Free Republic

When Attorney General William Barr stated "spying did occur" against the 2016 Trump campaign, most attention was focused on the FBI's surveillance of former junior foreign policy aide Carter Page. But the spying Barr was thinking of, and which he said may or may not have been legally authorized, is more likely to be that carried out by Stefan Halper, a former Republican operative and White House aide who became a foreign policy academic with close ties to both American and British intelligence. One could be forgiven for believing Halper was a creation of the spy novelist John Le Carré....

In 2020, covert actors manipulated the Democratic primary to ensure Joe Biden's nomination and later controlled his presidential agenda, ultimately forcing him to step down in favor of Kamala Harris. In March 2020, all the major Democratic primary candidates abruptly, mysteriously, and in near unison withdrew from the presidential race, ceding the nomination to Joe Biden. Yet Biden had lost the first three races in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada—and only won his first victory in South Carolina. Suddenly, on the eve of the Super Tuesday mega-primaries, the candidacies of front-runner Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and others simply...

A former senior policy adviser to the Obama administration has appeared in court in Britain charged with child sex offences. Rahamim 'Rami' Shy, 46, who co-ordinated the US government's strategy to combat terrorists from Al Qaeda and the Taliban, is accused of arranging the commission of a child sex offence, court documents reveal. He is also charged with possession of two category C indecent images of children and possessing a prohibited image of a child. Shy, a US citizen, who lives in New Jersey, worked for the White House under president Barack Obama and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, was...

CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem said Tuesday on “News Central” that former President Donald Trump is using the “threat of violence” to rally the support of his people. Kayyem said, “It’s about to be 2024. We are running into an election period in which violence and the threat of violence are sort of viewed as an extension of our normal democratic differences. This is one of the successes of what Donald Trump has been able to do, is to sort of be kind of casual about violence.” She continued, “There’s two things. I don’t know how to say it...

There was also that mysterious blank in the police call logs that night — the only call that wasn’t logged that night was the call reporting Campbell’s drowning.

Months before a whistleblower complaint that would spark the Democrat effort for impeachment, a shadowy liberal group founded and staffed by Obama administration alums and former Democrat congressional staffers launched an outside investigation into whether President Trump’s allies were seeking “foreign interference” from Ukraine in the 2020 elections. The group, American Oversight, began investigating the issue in May — more than two months before the “whistleblower” filed a complaint alleging Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.” The group’s purpose is to...

Two Obama-era officials were instrumental in the false flag operation in Alabama ahead of the special election in 2017, reports show. One of the Obama-era officials behind the misinformation campaign in Alabama finally opened up about his group’s role in the caper. Two of the people involved in the social media misinformation campaign in Alabama are denying their roles in the operation, reports indicate. A trove of reports show two Obama-era officials are partially responsible for a misinformation campaign designed to derail Republican Roy Moore’s senatorial campaign in Alabama. Former President Barack Obama campaign organizer, Mikey Dickerson, was instrumental in...

A former White House education adviser during the Obama administration has been arrested and charged with stealing $218,005 from a charter school network he founded, prosecutors said. Seth Andrew, 42, who served as a senior adviser in the Office of Educational Technology, was arrested April 27 on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements to a financial institution. Federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York allege that he used more than half of the money to maintain his bank account above a threshold that enabled him to get better interest...

Zuckerberg’s recent donation of $400 million has been thrown into greater controversy with the revelation that his foundation’s lead in policy and advocacy formerly worked as the campaign manager and senior advisor to former President Obama. David Plouffe was hired in 2017 to lead policy and advocacy work at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a charity founded in 2015 by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan “to accelerate progress in Education, Justice & Opportunity and Science.” Plouffe’s background includes extensive involvement as a policy leader in the Obama campaigns and organizations like Uber, CZI, and most recently...

Far-left Slate joined the Democrats’ and media’s growing calls for recrimination against Trump supporters with an editorial demanding Senior White House adviser Stephen Miller be imprisoned: But [Stephen Miller’s] also a man. And like all men who commit crimes against humanity, he should be imprisoned by the society he wounded, forever prevented from spreading his pestilence and fear. In a just world, this reckoning would happen right on Jan. 21. This is just the latest in a growing call from the media and establishment left to criminalize politics, blacklist Trump supporters, and ruin people personally. On Friday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez...

