Free Republic

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday denied a report that claimed embattled Rep. Matt Gaetz sought a blanket pardon from his White House — for himself and unidentified congressional allies amid a federal probe of underage sex trafficking allegations. “Congressman Matt Gaetz has never asked me for a pardon,” the 45th commander-in-chief said in the emailed statement, “It must also be remembered that he has totally denied the accusations against him.” The New York Times reported Tuesday that Gaetz (R-Fla.) allegedly pushed a pardon

The Times has reviewed receipts from Cash App, a mobile payments app, and Apple Pay that show payments from Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Greenberg to one of the women, and a payment from Mr. Greenberg to a second woman. The women told their friends that the payments were for sex with the two men, according to two people familiar with the conversations. In encounters during 2019 and 2020, Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Greenberg instructed the women to meet at certain times and places, often at hotels around Florida, and would tell them the amount of money they were willing to...

Undercover journalist group Project Veritas scored a major win last week in the New York Supreme Court concerning the group’s defamation lawsuit against the newspaper. The decision said the James O’Keefe-founded Project Veritas has sufficient evidence that the Times might have been motivated by “actual malice” and acted with “reckless disregard” in serval posts hitting the group’s work. Jonathan Turley reported Sunday: While it has received little coverage in the mainstream media, the conservative group Project Veritas won a major victory against the New York Times this week in a defamation case with potentially wide reach. In a 16-page decision,...

The state of Texas filed an audacious lawsuit in the Supreme Court on Tuesday against four other states, asking the justices to extend the Dec. 14 deadline for certification of presidential electors. The suit, filed by the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had engaged in election irregularities that require investigation, and it asked the court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the defendant states’ legislatures.” Legal experts called the suit outlandish, and it comes at a time when Mr. Paxton is battling a scandal in his own...

If we look more closely at it, the gender gap probably deserves another name: It’s the white male gap. Or the white male problem. Think about what the political map would look like if just white men voted. We’d have a Senator Roy Moore representing Alabama, where 72 percent of the state’s white male voters (and 63 percent of the white women) cast their ballot for a man who was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl — and who faced sexual misconduct allegations from multiple other women... We’d likely have a Senator David Duke from Louisiana. The entire U.S....

Emily Bazelon, staff writer for the New York Times Sunday magazine and a professor at Yale Law School, earned the Sunday Magazine’s newest cover story – an 8,000-word jeremiad against free speech. The cover itself was ironic and oh-so-clever: “Free Speech Will Save Our Democracy,” with an online-style warning label overlaid that suggests such thinking is naive: “Disputed by Third-Party Fact Checkers.” Bazelon’s screed is more relevant and sinister now, after both Twitter and Facebook proudly censored a New York Post expose about alleged emails from Hunter Biden showing his father Joe had met with Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser of...

President Donald Trump’s failure to contain the coronavirus outbreak and his refusal to promote clear public-health guidelines have left many senior Republicans despairing that he will ever play a constructive role in addressing the crisis, with some concluding they must work around Trump and ignore or even contradict his pronouncements. In recent days, some of the most prominent figures in the GOP outside the White House have broken with Trump over issues like the value of wearing a mask in public and heeding the advice of health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom the president and other hard-right figures within...

Quitting the Times Bari Weiss sets off an explosion at the Newspaper of Record.Wed Jul 15, 2020 Bruce Bawer I wrote my first book review for the New York Times in 1990. It was about a grim memoir, in the Face of Death, by a dying Swiss jurist called Peter Noll. Over the next decade and a half, several of the editors at the Book Review invited me to write about many other books, mostly literary fiction. Here are just the A’s and B’s: Louis Auchincloss, Deidre Bair, John Banville, Louis Begley, Veronica Buckley, Frederick Busch, A.S. Byatt. After I...

WASHINGTON — Sidney Powell, a firebrand lawyer whose pugnacious Fox News appearances had earned her numerous private phone conversations with President Trump, sent a letter last year to Attorney General William P. Barr about her soon-to-be new client, Michael T. Flynn. Asking for “utmost confidentiality,” Ms. Powell told Mr. Barr that the case against Mr. Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser who had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I., smacked of “corruption of our beloved government institutions for what appears to be political purposes.” She asked the attorney general to appoint an outsider to review the case, confident...

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. This month we’re adding the stories of important L.G.B.T.Q. figures. On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas walked into Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory, with a gun and a plan to enact vengeance. What happened next came to define her life and legacy: She fired at Warhol, nearly killing him. The incident reduced her to a tabloid headline, but also drew attention to her writing, which is still read in some women and gender studies courses today. Solanas was a radical feminist...

