor for soldiers who took part in an 1890 massacre of Native Americans would not be revoked. More than 300 Lakota Sioux men, women and children were killed by U.S. Army soldiers on Dec. 29, 1890, in one of the deadliest attacks on Native Americans by the United States military. The Lakota people had gathered to resist government control in an area of South Dakota that is now part of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation..... In 2019, Democratic lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, introduced legislation to revoke...

If Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey, Drew Barrymore and Gwyneth Paltrow are peddling a memoir from their billionaire investor pal, who has a mind-blowing tale of self-actualization — maybe just maybe, there’s a little more to the story. We learned just how much more this week, in a blockbuster New York Times piece that dug into the narrative behind Amy Griffin’s bestselling memoir, “The Tell.” And the article is far more compelling than the book itself. SNIP However, her memories were recovered during therapy sessions while under the influence of the drug MDMA — a practice that is illegal and was...

Would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh was declared guilty on Tuesday on all charges, but The New York Times accidentally published the wrong article. In journalism, outlets often pre-write obituaries, election outcomes and potential court verdicts of major cases before they occur, using the basic facts of the story and adding whatever key details are essential on the day of. However, a screenshot indicated that the New York Times accidentally published a headline, “Man Found Not Guilty of Trying to Assassinate Trump in Florida.” The lede of the now-scrubbed article added, “In a surprise verdict, a federal jury acquitted Ryan Routh...

We gathered some of the journalists closely involved to discuss how we approached coverage and to answer readers’ questions about itCharlie Kirk was shot at a college in Utah, and New York Times journalists began grappling with a series of questions and decisions. What happened? Were graphic videos of his injuries real? Which facts could we confirm without reporters on the scene yet?At 3:01 p.m., we published confirmation of the shooting, and a new round of judgment calls began: Would we show clips of Kirk’s shooting? What words and shorthand would we use for him in headlines — a “right-wing...

President Donald Trump's $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times has been tossed, for now. Calling the president's 85-page lawsuit "decidedly improper and impermissible," a federal judge in Tampa threw it out on Friday and gave him 28 days to file a new complaint that had to be under 40 pages. U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday blasted the Trump suit for alleging only two acts of defamation, yet "Count I appears on page eighty, and Count II appears on page eighty-three." He also criticized the suit's flowery descriptions about Trump and overly political language, writing a complaint is...

The New York Times issued a correction Thursday, admitting it had wrongly attributed an antisemitic remark to Charlie Kirk when the late Turning Point USA founder was actually critiquing the comment. As part of its story on where Kirk stood on key political issues in the wake of his assassination, The Times reported Kirk was "repeatedly accused of antisemitism." Kirk was a staunch supporter of Israel and has been praised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was...

https://t.co/AMeXCf4rA8 NEW YORK, NY — Responding to public outcry to set the record straight after a terrible act of political violence launched the debate about dangerous rhetoric to the forefront of American consciousness, the New York Times issued a minor clarification that conservative activist Charlie Kirk had said "Hitler is bad" and not "Hitler is good." The correction came several days after Kirk was gunned down at a public event, with the New York Times seeking to clarify that it had gotten one minor detail wrong by telling its readers that Kirk had praised infamous Nazi leader Adolf Hitler when...