Free Republic

People familiar with the Sanctuary Cities Enforcement working group say members were assigned menial busy work, and their impression was that the real goal was to force senior career lawyers to resign.In the first weeks of the current Trump administration, Justice Department officials gave a select group of top senior career attorneys a choice: They could either quit or go to a newly created Sanctuary Cities Enforcement working group.About a dozen lawyers from high-profile sections including the civil rights and national security divisions agreed to the transfer, jumping into an area most had no experience with but knew was one...

Trump is exercising dramatically more power than in his first term. Here’s what provides the fuel.There are at least two measures of a president’s power. The first is how many prerogatives he claims. The second is how much resistance he faces.In his first term, Donald Trump was a weak president — maybe even historically weak. When he made even modest assertions of power, the blowback from other institutions was intense. One example: The president clearly has the power to fire the director of the FBI. Yet when Trump did so in 2017, it prompted a special-counsel investigation that threatened for...

CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired less than a month on the job. CNN and The Washington Post and The Hill confirmed Dr. Monarez has been ousted. Details of Monarez’s departure from the CDC are not immediately available. The Hill reported: Susan Monarez, the longtime government scientist recently confirmed as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has been let go from her position after less than a month in the role. A source familiar with the situation confirmed to The Hill that Monarez is ousted as CDC director. The Senate confirmed her on July 29. The...

Journalists Against Journalism.Our critics can call us any name they like. That doesn’t change the facts.“Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova performed a public service by asking and answering a simple question,” write The Editors. (Illustration by The Free Press, images via screen grabs)By The Editors 08.25.25 — Israel and AntisemitismLast week, The Free Press ran an investigation into a dozen viral photos published by major international media outlets aimed at depicting starvation in Gaza. All 12 pictures featured distressed Gazans, mostly children. All were skin and bones. And all suffered from preexisting conditions, like cerebral palsy.Crucially, that last piece of...

The following idiotic piece that ran from the Washington Post's editorial board said that the FBI raid on former National Security Council advisor John Bolton raid "underscores the danger of putting partisan hacks in top law enforcement positions." FBI raid targeting Bolton crosses a line in the Trump revenge campaign Yes, they wrote that. What a bunch of hypocrites. Of course, they acted as though Democrat hack appointees in comparable positions from not so long ago, such as Merrick Garland, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, Andy McCabe, James Comey, and others, were absolutely independent and non-partisan no matter what they did....

Friday’s Bolton raid and the rebuke of Trump’s $500M fine show what happens when justice is not impartial.If you are a liberal alarmed by the Friday raid on the home of former national security adviser John Bolton, well, you should be. It’s possible that if charges come out, we’ll learn that Bolton committed a security breach that would have been prosecuted under any president. But there are reasons to suspect otherwise, given that President Donald Trump and FBI director Kash Patel have endorsed lawfare against their political enemies, including Bolton.This is a crisis for American democracy, because even if charges...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired a general whose agency’s initial intelligence assessment of damage to Iranian nuclear sites from U.S. strikes angered President Donald Trump, according to two people familiar with the decision and a White House official. Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse will no longer serve as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The firing is the latest upheaval in military leadership and in the country’s intelligence agencies, and comes a few months after details of the preliminary assessment...

A majority of residents in the nation’s capital are opposed to President Trump’s takeover of the city’s police department, according to a poll released Wednesday. The latest survey, released The Washington Post, shows 69 percent of participants said they “strongly” oppose the president’s decision to take federal control over the Metropolitan Police Department, and 10 percent said they “somewhat” oppose the move. Another 9 percent said they “strongly” approve of the Trump administration’s federalization of local police, while 8 percent said they “somewhat” support the crackdown on crime. About 4 percent said they had no opinion, the poll found.

President Donald Trump’s crusade against crime in the nation’s capital has resulted in more than 450 arrests since Aug. 7, the White House announced Tuesday morning. Those arrests, fueled by an increase in federal agents on city streets, run the gamut of charges, from murder and assault to driving under the influence. But a full picture about who has been arrested, where, for what and by whom is not yet clear. Every day, the White House issues a summary of the previous night’s operation, including the number of arrests and some examples of arresting causes. Numbers of illegal firearms seized...

Failed Prosecutor John Durham’s report on the Hillary Clinton campaign plot to convince the American electorate and U.S. allies that Donald Trump was a stooge of Russia totally ignores the role that intelligence operatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Israel played in helping set the stage to provide the FBI with the pretext of predication for launching its now discredited Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump Campaign. Let me take you back to an article I wrote in May 2019. John Durham and his team failed to address any of the issues and leads I raised:...