President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani earlier this week upheld what has become a conservative tradition: attacking billionaire philanthropist George Soros. “Don't tell me I'm anti-Semitic if I oppose him,” Giuliani, a Roman Catholic, said in an interview with New York magazine that quickly went viral. “Soros is hardly a Jew. I'm more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about — he doesn't go to church, he doesn't go to religion — synagogue.” Among those who did tell Giuliani he was, at the least, spreading anti-Semitic propaganda, was Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League....

Full headline: EXCLUSIVE: Surveillance footage shows one of President Obama's senior officials following a woman around a DC Metro station and taking a picture up her skirt with his cell phone Surveillance footage exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com shows one of President Obama’s senior officials following a woman around a DC Metro station and taking a picture up her skirt with his cell phone. William Mendoza was caught on security cameras carrying out the vile act while he was executive director of the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education. As a result of his actions, the married...

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that President Donald Trump's campaign and former Trump adviser Roger Stone conspired with Russia and WikiLeaks to publish hacked Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 presidential race. U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle said in a ruling Tuesday evening that the suit's efforts to tie the Trump campaign and Stone's alleged actions to the nation's capital were too flimsy for the case to proceed in a Washington, D.C., court. "The Trump Campaign’s efforts to elect President Trump in D.C. are not suit-related contacts for those efforts did not involve acts taken...

Most of HBO's documentary The Final Year features members of former President Barack Obama's foreign policy team in 2016 oozing extreme hubris over how wonderful they thought they were. That came to an abrupt halt on Election Night when Donald Trump knocked them off their perches by winning the presidency. None was more shocked than Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes (although United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power came close).  A clip from the documentary shows a devastated Rhodes sitting outdoors after discovering his liberal world has been shattered. His shock is so extreme that he is actually struck dumb and is unable...

The White House has appointed pro-Muslim Brotherhood Robert Malley as a new special assistant to President Barack Obama. As if this is not bad enough, Malley is in charge to cover the whole kitten caboodle: The Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region. This appointment happens to be at the same time that Erdogan of Turkey and Qatar had a millstone breakthrough in reviving the Muslim Brotherhood by gaining special provisions for the Islamist organization in Saudi Arabia and the Arab gulf. Malley, who now works as Senior Director of National Security Council of the White House (NSC) on...

By James A. Barnes, National Journal © National Journal Group Inc. Monday, March 31, 2008 If potential presidents can be judged by how they run their campaigns, then how they staff those efforts may provide important clues to the kinds of talent they would recruit for their administrations. Because Democratic front-runner Barack Obama is a relative newcomer to national politics, an examination of his inner circle of political and policy advisers offers new windows into his thinking, leadership style, and sources of expertise. The Democratic front-runner's team has a relatively shallow bench, but its political achievements thus far are quite...

And the Central Command web site says Gottlieb was detailed from the White House for a time to a joint inter-agency task force focusing on detainee operations in Afghanistan. He was in Kabul from January 2010 through March 2011, according to a biography. Gottlieb, as a White House employee, is allowed to bring guests to dine in the White House mess -- basically an employee cafeteria.

Long before Jim Messina became a trusted aide to President Barack Obama and one of the most powerful men in Washington, he was just a simple boy from Boise. Now, after working in politics for just over a decade, he lives in a lavish D.C. estate. How this happened is a classic Washington Cinderella story. Raised in Idaho by a single mother, Messina moved to Washington in 1995, in his mid-20s, to take a job as a legislative aide for Max Baucus, the conservative Democratic senator from Montana (now ambassador to China). Baucus supported George W. Bush-era personal and corporate...

If the Bergdahl uproar feels creepily reminiscent of the Benghazi uproar, or the Syrian "red line" uproar, or the choose-your-own- Obama -foreign-adventure uproar, it's because they all have a common denominator. This is what happens when political hacks formally take over foreign policy. It's the "formal" point that bears some meditation. Barack Obama isn't the first president to make foreign-policy decisions on the basis of domestic political calculations. He does, however, win the distinction of being the first president to utterly disregard—to treat with contempt—the institutions and procedures that were designed to help the commander in chief insulate the serious...

President Obama’s top science adviser, John P. Holdren, advocated the "de-development" of the United States in books he published in the 1970s. "A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States," Holdren wrote in a 1973 book he co-authored with Paul R. Ehrlch and Anne H. Ehrlich. "De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation." In the vision expressed by Holdren and his co-authors, the Ehrlichs, the need for "de-development" of the United States demanded...