Free Republic

With the second bogus impeachment in the books, the Washington Post has finally seen fit to admit that President Trump did not incite the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 with his speech, acknowledging that it was, in fact, planned in advance. The article, published Tuesday, the day before Biden’s inauguration, declares in its headline “Self-styled militia members planned on storming the U.S. Capitol days in advance of Jan. 6 attack, court documents say” and opens with the following paragraphs.

Acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller ordered the director of the National Security Agency to install on Saturday a former GOP political operative as the NSA’s top lawyer, according to four individuals familiar with the matter. The move is troubling, coming as it does four days before President Trump leaves office and the Biden administration takes over, former U.S. officials said. The move makes it more difficult for the Biden administration to immediately replace him, the former officials said. “An 11th-hour move like this and a directive from the acting secretary of defense is overwhelmingly strong evidence of irregularity,” Hennessey...

Whether Kamala Harris's anecdote is completely made up, seriously exaggerated, or stolen from MLK, this unfortunate snag illustrates she is the perfect right-hand woman to Joe Biden, who has a track record of inventing tales and plagiarizing.“Fweedom.” It’s something Kamala Harris has been wanting since she was in diapers, according to an account of the vice president-elect’s early childhood that should probably be filed under fiction — or maybe plagiarism.The story of Harris, ostensibly plucked from her childhood memories, opens a glowing interview profile that was Elle magazine’s November 2020 cover story. The anecdote, however, reeks of convenient dishonesty and...

Far-right online forums are seething with references to potential violence and urging supporters of President Trump to bring guns to Wednesday’s protests in Washington — in violation of local laws — as Congress meets to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.Many of the posts appear to be direct responses to Trump’s demands that his supporters pack the nation’s capital in support of his bogus claims that November’s national vote for Biden resulted from election fraud. Congress’s largely ceremonial role in confirming Biden’s victory has emerged as a catalyst for expected unrest that has D.C. police and the National Guard deploying on...

President Trump granted clemency on Tuesday to 20 people, including three former Republican members of Congress and two people who were convicted of crimes as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also pardoned four military contractors convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007, and extended clemency to several people convicted of drug offenses. The pre-Christmas pardons and commutations came as the president has been exploring how to reward friends and allies in the waning days before leaving office next month, with more acts of clemency expected to come.

The media has normalized an anti-religious bigotry that threatens to remove faithful Christians, be they Catholic or anything else, from public service.In a series of articles by its editorial board, media columnist Margaret Sullivan, and former Voice of America Director Amanda Bennett, the Washington Post has mounted a coordinated attack on Robert R. Reilly, the new nominee for VOA director, claiming he is an existential threat to the organization’s mission to provide independent reporting to foreign audiences.The reason they deem Reilly disqualified to serve as VOA director isn’t about a lack of credentials. He was director from 2001 to 2002...

Fact checks on the United States' COVID vaccine timeline expose how outlets like NBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are willing to attack American aspirations to score political points.Long gone are the days of Snopes assuring readers there isn’t a million dollars waiting in a Nigerian bank account for them. Distant are the happier times when fact-checks assured us there was no hook-handed hitchhiker killing our grandparents on the local highway. Today, we see an alliance between corporate media and corporate tech titans to squelch debate, silence conservatives, and literally censor regular Americans, dissenting scientists, newspaper competitors,...

The pro-Biden media is obsessing over the tiniest kerfuffle imaginable. Jill Biden likes to be addressed as "Dr. Jill," based on the doctorate in education she got in 2007. We've known about her insistence on this appellation since at least 2009, because servile journalists often indulge it. It's harmless to call her Dr. Jill. But the elites exploded in fury when The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Joseph Epstein, who professed that this honorific "sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic." It was certainly comical when Whoopi Goldberg insisted on "The View" in March, "I'm...

Looking at reporting and discussion of the 2020 presidential campaign, has any word been misused as often as "misinformation"? In much political debate, it was used to mean "information I don't like," rather than something that was provably false. That confusion extends to a new survey of American attitudes done by Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The survey questioned 2,752 respondents and was conducted in mid-November. Gallup found that 64 percent of Americans believe they were subjected to more "misinformation" in the 2020 campaign than in earlier campaigns. That number included 52 percent of Democrats,...

No one should mistake William P. Barr’s resignation as a principled act to dissociate himself from a president whose conduct has passed the limit of what the attorney general could tolerate: As, respectively, a former colleague of Barr’s in a past Justice Department and an adversary of his in his current role, we certainly do not.

