Free Republic

"While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition." "There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I'll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General."

President-elect Donald Trump is now privy to intelligence briefings at his Mar-a-Lago estate as he waits to officially come back to the White House — after promising to clean house at some of the executive branch agencies that dogged him during his first term. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) began to provide Trump, 78, with briefings after his decisive victory earlier this month against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Washington Post first reported. A spokesperson declined to tell The Post specifically whether Trump has received briefings, but confirmed, “ODNI is acting consistent with the tradition, in...

A thousand miles from the austere buildings where Washington runs, Donald Trump’s transition team in his Mar-a-Lago resort has begun what a close ally calls a hostile takeover of the federal government.Since his victory, Trump has ignored many of the rules and practices intended to guide a seamless transfer of power and handover of the oversight of 2.2 million federal employees. Instead, the president-elect, who has pledged to fire thousands of civil servants and slash billions of dollars in spending, has so far almost fully cut out the government agencies his predecessors have relied on to take charge of the...

For a while, Donald Trump's transition kept up a record-setting pace with top Cabinet picks being named against a backdrop of calm consensus. But the knives are now out, with advisers leaking against each other to the press amid the scramble to parachute allies into plum jobs. 'Winning helped make everything better for a bit but this is still politics and there are always scores to settle and axes to grind,' said a source familiar with the workings of Trump's inner circle. In the most widely publicized example, Axios was tipped that Tesla founder Elon Musk and Trump legal adviser...

If they did nothing wrong, what are they afraid of? After all, that's what they said about Donald Trump for years. Now that the script flipped, their tune has changed--dramatically. As I reported last week, former and current apparatchiks for the Department of Justice are making plans to resign in advance of Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January. Those headed for exits include Special Counsel Jack Smith and his top team of prosecutors, who just withdrew their appeal of Judge Aileen Cannon’s order dismissing the classified documents indictment in Florida and asked for a halt to the...

President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration is considering adjusting certain policies in response to the anticipated challenges posed by President-elect Trump’s return to office, seeking to safeguard Mexico’s economic interests, and manage immigration effectively. Fearing that measures from the coming Trump administration might be harmful to Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum and other officials have expressed a commitment to maintaining a positive bilateral relationship while emphasizing Mexico’s sovereignty. At a recent press conference, she reassured Mexicans that there is "no reason for concern" regarding the election outcome, indicating confidence in the stability of bilateral relations. "We will work with dialogue and respect for our...

WASHINGTON, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Billionaire Elon Musk, who is an adviser to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday, the New York Times reported on Thursday. Citing two Iranian officials, the newspaper reported that the meeting was a discussion of how to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States.

Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) asked on Tuesday for a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump, who vowed to help the District reduce increased crime rates since he left the White House. The District currently ranks 172 in safety on a list of 182 American cities, according to a study recently released by WalletHub. Crime, such as reported carjacking offenses, remain much more frequent than they did under Trump’s first term, according to police data. District officials defunded the police in 2023 by 1.7 percent, while U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, who is responsible for prosecuting...

Libertarian National Committee Chair Angela McArdle stated in an email on Friday that she is already in communication with Republican Donald Trump’s team regarding the appointment of a libertarian to a cabinet position in his incoming administration. In the email to party supporters, McArdle extended her “heartfelt thanks and appreciation” to Libertarian nominees Chase Oliver and Mike ter Maat, their campaign team, and their supporters, describing 2024 as “the most challenging election year in the party’s history.” McArdle acknowledged that, while the Libertarian Party did not win the presidency, she believes it will still have an influence on the incoming...

Hyperventilation about President-Elect Trump not yet signing an ethics agreement with GSA is fabricated nonsense. Read the actual law. The obligation to get this done is on GSA not the President-Elect.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said on Monday that President elect-Trump “and his transition team are already breaking” a law on presidential transition. “Donald Trump and his transition team are already breaking the law,” Warren said in a post on the social platform X. “I would know because I wrote the law. Incoming presidents are required to prevent conflicts of interest and sign an ethics agreement.” “This is what illegal corruption looks like,” she added. Warren was responding to a report from CNN on Saturday that said a conflict of interest pledge included in the Presidential Transition Act was, in part,...

