Free Republic

Carter Page, former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, said he might have been included in emails with George Papadopoulos, another campaign foreign policy adviser, regarding Russia. MSNBC host Chris Hayes pressed Page Monday night if Page remembered Papadopoulos telling people Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to set up a meeting and that he was approached about Hillary Clinton’s emails. “I know nothing about e-mails,” Page said. “Definitely nothing. I heard nothing about that.” “A direct question on this particular thing,” Hayes said. “Do you remember Papadopoulos emailing about this stuff? “There were tons of emails happening on a...

The Obama administration has compromised a core U.S. interest -- the ability to take action unilaterally or with like-minded allies -- in return for Russian cooperation on second-order issues like Iran sanctions (which should be just one element of an Iran policy). Realists would never make that trade. In classic liberal fashion, Obama is constraining American power by rules and norms to which all states could be subjected. The reason President Obama's Russia policy is on the rocks is that the White House pretends to be realist but acts like a liberal. President Obama may think he's sent a tough...

The recent crash of a Polish military transport that killed most of Warsaw's senior civilian and military leaders was not only a human catastrophe for a key U.S. ally. NATO sources said that, in addition to the loss of nearly 100 pro-U.S. Polish leaders, the crash provided Moscow with a windfall of secrets. The crash killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski in western Russia on April 10 and decapitated Poland's military, killing two service chiefs, key military aides and several national security officials, many of whom were carrying computers and pocket memory sticks that contained sensitive NATO data. Perhaps the most...

It’s never fun to admit failure. But Russia’s 13 percent flat tax forces me to confess a certain degree of incompetence. For 10 years, I’ve been working in Washington to replace our convoluted tax code with a simple and fair flat tax. But as every taxpayer can attest, my efforts have not borne fruit. Yet in Russia, President Vladimir Putin -- the former head of the Soviet KGB -- implemented a flat tax in 2001. Not only a flat tax, but a flat tax with a 13 percent rate, four percentage points lower than the supposedly “radical” plan espoused by...