Free Republic

His super PAC, which is said to have amassed $400 million alongside its nonprofit arm, has grown even more influential. And powerful groups for congressional Republicans are being stocked with Trump allies.President Trump is harnessing the Republican Party’s all-encompassing deference to him to exert even greater control over the G.O.P. big-money world, which had long been one of the party’s final remaining redoubts of Trump skepticism. For years, the super PACs allied with House and Senate Republicans have been some of the most powerful and independent fiefs in American politics, raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in each...

Eighteen states sued the Trump administration Monday over its halting of permits for wind-energy projects, arguing that its actions posed an existential threat to the burgeoning industry.“This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable and affordable energy,” said Attorney General Letitia James of New York, which is one of the plaintiffs. She said the halt threatened “the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments” and was “delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet.”The halt on federal permits for wind energy was first laid out...

Joe Biden refuses to drop out of the presidential race even as some liberals, rattled by the incumbent’s frightening debate performance last week, keep pressuring him to do so.Who’s surprised by that?The inertia of a presidential campaign is one of the most powerful forces in politics. Ending one after a party’s nomination has been secured is almost unfathomable. The candidate is already strapped to the rocket.Furthermore, all serious presidential contenders, particularly those who hold or have already held the office — this year, we have both — have a God complex. They must. And doubt doesn’t exist in the presence...

A 4chan user has leaked 270GB of internal New York Times data, including what's said to be source code and other web assets, via the notorious image board. According to the unnamed netizen, the information includes "basically all source code belonging to The New York Time Company," amounting to roughly 5,000 repositories and 3.6 million files now available for download from peer-to-peer networks. Details on how to get the files were shared by the poster on 4chan. While The Register has seen what's said to be a list of files in the purported leak, we have not yet verified the...

The staff of the New York Times spent the morning patiently waiting by the computer, waiting for the call from Hamas to see what the terrorists would like to have printed on the front page today. "No fingers on the keyboard until Hamas calls!" declared Chief Editor Joe Khan. "We don't post a single word unless we've sourced it directly from the terrorists on the ground - understood?" At long last, the Zoom app began ringing with a phone call from a Hamas spokesman. "Hello! Allahu Ackbar! Okay, what message do you guys want out there?" asked reporter Gene Okerlund....

Of all the distortions and paranoia that Tucker Carlson promoted on his since-canceled Fox News program, one looms large: a conspiracy theory that an Arizona man working as a covert government agent incited the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol to sabotage and discredit former President Donald Trump and his political movement. What’s known about the man — a two-time Trump voter named Ray Epps — is that he took part in demonstrations in Washington that day and the night before. He was captured on camera urging a crowd to march with him and enter the Capitol. But at...

In settling with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has avoided an excruciating, drawn-out trial in which its founding chief, Rupert Murdoch, its top managers and its biggest stars would have had to face hostile grilling on an embarrassing question: Why did they allow a virulent and defamatory conspiracy theory about the 2020 election to spread across the network when so many of them knew it to be false?

It is ironic to hear Democrats frequently emphasize the principle of “no one is above the law,” given that they often evade consequences for wrongdoing.While there are many voices on the left that saw the indictment of Trump after it was unsealed and realized there’s no “there” there, there are still plenty of radical leftists who couldn’t care less. They hate Trump and want him punished, regardless of the evidence. And one need not look further than the New York Times to see an example.On Thursday, the so-called paper of record published an article headlined, “Trump’s Indictment Is Karmic Justice,...

A trove of leaked Pentagon documents reveals how deeply Russia’s security and intelligence services have been penetrated by the United States, demonstrating Washington’s ability to warn Ukraine about planned strikes and providing an assessment of the strength of Moscow’s war machine. The documents paint a portrait of a depleted Russian military that is struggling in its war in Ukraine and of a military apparatus that is deeply compromised. They contain daily real-time warnings to U.S. intelligence agencies on the timing of Moscow’s strikes and even its specific targets. Such intelligence has allowed the United States to pass on to Ukraine...

Former President Donald Trump recently told aides to hire Laura Loomer, a far-right, anti-Muslim activist with a history of expressing bigoted views, for a campaign role, according to four people familiar with the plans. Trump met with Loomer recently and directed advisers to give her a role in support of his candidacy, two of the people familiar with the move said. On Tuesday, after Trump’s arraignment in New York, Loomer attended the former president’s speech at Mar-a-Lago, his resort and residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Some of Trump’s aides were said to have concerns that such a hire would cause...