President Biden and President-elect Trump will meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday, the White House announced on Saturday. The meeting will be held at 11 a.m. local time, according to the statement from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Mr. Biden extended the invitation for the meeting. Such a meeting is customary between the outgoing president and the incoming president and is meant partly to mark the start of a peaceful transfer of power under America's democracy. However, Mr. Trump did not host Mr. Biden for a sit-down after the 2020 election, when Mr. Trump lost his reelection bid. Mr. Trump,...

His name is Nicolas Berggruen, and he is the subject of a new profile in Bloomberg Markets magazine. Berggruen's art-dealer dad gave him a $250,000 trust fund and he's multiplied that by 10,000—a $2.5 billion fortune. He hasn't had a home address since 2000; now he "constantly roams the world on his Gulfstream IV jet, living out of five-star hotels," reports the magazine. Berggruen might not share Soros' poor-to-rich background, but he shares Soros' passion for politics and even some of his specific policy proposals, such as a more integrated Europe.

As Madeline covered on Tuesday, Do No Harm, a healthcare watchdog, published a first-of-its-kind database exposing the major U.S. hospitals and their physicians that perform bodily mutilation procedures on minors and prescribe them chemically castrating drugs in the name of so-called "gender affirmation."Researchers at Do No Harm aggregated and analyzed thousands of insurance claims from across all 50 states, matching procedures and prescriptions with gender-related diagnostic codes to confirm cases of medical "transitioning." The shocking statistics revealed that nearly 14,000 children in the U.S. underwent some sort of "sex-change" medical intervention between 2019 and 2023, such as surgeries, puberty blockers,...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard will join Former President Donald Trump’s potential transition team as honorary co-chairs if he wins the 2024 presidential election. A transition team enables an orderly and peaceful transfer of power and conducts post-election responsibilities, such as vetting, selecting, and appointing presidential personnel. “We look forward to having their powerful voices on the team as we work to restore America’s greatness,” Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior adviser, told the New York Times on Tuesday.

"Executive Summary In the spring of 2024, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP 2024) ran a series of academic exercises to educate the public regarding crises that may arise in relation to the upcoming presidential election in the United States. A bipartisan group of about 60 well-known individuals with experience in politics, government, law, national security, media, and academia participated in role-playing scenarios which placed the election within the larger context of pressing issues that America faces at home and abroad: inflation, mass illegal immigration, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, China’s increasingly bellicose actions in the seas around Taiwan and the...

Joe Biden sat down for a pre-recorded interview with CBS News reporter Robert Costa. The interview was conducted on Sunday and will air in full on Sunday, August 11. Joe Biden has not been publicly in more than 3 days. CBS played a clip from Biden’s interview with Robert Costa. “Are you confident that there will be a peaceful transfer of power in January 2025?” CBS News reporter Robert Costa asked Biden. “If Trump wins, no, I’m not confident at all,” Biden said before correcting himself: “I mean if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all. He means what he...

This is Part 2 of a multi-part investigative series.Part 1 investigated the Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League (SMYAL)'s trail of government grants, leading to SMYAL's taxpayer-funded LGBTQ youth program aimed at influencing kids as young as six-years-old to identify as "transgender." This sequel follows the next (un)natural step in childhood "gender-transitioning," providing a raw and intimately close peek under the hood of pediatric "gender care." Meet the physicians who practice it, the parents who willfully sacrifice their children on the altar of gender ideology, and the activists who marshal them there.WASHINGTON, DC — Pro tip: When medically mutilating your young...

A military family who lost custody of their autistic son after they refused to transition his gender are suing a major DC hospital. The family said their boy had never shown any desire to become a girl until, at 16, he was hospitalized for self-harming after a bitter breakup with his girlfriend in 2021. Staff at Children's National Hospital informed the family that he wanted to be female and should be referred to using she/her pronouns going forward, the suit claims. His army veteran parents, from Prince George County in Maryland, rejected the suggestion, saying their son was 'impressionable' due...

Back on the campaign rally trail, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump issued a warning for world rivals seeking to take advantage of the final months of President Biden's "incompetent" administration: Do not dare. "The whole world should know that while Biden is the worst president in the history of America, our country is going to be strong again, and it's going to be very soon," Trump told a rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, in a speech that aired live and in its entirety on Newsmax and the free Newsmax2 streaming platform. "I want the enemies to know that because we...