Free Republic

At 1:45 p.m. Sunday, President Joe Biden’s senior staff was notified that he was stepping away from the 2024 race. At 1:46 p.m., that message was made public. It was never Biden’s intention to leave the race: Up until he decided to step aside Sunday, he was all in. His campaign was planning fundraisers and events and setting up travel over the next few weeks. But even as Biden was publicly dug in and insisting he was staying in the race, he was quietly reflecting on the disaster of the past few weeks, on the past three years of his...

Jeff Zients, the incoming White House chief of staff, met multiple times in 2016 with President Biden's son Hunter Biden who is facing criminal and congressional probes into his past business dealings. According to emails obtained from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and verified by Fox News Digital, Zients met with Hunter Biden twice in February 2016 and on another occasion in May 2016, just months before President Biden, the vice president at the time, was set to leave the White House. President Biden also attended the first two meetings which both took place at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where the...

An alleged campaign finance violation could ensnare Secretary of State Antony Blinken and 51 former senior intelligence officials who asserted without evidence in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. America First Legal, a conservative organization run by former Donald Trump White House aide Stephen Miller, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in late October, alleging a "coordinated communication" and an unreported in-kind contribution to the Joe Biden presidential campaign and related entities, in violation of federal law. "[The] evidence suggests that the respondents failed to disclose coordinated expenditures constituting in-kind donations with respect to the...

Antony Blinken represents neither the beginning nor the end of the info ops run to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Revisiting the contemporaneous coverage of the laptop story in light of last week’s revelations about Blinken reveals the scandal extends far beyond the Biden campaign and involves government agents. Last week, news broke that a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, testified as part of a House Judiciary Committee investigation that Blinken, now-secretary of state and then-Biden campaign senior adviser, had contacted Morell to discuss the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story. Blinken and Morell...

WASHINGTON – In moments of great peril and uncertainty, the question of who actually runs Washington – who they are, what they think, what they know, what they think they know – takes on even more importance than it might under normal circumstances. In this, the first in a three-part series, Asia Times will examine the current power dynamics that shape the Biden White House and his national security team. Needless to say, the most important players in Washington are, as one might expect, the ones closest to the President, even if, for the most part, they remain unknown by...

A new book being published by a pair of New York Times reporters writes that White House Office of Public Engagement director and senior adviser Cedric Richmond referred to two prominent members of "the Squad" as "f---ing idiots." An excerpt of the new book, "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future" by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin, obtained by Fox News Digital writes that Richmond, a former House member, made the comments about Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to a friend. Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti also had words for "the...

I think we can say, at least for the moment, it looks like the Biden agenda is dead.Whether it will come back at a later point, scaled back is another question. But, right now, it’s looking like the progressives’ greed just killed the whole works. They tried to hold up the infrastructure bill by demanding the reconciliation spending spree first and got called on it. So now what they have is nothing.As we reported earlier, Biden sent strong signals that the meeting was a failure by indicating a timeline for “getting this done” no longer matters. “We’re gonna get this...

The White House deployed Susan Rice to Capitol Hill late Thursday evening to help push President Joe Biden’s agenda through Congress. Rice, who previously served former President Barack Obama as a national security advisor, now works for Biden as the director of the White House domestic policy council. Rice joined Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, White House Legislative Affairs Director Louisa Terrell, and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese for meetings with Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-AZ) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) as Biden tries to push $5 trillion in proposed domestic spending through Congress. On Thursday, Manchin voiced his...

WASHINGTON — President Biden will scramble to Capitol Hill Friday afternoon to try and salvage his signature spending plans after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi laid the groundwork to delay a vote on his $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill for up to a month, sources told The Post. Biden’s effort to strike a deal with warring House Democrats also came after two leading progressive lawmakers took shots at him for not engaging in talks sooner.

President Joe Biden will travel to his home in Delaware on Saturday, according to the White House, after his agenda stalled in Congress due to Democrat infighting. The president spent Friday afternoon meeting with Democrats on Capitol Hill to try to advance his $5 trillion spending agenda, but to no avail.

. . .Many lobbyists have been telling their clients that they expect a strong relationship with a potential Biden administration. Reasons include: Steve Ricchetti, himself a former lobbyist, is Biden’s campaign chairman and has been mentioned as a potential candidate for White House chief of staff; and the campaign’s transition team allows the inclusion of lobbyists. . .Biden has pledged to curb the “improper influence of lobbyists” and build upon the Obama administration’s ethics pledge. Obama signed an executive order early on in his first term as president, which said that appointees who were previously registered lobbyists during the prior...

Many of his aides and close allies are veteran Washington hands who have profited from advising big corporations. The Sanders-Warren wing of the party is not happy.

WASHINGTON — It was one of the few issues on which President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. disagreed — how far to go in limiting the influence of lobbyists in government. The vice president privately complained that his boss’s effort to slam shut the revolving door between K Street and the administration would deprive it of experienced talent, and he bristled when Mr. Obama’s aides tried to block him from hiring a well-connected Washington operator who had lobbied for pharmaceutical and insurance companies, credit agencies and others. Eight years later, that same confidant, Steve Ricchetti, is...

This is just too rich. Seriously. From the insufferable Iran deal… to the appeasement “Russian Reset”… to the Libya fiasco… to the rise of ISIS… to installing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt… to the explosion of terrorism in Yemen… to civil war in Syria… to the crisis in Ukraine… to the 2010 State Department apology tour (WikiLeaks cables scandal)… to their inability to stop North Korean nuclear ambitions and the rise of China as an influential power… there were/are zero foreign policy successes in eight years of the Obama administration. There was not a single Obama foreign policy initiative that...