I suppose it’s the prerogative of opinion writers to twist the facts to advance their narratives, but that’s not what fact-checkers are supposed to do.Fact-checking the fact-checkers ought to be a full-time job. It never ceases to amaze and appall how these pretend nonpartisans can take entirely true statements that threaten the mainstream media’s narrative and twist them so far as to make them appear false. Over the weekend, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave “three Pinocchios” to an assertion President Trump made during his speech last week about the presidential election, based on a report published by my think...

The joint operation by big tech and big media to bolster former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign likely landed Democrats in the White House.President Donald Trump has been deriding the election as unfair ever since the race was called for Joe Biden last month. Launching a series of lawsuits in target swing states decided by razor-thin margins, the president has now hinged his 2020 hopes on the existence of voter fraud big enough to tip the outcome. Whether there was enough ballot corruption to manipulate the result remains an open question, one to be decided in the courts. Whether fraud...

... Topping the list is a prohibition on reducing the number of troops stationed in Germany and South Korea below current levels unless Congress receives certain guarantees that it is strategically safe ... ... The final bill does not mention the piece of law regarding Silicon Valley, and instructs the Defense Department to change the names of the Confederate-titled installations within three years... ... several provisions of the 4,500-plus-page bipartisan bill suggest that GOP lawmakers have had complaints to get off their chests about more of Trump’s actions — and want to ensure no future president repeats them...... The defense...

After nearly two decades without any federal executions, the Justice Department reversed course this summer by carrying out three death sentences in four days. Now the department is planning a similarly busy schedule of executions during the Trump administration’s final days, before a president who staunchly backs capital punishment is succeeded by one who opposes it. *** A Justice Department official disputed that reasoning, asserting that Attorney General William P. Barr had been routinely scheduling executions, as the law dictated he should do, since concluding an Obama administration-era review of the federal death penalty last year. “It’s his job to...

One must read to the end of The Washington Post's editorial, "Abolish the electoral college," before hitting on the real reason the Post's editors want to upend the long-standing constitutional institution. "Mr. Trump's election was a sad event for the nation," notes the Post, "his reelection would have been a calamity." Maybe, maybe not. That's a matter of partisan perspective. Those who are genuinely concerned about the future of American governance would be calling to strengthen institutions that provide political stability, not destroy them. But when your concerns about "American democracy" are really just a euphemism for partisan power grabs,...

Max Boot, a conservative columnist for The Washington Post, in his latest op-ed Monday warned of what he fears will be President Donald Trump’s legacy for the GOP. Boot wrote of his hope that Trump’s “outrageous” bid to overturn the 2020 election would be “the last gasp of a pathetic presidency in its dying days” but also of his worry “it might represent only a middle chapter in the Republican Party’s transformation” into an authoritarian party. Boot, a vocal critic of Trump, noted how even before Trump’s arrival on the political stage, “Republicans had shown their willingness to use any...

Life is too short to live it in fear of dying.More than eight months after “15 days to flatten the curve,” our so-called medical experts, politicos, and pundits are bidding us to avoid our family at all costs over the holidays, lest we die. This Thanksgiving week, family separation is the name of the game, with governors and local authorities implementing onerous restrictions to discourage people from leaving their homes.“If you are planning to spend Thanksgiving with people outside your household, we urge you to reconsider,” wrote a group of governors in the pages of the Washington Post. These authors...

President Trump would have the world falsely believe that he won the election and is preparing for a second term. In private huddles and phone conversations, however, Trump has been discussing an entirely different next act: another presidential run in 2024. In a nod to the reality that he is destined to leave office in January, the president is seriously contemplating life beyond the White House, telling advisers that he wants to remain an omnipresent force in politics and the media — perhaps by running for the White House again. Trump has told confidants that he could announce a 2024...

It appears someone in the Georgia secretary of state’s office getting a bit over their skis, after Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced today that Georgia had certified former Vice President Joe Biden as the state’s presidential winner, which our own Streiff reported earlier on Friday. Despite an earlier announcement, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) said the office is still completing its certification. The office issued a correction, reversing an earlier announcement that had declared the certification was complete. Raffensperger said he expects certification to be completed later Friday.A revised update from WaPo included this depiction of...

When we were kids on the playground and there was an angry dispute, someone would always shout "majority rules." And we'd vote. If the losers didn't like the outcome, there were two options: punch the winners in the stomach or take the ball and go home. It worked on our playgrounds because a punch in the stomach isn't the end of the world, exactly. You could punch a kid, or he could punch you, and half an hour later you could both ride your bikes to a convenience store for a Slurpee. You could always find a ball somewhere. There...