WASHINGTON – A new batch of classified documents that appear to detail U.S. national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China surfaced on social media sites Friday, alarming the Pentagon and adding turmoil to a situation that seemed to have caught the Biden administration off guard. The scale of the leak — analysts say more than 100 documents may have been obtained — along with the sensitivity of the documents themselves, could be hugely damaging, U.S. officials said. A senior intelligence official called the leak “a nightmare for the Five Eyes,” in a reference to the United...

Classified war documents detailing secret American and NATO plans for building up the Ukrainian military...were posted this week on social media channels, senior Biden administration officials said...the documents appear to have been modified...overstating American estimates of Ukrainian war dead and understating estimates of Russian troops killed...But the disclosures in the original documents, which appear as photographs of charts of anticipated weapons deliveries, troop and battalion strengths, and other plans,...

WASHINGTON — As Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, prepared to bring criminal charges against former President Donald Trump, House Republicans rallied to Trump’s side, vowing to use their power in Congress to haul in Bragg and force him to turn over documents and answer questions. The reality, they have privately acknowledged, is much more complicated. For weeks, top House Republicans and their lawyers have been grappling with how to move forward in their investigation of Bragg amid legal and institutional concerns about overreach and how to enforce a subpoena in court. The situation is a reminder for the new...

WASHINGTON — Hours after pleading not guilty to 34 counts of filing false business records in a courtroom in Lower Manhattan, former President Donald Trump maintained his innocence Tuesday before a crowd of supporters at Mar-a-Lago. He repeated a host of familiar and inaccurate attacks on his opponents. Here’s a fact-check of his remarks. What Was Said: “From the beginning, the Democrats spied on my campaign, remember that? They attacked me with an onslaught of fraudulent investigations. Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine impeachment hoax No. 1, impeachment hoax No. 2, the illegal and unconstitutional raid on Mar-a-Lago right here.”...

Chinese Ambassador to the European Union, Fu Cong, has confirmed that China will not recognize the Ukrainian territories taken over by Russia during its military operation in Ukraine. “China does not recognize Crimea as Russian, as well as other territories of Ukraine that became part of the Russian Federation,” he emphasized. According to Cong, the statement about “boundless friendship” between China and Russia is merely a “rhetorical device, nothing more.” Recently, Chinese leader Xi Jinping traveled to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and discuss issues of shared concern, including the Ukraine-Russia war. Cong underscored that China “does...

Renowned author James Patterson has ripped the New York Times in a fiery open letter over its “lack of journalistic rigor” regarding its Best Sellers list — after the closely-watched list snubbed his highly-reviewed novel about law enforcement in America. Patterson, 76, said his new book “Walk the Blue Line: No Right, No Left – Just cops telling their true stories to James Patterson” initially failed to make the list even though he said it outsold all but three of the books on the list of 15, according to BookScan, which compiles book sales data. He accused the Times of...

Twitter has removed the verification check mark on the main account of The New York Times, one of CEO Elon Musk's most despised news organizations. The removal comes as many of Twitter’s high-profile users are bracing for the loss of the blue check marks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors on the social media platform. Musk, who owns Twitter, set a deadline of Saturday for verified users to buy a premium Twitter subscription or lose the checks on their profiles. The Times said in a story Thursday that it would not pay Twitter for verification of...

In some ways, it was the turn of events that Democratic voters had dreamed of and some of the party’s lawmakers had long demanded: After years of telling lies, shattering norms, inciting a riot at the Capitol and being impeached twice, Donald Trump on Thursday became the first former president to face criminal charges. But as the gravity of the moment sank in, Democratic voters, party officials and activists across the country absorbed the news of Trump’s extraordinary indictment with a more complex set of reactions. Their feelings ranged from jubilation and vindication to anxieties about the substance of the...

WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.

Since Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia’s recent withdrawal from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) — a widely used voter-roll management group with ties to left-wing activists — last week, America’s legacy media have been in freak-out mode. In uniform fashion, leftist outlets have labeled the legitimate concerns raised by the aforementioned states as “conspiracy theories” promoted by “election deniers” and “right-wing media.” As The Federalist’s Victoria Marshall reported, publications like The New York Times and Associated Press have gone out of their way to run grossly dishonest headlines such as “G.O.P. States Abandon Bipartisan Voting Integrity Group, Yielding to...