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has taken a commanding lead over President Trump in the 2020 race, building a wide advantage among women and nonwhite voters and making deep inroads with some traditionally Republican-leaning groups that have shifted away from Mr. Trump following his ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new national poll of registered voters by The New York Times and Siena College. Mr. Biden is currently ahead of Mr. Trump by 14 percentage points, garnering 50 percent of the vote compared with 36 percent for Mr. Trump. That is among the most dismal showings of Mr....

“ Former President George W. Bush’s spokesman vehemently denied an article from the New York Times that alleged he would not be voting for President Donald Trump in 2020. The NYT reported Saturday that a slew of high-profile Republicans do not plan on supporting Trump’s reelection. Included in that list was Bush, and the NYT cited “people familiar with their thinking.”

The U.S. Marine Corps on Friday issued detailed directives about removing and banning public displays of the Confederate battle flag at Marine installations — an order that extended to such items as mugs, posters and bumper stickers. “Current events are a stark reminder that it is not enough for us to remove symbols that cause division — rather, we also must strive to eliminate division itself,” the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. David H. Berger, said in a statement on Wednesday.

As Americans reeling from coronavirus stay-at-home orders struggle to celebrate the nation's heroes on Memorial Day, The New York Times published an editorial over the weekend that claims the U.S. military celebrates white supremacy.On Sunday, The New York Times Editorial Board published the piece titled “Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy?” The editorial made the argument that it’s time to rename military bases after “American heroes, not racist traitors.” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Rath Hoffman tweeted Sunday night in response: “On a solemn day for remembering those that have given their lives for our country fighting against tyranny and...

Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer leveled scathing criticism at The New York Times on Friday over an article pointing out that the Israel Defense Forces’ research and development efforts, which have proven crucial in Israel’s battle against the coronavirus, are predominately dedicated to devising ways to counter the Jewish state’s enemies. The article, “Israeli Army’s Idea Lab Aims at a New Target: Saving Lives,” which was published on Thursday, states that “The Israeli Defense Ministry’s research-and-development arm is best known for pioneering cutting-edge ways to kill people and blow things up, with stealth tanks and sniper drones among its more...

It can be hard to recall, since so many members of President Trump’s inner circle have been indicted, convicted of federal crimes and sent to prison, but the first felon to emerge from this administration was Michael Flynn. Flynn, who served as national security adviser before resigning in disgrace, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators. At the time, Trump said, “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the vice president and the FBI.” Flynn did lie, as he admitted to under oath in a court of law — twice. He told investigators, falsely, that he had...

It is said that the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result. In media, NeverTrumpism is writing the same column over and over and expecting the Orange Bad Man to disappear. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: President Donald Trump is unraveling. Oh, you’ve heard it eleventy billion times from the same half dozen “NeverTrump” pundits? Yeah, so has everyone. It’s the same column from the same people published with alarming frequency. It’s not the pundits’ fault, necessarily. They are who they are, and clearly Trump has broken the part...

The New York Times on Friday penned an editorial calling on the Democratic National Committee to investigate Tara Reade's sexual assault allegations made against former Vice President Joe Biden. The editorial board made the case that the DNC had an obligation to look into the allegations because Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee. As is so often the case in such situations, it is all but impossible to be certain of the truth. But the stakes are too high to let the matter fester — or leave it to be investigated by and adjudicated in the media. Mr. Biden is...

The New York Times' Bret Stephens took a lot of heat for arguing New York lockdown rules don't fit the rest of the country. I know the feeling. Bret Stephens has a tough job. I don’t mean like 19th-century coal miner tough, but as one of the “conservative” opinion contributors at The New York Times, he winds up pleasing none of the people a lot of the time. This is because much of the Grey Lady’s leftist readership doesn’t think the Times should run conservative views at all and much of the American right finds the anti-Trump “can’t we go...

WASHINGTON - In his daily briefings on the coronavirus, President Donald Trump has brandished all the familiar tools in his rhetorical arsenal: belittling Democratic governors, demonizing the media, trading in innuendo and bulldozing over the guidance of experts. It’s the kind of performance the president relishes but one that has his advisers and Republican allies worried. As unemployment soars and the death toll skyrockets, and new polls show support for the president’s handling of the crisis sagging, White House allies and Republican lawmakers increasingly believe the briefings are hurting the president more than helping him. Many view the sessions as...