Free Republic

President Trump reposted a fake video showing former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, as Trump administration officials continue to accuse Mr. Obama of trying to harm Mr. Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election, and the president seeks to redirect conversation from the Epstein files. The short video, which appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence and posted on TikTok before being reposted on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account on Sunday, comes days after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration trying to...

This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Trump gave Mr. Epstein a note for his 50th birthday in 2003 that included a sketch of a naked woman and a cryptic reference to a “secret” the two men shared.In the swirl of money and sun-tanned women that was their Palm Beach-and-Manhattan set, Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein spent nearly 15 years mingling side-by-side as public friends. There were lavish dinners with boldface names at Mr. Epstein’s mansion on the Upper East Side and raucous parties with cheerleaders and models at Mr. Trump’s private club and residence at Mar-a-Lago....

As a warming planet delivers more extreme weather, experts warn that the Trump administration is dismantling the government’s disaster capabilities.In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say. Staff reductions, budget cuts and other changes made by the administration since January have already created holes at the National Weather Service, which forecasts and warns of dangerous weather. Mr. Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year would close 10 laboratories...

Some senior officials who have taken the test have been asked whether they said anything negative about the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, in a highly unusual use of the tool.Typically, the F.B.I. has turned to polygraph tests to sniff out employees who might have betrayed their country or shown they cannot be trusted with secrets. Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself. In interviews and...

On Saturday, the New York Times editorial board published an article claiming that Trump’s “politicized FBI” has “made Americans less safe.” That’s rich. I’m old enough to remember when the Obama administration and the Biden administration actually did weaponize the FBI against Donald Trump. And I’m pretty sure everyone on the NYT editorial board is, too. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino wrote a scathing response to the article, calling it “precisely why hard-working Americans simply do not trust the media.” Bongino’s tweet, which quickly gained traction online, took direct aim at what he described as a “poorly thought out hit...

Only 11 days after President Trump was inaugurated for a second term, his administration began a purge of the F.B.I. that now threatens some of the bureau’s most important missions. His appointees ousted eight of its most experienced managers, including the division heads overseeing national security, cybersecurity and criminal investigations. Several had worked on prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters or had assisted in the various investigations of Mr. Trump, and Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, said they could not be trusted to carry out the president’s agenda.That was just the beginning. Over the past five months, many...

The Supreme Court has set a new, higher bar for judges seeking to block Trump administration policies nationwide. But some legal routes remain open.A Supreme Court ruling limiting the ability of judges to block White House policies will bring a wave of urgency and uncertainty to the federal courts, experts said, as plaintiffs pursue new ways of blocking President Trump’s agenda and judges sort out how to apply the court’s complex ruling. On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that district court judges likely exceeded their authority with so-called nationwide injunctions. Also known as universal injunctions, they have been used by...

The court tied the hands of judges at a time when Congress has been cowed and internal executive branch constraints have been steamrolled.The Supreme Court ruling barring judges from swiftly blocking government actions, even when they may be illegal, is yet another way that checks on executive authority have eroded as President Trump pushes to amass more power.The decision on Friday, by a vote of 6 to 3, will allow Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship to take effect in some parts of the country — even though every court that has looked at the directive has...

Zohran Mamdani’s stunning performance in the Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday amounted to a watershed moment for Muslim New Yorkers, who could see one of their own lead City Hall for the first time should he succeed in the general election in November. New York City is home to roughly one million Muslims; they made up 12 percent of the electorate in the 2021 mayoral election. Mr. Mamdani wove his faith into his campaign from its earliest days, hitting the trail while fasting for Ramadan and taking his message of affordability to mosques and Muslim community centers throughout the city....

Paywall. Headline speaks for itself. If you can get the text in some circuitous way, please post it.

President Trump has long mused about using troops to crush violent protests or riots in blue-state cities. He is now moving to do so in Los Angeles.Setting up a rare use of military force on domestic soil, President Trump ordered the Pentagon on Saturday night to send at least 2,000 National Guard troops to respond to protests in Los Angeles set off by his immigration crackdown.Mr. Trump has long mused about using military force on domestic soil to crush violent protests or riots, fight crime and hunt for undocumented migrants — a move that his aides talked him out of...