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was roasted on social media for creating a fictional Long Island couple called Joe and Eileen Bailey, whom he has based his entire political career on. During an episode of Last Week Tonight, British-born HBO talk show host John Oliver shared several clips of Schumer talking about the fictional couple, describing them as being “middle-class” and having “bought into Reagan Republicanism in 1980.” Schumer has explained that he has “guided” his political career “through the Baileys.” “They’re a middle-class couple in Massapequa, which is a suburb on Long Island,” Schumer said in one clip from an...

Former State Department official Victoria Nuland, who reportedly connected FBI officials to the former British spy who wrote the infamous anti-Trump dossier, will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee next week. Ms. Nuland, a longtime State Department official who served in the George W. Bush administration as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, served during the Obama administration as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs. In that capacity, according to the book “Russian Roulette,” she played an instrumental role in the evolution of Christopher Steele’s negative campaign research on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 by giving permission...

Curiously, Brennan left no way for future investigators to confirm or deny its existence.In June 2017, well on their way to a Pulitzer for national reporting, the stenographers at the Washington Post published a lengthy, breathless article about an extraordinary message delivered to the White House in early August 2016. According to the Post, CIA Director John Brennan had sent an “intelligence bombshell” directly to President Barack Obama, an “eyes only” report. So sensitive was the report that Brennan kept it out of the President’s Daily Brief and insisted it “be returned immediately after it was read.” The report was...

One of the internet’s most famous fact-checkers, former Washington Post writer Glenn Kessler, was grilled by author and podcaster Mark Halperin on Friday over media bias. The man behind The Washington Post's "Pinocchios" announced in late July he would be leaving the paper without anyone to fill his shoes. Kessler, who reportedly edited more than 3,000 fact checks as editor and chief writer of The Fact Checker, announced that week he had taken a buyout deal, ending his lengthy career at the Post. "After more than 27 years at The Washington Post, including almost 15 as The Fact Checker, I...

Redistricting reform could die as it becomes another polarizing and partisan blood sport.David Daley is author of “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” and “Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections.”The 2026 midterms might not be decided by tariffs, President Donald Trump’s approval ratings or even Sydney Sweeney’s divisive American Eagle ad — but by gerrymandering. Just a handful of seats separate the two parties, and first Republicans and now Democrats are angling for more before votes are cast.Texas Republicans stand ready to adopt a new map that could award them as many as five additional...

By Jerry Markon and Ben Hubbard Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, July 15, 2008; Page B01 A Saudi-funded academy in Fairfax County used textbooks as recently as 2006 that compared Jews and Christians to apes and pigs, told eighth-graders that these groups are "the enemies of the believers" and diagrammed for high school students where to cut off the hands and feet of thieves, a Washington Post review of the books has found. Saudi officials acknowledged that the textbooks used at the Islamic Saudi Academy had contained inflammatory material since at least the mid-1990s but said they ordered revisions in...

I’m not a big fan of political labels. They invite people to put you in a box, and the only box I want to be in is one labeled “open-minded.” I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on the truth.But anyone who takes a look at my résumé — I worked at a top Democratic Party-aligned think tank and a left-leaning political action committee, where I helped Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats win elections — would acknowledge that over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time in the progressive movement.And yet, for the past week, the politician I find...

The man behind The Washington Post's "Pinocchios" is leaving the paper without anyone to fill his shoes. Glenn Kessler, the editor of The Fact Checker, announced Monday he has taken a buyout, ending his lengthy career at the Post. "After more than 27 years at The Washington Post, including almost 15 as The Fact Checker, I will be leaving on July 31, having taken a buyout," Kessler wrote on his Facebook page. "Much as I would have liked to keep scrutinizing politicians in Washington, especially in this era, the financial considerations were impossible to dismiss." Kessler said he wrote or...

President Donald Trump made a promise at a reception last week for Republican lawmakers that was as impossible as it was specific: He would drive down drug prices by as much as 1,500 percent — “numbers that are not even thought to be achievable,” he said. A price cannot drop by more than 100 percent, but Trump went on to make several other precise but clearly false numerical claims. The cost of gasoline had fallen to $1.99 a gallon in five states, he said; according to AAA, it was over $3 in every state. Businesses had invested $16 trillion in...

The data centers required for Big Tech are driving up electricity demand — and prices.This summer, across a vast stretch of the eastern United States, monthly home electric bills jumped. In Trenton, New Jersey, the bill for a typical home rose $26. In Philadelphia, it increased about $17. In Pittsburgh, it went up $10. And in Columbus, Ohio, it spiked $27.Few customers were happy, of course, but even fewer knew exactly why the rates had climbed so quickly.“I never know why it goes up,” said Vicki Miller, a retired secretary in Columbus. “But I can adjust the thermostat to save...