Free Republic

At their weekly news conference, several Republican House leaders wrongly claimed the special counsel report into Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents found the president was mentally unfit to stand trial. The report said no such thing. Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report ultimately concluded “the evidence is not sufficient to convict” Biden and that “no criminal charges are warranted.” The report did refer numerous times to what it characterized as Biden’s “limited” and “poor” memory. Those observations were included, Hur wrote, because they factored into his decision about whether he could convince a jury that Biden had acted “willfully” to...

The impact of the use of a nuclear device in Ukraine will depend on the details. Like any large-scale industrial army, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have obvious pressure points that would be vulnerable to nuclear attack. These include logistical centers, command and communications nodes, and concentrations of front-line forces. During the Cold War the Soviet Union expected to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO (and expected that NATO would use them in return) and it is therefore likely that the Russian armed forces have workable theories as to how they might best use tactical nukes to inflict damage on Ukraine’s...

On the occasion of the sinking of the Moskva, it is worth spending a moment thinking about how the Great Powers of the Black Sea waged naval war against one another in the 20th century, because Moskva is hardly the first modern warship to find her way to the bottom of the Pontus Euxinus. For Russia, the Black Sea has long represented a problem that remains stunningly obvious today; it is a critical theater of naval operations, the control of which can threaten amphibious attacks along its coastlines as well as conduct or prevent blockades of trade from crucial ports....

Key point: The risk of war may be low, but it is ever present. As the United States enters an election year, prospects for global stability remain uncertain. President Trump’s foreign policy stood at odds with those of his predecessor, and will likely a central point of contestation in the election. At this point, several crises might emerge that would not only turn the election, but potentially bring about a wider global conflict. Iran-Israel Iran and Israel are already waging low-intensity war across the Middle East. Turkey The state of the relationship between the U.S. and Turkey has decayed to...

The latest concern raised by the Trump campaign about mail-in voting is that some states run by Democrats will allow votes to be cast and counted after Election Day.Specifically, Hogan Gidley, the national press secretary for the Trump campaign, warned that Nevada legislators have created a loophole that would allow voters to “wake up on Wednesday morning, see that they don’t like the results and then go drop their ballots in the mail,” and that those votes would be counted.But Gidley is exaggerating the potential for what he called “massive fraud” in part because his concern is based on the...

In a contentious Oval Office meeting, President Donald Trump and the Democratic congressional leaders — Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer — disagreed over funding for a border wall, mangling some facts in the process. The president claimed that “a lot of the wall is built,” and he cited statistics purporting to show “it’s very effective” at stopping illegal immigration. But his figures correspond to those in a Customs and Border Protection video on various border security strategies deployed before he took office, from 1992 to 2016. And in most sectors Trump cited as successful, there is very little fencing...

In his speech in El Paso on immigration reform on May 10, 2011, President Obama declared that the fence along the border with Mexico is "now basically complete." ... the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President George W. Bush. It authorized the construction of hundreds of miles of additional fencing along the border with Mexico. The act specified "at least two layers of reinforced fencing." But the law was quietly altered in a significant way the following year. Responding to urging from the Department of Homeland Security -- which...

What, me worry about Ahmadinejad? Last night's MSNBC lineup provided a trifecta of reasons people dismiss that network's "news analysis": the intellect of the show's host, the insight of his guest, and the reputation of a “scholar” the guest referenced. In this case, Ed Schultz interviewed a man who encouraged us to think the best of a Holocaust Denier and cited a "scholar" who turned in an intellectually bankrupt review of a book I co-wrote with David Horowitz, Party of Defeat. On "The Ed Show" last night, Schultz discussed the Iranian nuclear program with Matthew Duss, a senior policy researcher...