Free Republic

MSNBC’s Jen Psaki appeared to mock White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt with her own spin as press secretary for the Trump administration during her show on Friday. "I have noticed the White House briefing room has taken a bit of a bizarro turn lately. And I figured, what the hell, it’s a Friday night. Why not dust off the cobwebs and field a few questions from the White House press briefing room today? Because it’s been a while. Of course, I’m going to answer them without the usual MAGA spin," Psaki said on "The Briefing." The former White House...

MSNBC host and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted in a new interview that she never saw signs that former President Joe Biden had declined while she worked for him. "I never saw that person —not a single time, and I was in the Oval Office every day, that was on that debate stage," Psaki said on the "Mixed Signals" podcast about Biden's performance during the June 2024 presidential debate which raised alarms about his fitness to serve another term. He dropped out the following month and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the Democratic...

Tony, an energetic 7-year-old who loves playing football and roughhousing with his brothers wasn’t all that excited when his parents took the family to see Santa in December. Instead, he was tired and lethargic. Tony has been in and out of the hospital, his body weakened by chemotherapy. Pauline McLaurin quit her job as a fifth-grade teacher to care for him, and they struggle to pay their bills on the salary her husband, Ronnie McLaurin, makes as an electrician. As if that weren’t enough, the McLaurins have a new worry. They lost their private insurance when Pauline McLaurin left her...

President Trump has repeatedly shared an image of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's finger tattoos in an effort to link the Maryland man, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador on March 15, to the notorious MS-13 gang. On Monday, Mr. Trump again shared a photo of Abrego Garcia's left hand on social media, alleging he "had 'MS-13' tattooed onto his knuckles." The image shows the characters "M," "S," "1" and "3" digitally added above Abrego Garcia's existing tattoos — a leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull — along with labels describing each symbol beneath. Many people online recognized...

Podcaster Tim Pool took full advantage of his New Media seat in the White House Briefing Room to humiliate the corporate media to their faces … and it was glorious… “Many of the news organizations represented in this room have marched in lock step on false narratives, such as the ‘very fine people’ hoax, the Covington smear,” Pool said, prefacing his first official question to Awesome White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. “And now, the ‘Maryland man’ hoax, where an MS-13 gang member, adjudicated by two different judges, I believe, is simply being referred to as a ‘Maryland man’ over...

She can finally have some pride in her job! Former President Joe Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has landed a new gig out of the White House as a grand marshal of NYC Pride Parade. Jean-Pierre, who became the first openly gay spokesperson to hold press briefings for a US president, will be among those to head the Big Apple’s famed annual parade in June, CBS reported. “It goes back to that trail-blazing career that she’s had in politics and representing the community at the highest microphone that exists,” NYC Pride spokesperson Chris Piedmont said of Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre, 50 —...

There was emotion across the United States following the death of Pope Francis, with many mourners contrasting the Argentine pontiff's gentle touch with the harshness of the current US administration. At New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral, hundreds of Catholics gathered in mourning, including worshipper Peter who said "we lost a very good man" whose values were entirely at odds with those of President Donald Trump. Francis "cared about (people) most of us forget about – the poor, the downtrodden, the forgotten, and the healing power of forgiveness", said the 70-year-old, who did not provide his last name, as Catholics and...

MIAMI — After Florida International University’s police department entered into an agreement with the federal government to carry out immigration enforcement on campus, some students say they are terrified. “It’s scary and nerve-racking,” said an undergraduate at the university. The student, who's not being identified because he lacks legal immigration status, told NBC News he came to the U.S. when he was 5 with his family after they were threatened by gangs in their native El Salvador. FIU is one of a number of universities in Florida that have signed agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the 287(g)...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Campus mentors. Move-in events. Scholarships. Diversity offices that made them feel welcome on predominantly white campuses. As U.S. colleges pull back on diversity, equity and inclusion practices, students of color say they are starting to lose all of these things and more. The full scope of campus DEI rollbacks is still emerging as colleges respond to the Trump administration’s orders against diversity practices. But students at some schools said early cuts are chipping away at the sense of community that helped open the door to higher education. “It feels like we’re going back. I don’t know how...

Sen. Chris Van Hollen took aim at President Donald Trump and the El Salvador government over their treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the migrant who the government said in court was erroneously deported to El Salvador, and for trying to deflect from the notion that the U.S. government is flouting court orders to "facilitate" his return to the U.S. The Maryland Democrat joined Abrego Garcia's wife and mother and other supporters at Washington Dulles International Airport on Friday and spoke about his three-day visit, providing more details about the one-hour conversation he had with Abrego Garcia. Van Hollen took aim...