"Senior executives are being pushed out and the director, Kash Patel, is more freely using polygraph tests to tamp down on news leaks about leadership decisions and behavior"Behind the scenes, his vision of an F.B.I. under President Trump is quietly taking shape. Agents have been forced out. Others have been demoted or put on leave with no explanation. And in an effort to hunt down the sources of news leaks, Mr. Patel is forcing employees to take polygraph tests.Taken together, the moves are causing worrisome upheaval at the F.B.I., eliciting fear and uncertainty as Mr. Patel and his deputy, Dan...

It is one of the more baffling story lines of Donald J. Trump’s second term. The president has said he wants to personally visit Fort Knox to ensure that no one has stolen the government-owned gold bars that are stored there. Mr. Trump has not explained why any gold might be missing from the nation’s heavily guarded reserves. His own Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has insisted that there is no reason to worry. “All the gold is there,” Mr. Bessent emphatically told Bloomberg in February, at one point looking directly into a camera and addressing the American people. Mr. Trump’s...

The administration is not only allowing more greenhouse gases. It is undermining the nation’s ability to understand and respond to a hotter planet.When the Trump administration declared two weeks ago that it would largely disregard the economic cost of climate change as it sets policies and regulations, it was just the latest step in a multipronged effort to erase global warming from the American agenda.But President Trump is doing more than just turning a blind eye to the fact that the planet is growing hotter. He is weakening the country’s capacity to understand global warming and to prepare for its...

A raid on Abby’s Bakery in Los Fresnos heralded the crackdown to come. Ahead of the owners’ trial for “harboring” undocumented workers, the community is seeing the impact of the president’s policies.Most mornings, Leonardo Baez, a father of seven, wakes up hours before sunrise to mix bread dough in the border city of Los Fresnos, Texas. Punishing and laborious work, yes, but owning a beloved bakery has been a lifelong dream of his, he said.It is now in jeopardy.In February, federal agents swooped down on his shop, Abby’s Bakery, detained workers they said were in the country illegally and pressed...

At home, President Trump is ordering up investigations into his political opponents and finding creative ways to use his executive power to ruin the lives of even some of his milder critics.Abroad, Mr. Trump has sent a different message: Let bygones be bygones. Even if those bygones involved trying to assassinate him or working with Al Qaeda.In a series of speeches and off-the-cuff remarks during the first major foreign trip of his second term, Mr. Trump has told audiences in the Middle East that he is willing to set the past aside in the interests of peace and profit.“I have...

President Trump has long railed against drug traffickers. He has said they should be given the death penalty “for their heinous acts.” On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order listing cartels as “terrorist organizations.”But many public health and addiction experts fear that his budget proposals and other actions effectively punish people who use drugs and struggle with addiction.The Trump administration has vowed to reduce overdose deaths, one of the country’s deadliest public health crises, by emphasizing law enforcement, border patrols and tariffs against China and Mexico to keep out fentanyl and other dangerous drugs....

On March 11, about 50 judges gathered in Washington for the biannual meeting of the Judicial Conference, which oversees the administration of the federal courts. It was the first time the conference met since President Trump retook the White House.In the midst of discussions of staffing levels and long-range planning, the judges’ conversations were focused, to an unusual degree, on rising threats against judges and their security, said several people who attended the gathering.Behind closed doors at one session, Judge Richard J. Sullivan, the chairman of the conference’s Committee on Judicial Security, raised a scenario that weeks before would have...

PBS NEWSHOUR: New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart join William Brangham to discuss the week in politics, including President Trump's continued faceoff with the courts, if Republicans will begin pushing back against the president and Harvard rejecting Trump's demands. David Brooks, New York Times: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal. "The core argument is that Trump is really about amassing power," Brooks said of his column. "And anything that might potentially restrain his power, he will destroy. And that includes the court systems and anything part...

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....