Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — John Kirby, President Joe Biden’s national security spokesman, is getting an expanded role at the White House, according to a U.S. official. Kirby will have a new title, White House national security communications adviser, and will be named an assistant to the president, the official said Sunday. The official was not authorized to speak about an appointment that has not been publicly announced and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Details of the expanded role were first reported by Reuters. Kirby came to the White House in 2022 as the National Security Council coordinator...

At the White House Summit on Extremism That Shall Remain Unspecified Because Violent Followers Belonging To Unnamed Extremist Movement Might Take Extreme Offense And Act Extremely, the feds are touting a groundbreaking new strategy to fight terrorists. Just kidding. It's actually the same old futile strategy that big-government liberals use to cure everything: mo' money, mo' money, mo' money. Instead of killing jihadists, keeping them off of our soil, locking up their poisonous spiritual agitators and shutting off their terror-funding pipelines, President Obama called on America and the world to "invest" in unnamed immigrant "communities" vulnerable to unnamed extremism. Some...

During Wednesday afternoon’s White House press conference, ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl cornered Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz over why the administration does not consider the Taliban to be a “terrorist” organization. In light of a possible Jordanian prisoner swap with ISIS forces, Karl asked Schultz how that government’s actions differ from the United States’ 2014 release of Gitmo prisoners to the Taliban in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. When the spokesman suggested the Taliban is just an “armed insurgency,” and not a “terrorist organization” like ISIS, Karl pounced: “You don’t think the Taliban’s a terrorist group?” In the clip...

Iran says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "baselessly" associated the Islamic world with the Islamic State group during his address to the United Nations General Assembly. In a reply to the Monday speech, Iran also said Netanyahu continued a policy to "sabotage and disrupt" Iranian negotiations with world powers over the country's nuclear program. The Israeli leader told the United Nations Iran is trying to trick the world into accepting an agreement to end sanctions while still allowing it to develop nuclear weapons. Iran has long declared its nuclear program to be for peaceful purposes. Netanyahu said Iran is on...

A State Department spokeswoman attacked Bill O’Reilly Thursday for saying another State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, looks “way out of her depth,” following days of mixed messages and incoherent statements from the State Department.Marie Harf, deputy spokeswoman for the State Department, said in a tweet Thursday that O’Reilly’s coverage of the State Department’s failure to coherently talk about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria lacks intelligence and class.The tweet links to a Wednesday O’Reilly Factor segment on Fox News, in which O’Reilly criticized the Obama administration’s inconsistent messaging and lack of strategy for dealing with ISIS.In a clip shown...

Can anyone recall another instance outside of Israel in which the government of the United States went out of its way not to blame a terrorist organization for a terror attack? Encouraging restraint from both the Israeli government— livid over the finding of the bodies of the missing on Monday, vowing to exact justice on the perpetrators— and from the Palestinian leadership, some of whom are calling the trial an Israeli conspiracy, and all of whom are bracing for reprisal, State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters that the US is intimate with intelligence on the case, in...

The State Department is insisting that secretary of state John Kerry’s decision to reinstate four employees put on administrative leave in the wake of of last year’s Benghazi attack was the right call. A spokeswoman said that Kerry, after revewing the Accountability Review Board’s report on the attack and the “totality of the careers” of the four employees, determined that the the action taken against them was “not warranted.” “These are people with real lives, real careers,” deputy press secretary Marie Harf told reporters on Tuesday?. Asked who should be held accountable for the attack that resulted in the deaths...