President Donald Trump’s tariffs are threatening to put a crimp in Christmas. The United States imports as much as 75% of the toy products it sells from China, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, making it one of the industries most reliant on that country’s supply chain. Along with sports equipment and games, it is the fourth-largest import category from that nation. As a result, toy industry officials are warning U.S. consumers to expect higher prices and fewer choices this year, including for the holidays, as a result of Trump’s tariffs. “Christmas is in danger,” said Greg Ahearn, president and...

Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI) claimed on Friday on CNN’s “The Situation Room” that the Trump administration was attacking the freedoms of speech, religion and the press. Co-host Pamala Brown said, “You talk about due process, that brings me to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen was able to finally get a face to face meeting with him. The administration admitted that he was wrongly deported to El Salvador. Where do you think this goes from here?” Dingell said, “You know, I don’t know where it goes. I’m glad that the senator was able to see...

More than 200 journalists, including prominent members of the French press, lay down on the steps of the Opéra Bastille in Paris in a symbolic "die-in" as the names of the reporters killed in Gaza were read out on Wednesday. Many wore red-stained press signs and fake flak jackets as they carried photographs of journalists killed in Gaza while trying to report on the war launched by Israel after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “Gaza of faces, not just numbers”, read posters bearing photographs of their fallen Palestinian colleagues. “You can see them behind me, showing pictures of those...

A pause to NIH funding has researchers scrambling for contingency plans at the University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. The center’s brain bank is preserving more than 4,000 brains for research. SEATTLE — Andrea Gilbert thought she knew what would happen to her brain. The 79-year-old retired attorney, who has Alzheimer’s disease and receives care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, agreed to donate it for research in 2023. She hoped to help scientists unlock the keys to a disease that had left her writing notes to remind herself if she’d already brushed her teeth. The fate of that...

When his camera stopped working on his iPhone recently, New Yorker Richard Medina didn't waste any time. With the threat of tariff-fuelled price hikes on smartphones bearing down, he quickly called his phone company for a new one. "I said, 'We've got to switch this out now,'" the 43-year-old recalled. "Let's take care of it." The move was a sign of the pressure rising across the US, where households are being buffeted by what could be staggering price rises, and even possible shortages triggered by the sweeping tariffs that US President Donald Trump announced this month. Some are trying to...

Strolling in bright sunshine across the immaculately raked gravel of Paris's Tuileries gardens, Barbara and Rick Wilson from Dallas, Oregon, were not exactly in disguise. But earlier that morning, on their very first trip to France, Rick, 74, had taken an unusual precaution. Before leaving his hotel, he'd taken a small piece of black tape and covered up the Stars and Stripes flag on the corner of his baseball cap. "We're sick about it. It's horrible. Just horrible," said Rick, as he and his wife contemplated the sudden sense of shame and embarrassment they said they now felt, as Americans,...

This seems, on the surface, like a victory for the legacy media - but it's not the victory they were hoping for. Here's why. On Tuesday, Judge Trevor McFadden granted the Associated Press (AP) an injunction against the Trump administration's banning them from press events in the Oval Office and the East Room. The AP claimed that the administration blocked their access because of editorial viewpoints, and Judge McFadden agreed. Here's Politico's Senior Political Affairs reporter Kyle Cheney's X thread with some details; this takes a little unpacking.BREAKING: Judge McFadden has *granted * the AP’s injunction against the White House’s...

LOS FRESNOS, Texas — Leonardo Baez and Nora Avila-Guel’s bakery in the Texas community of Los Fresnos is a daily stop for many residents to share gossip over coffee and pick up cakes and pastries for birthdays, office parties or themselves. When Homeland Security Investigations agents showed up at Abby’s Bakery in February and arrested the owners and eight employees, residents of Los Fresnos were shocked. Abby’s Bakery doesn’t employ violent criminals and Baez and Avila-Guel are not the people who border czar Tom Homan calls the “worst of the worst” and says are the priority for mass deportations. “I...

GUANGZHOU, China — At his factory in southern China, hat supplier Jeffy Ma is trying to keep up with global demand as well as President Donald Trump’s seismic changes to international trade. His company, Ace Headwear, sews, embroiders and finishes golf visors, cycling headwear and baseball hats for brands such as Wilson and Fila, as well as for Major League Baseball teams. About 40% of the hats his 350 employees make are sold to the United States. “For us, the manufacturing profit is very low, so we cannot absorb so much,” Ma told NBC News last week at his factory...

When wildfire smoke drifts into the Methow Valley, it tends to stay, settling in the folds of the Cascade foothills like a choking fog. Recent summers have brought weeks-long binges of unhealthy air to one of Washington state’s poorest counties, rivaling some of the most polluted cities in the world. Countering this intensifying threat are small nonprofit organizations such as the Methow Valley Citizens Council, which has been distributing air purifiers, maintaining a network of air quality monitors, and spreading the message about how to keep safe when the smoke rolls in. Much of that work was funded by a...