Free Republic

A neighborhood advisory panel in Washington that typically focuses on liquor license applications and other local concerns is inserting itself into the international furor prompted by the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last month at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2A, as the Foggy Bottom panel is known, is expected to vote Wednesday to rename the street outside the Saudi Embassy for Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist who resided in Virginia. Under the proposal, the east side of New Hampshire Avenue NW between F Street and Juarez Circle would become “Jamal Khashoggi Way.” The Watergate complex...

In 1968, on the eve of the presidential election, Lyndon Johnson found out that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were actively working to stop his administration from concluding a peace deal with the North Vietnamese. Nixon didn’t want that kind of October surprise to shift the election to Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Unfortunately for LBJ, he couldn’t reveal that kind of political hanky-panky because he found out about it by illegally wiretapping the Nixon campaign. In 1980, rumors were rampant that the Reagan campaign had actively worked to ensure that Iran wouldn’t give back the American hostages right before...

The economy is booming but did you know that these are the final days of Donald Trump's presidency? That is the absurd premise put forward on MSNBC's The 11th Hour with Brian Williams on Wednesday by that master of hyperbole, Jon Meacham, the man at the helm of Newsweek as it sank like the Titanic. Meacham expressed optimism about America's future because "there is increasing evidence, there's facts in a post-truth world, facts are coming into play." There is Manafort's verdict and Bob Woodward's new book and the anonymous op-ed in The New York Times, representing  "a genuine reckoning, because there...

One of the symptoms of extreme Trump Derangement Syndrome is making comparisons to Watergate in the desperate hope that President Donald Trump can be removed from office. Former New York Times columnist and drama critic Frank Rich too such fantasies to an extreme in his August 23 New York magazine article, building up an entire imaginary world in which his obsession with the removal of Trump from office is revealed down to the smallest of Watergate-related details. One of the symptoms of extreme Trump Derangement Syndrome is making comparisons to Watergate in the desperate hope that President Donald Trump can...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — There hasn't been a darker moment for a president — or for the presidency — since Richard Nixon resigned on the verge of impeachment in 1974. On Tuesday, Michael Cohen, the president's longtime fixer and former personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to felony crimes that included illegally paying women hush money to help Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016. Most important, he said he did so at Trump's direction. In other words, Trump cheated to win the White House, according to one of his closest former associates. Cohen's admissions were so damaging for the president, both legally...

he Watergate tapes stand as one of the stunning, implausible twists of American history. Nixon confessed his crimes and recorded himself in the process. Who does that? In their book The Final Days, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein write, “the single thread that linked the problems together was the President’s tapes. The lawyers represented a President who had bugged himself, who had blurted his secrets into hidden microphones. They had not yet heard the tapes, nor seen any transcripts of them. The President would not permit it. They were told to mount a defense, but were not given the information...

John Dean knows what it’s like for a scandal with the power to destroy a president to stalk the White House. Dean served as White House Counsel under President Nixon and can testify to the enormous toll that lying, deflecting, hiding and obstructing took on him and his colleagues following the 1972 Watergate break-in. A few months after Nixon fired him, in 1973, Dean testified before the Senate and became the first member of the Nixon administration to directly implicate the president in the cover-up. After serving four months for conspiracy to obstruct justice, Dean became an investment banker, lecturer...

Bob Woodward, a CIA mouthpiece, foisted off an absurd fiction on a gullible public, called “Deep Throat.” When his fraud was exposed, he and the CIA trotted out someone they claimed to be the “real real” Deep Throat, a stroke victim named Mark Felt who had been highly placed in the FBI during Watergate, and who “admitted” in a befogged state that he had been the informant to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. It was fiction to “prove” fiction.

FBI Lying to Congress, Fudging 302s, Planting Double Agents, Covering CIA Crimes, and Hiding Crucial Facts? Just Business as Usual. by Ashton Gray Several watchdog sites for news and information have rocked their readers with the revelation recently that key officials of the FBI may have manipulated or altered investigative reports and documents to put a fraud over on Congress, the American people, and the world. Those who have read my 2016 exposé Watergate: The Hoax are not the least bit surprised, because the FBI criminality today is the exact same modus operandi that was used in the early 1970s...

“F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims,” read the headline on a lengthy New York Times story May 18. “The Justice Department used a suspected informant to probe whether Trump campaign aides were making improper contacts with Russia in 2016,” read a story in the May 21 edition of The Wall Street Journal. So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump’s campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparat have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was...

In a democracy elected officials control the police.. In a police state, the police can tell elected officials what to do. In a democracy elected officials can fire police leaders. In a police state police leaders cannot be fired by the officials the people have elected to supposedly run the government. 'In a police state Gestapo like police may terrorize political figures by invading their homes in the middle of the night like Robert Mueller did to .Paul J. Manafort. In a police state KGB like police may plant spies in political organizations like the Department of Justice did to...

Spygate is the biggest political scandal in political history. The embedding of an FBI spy in the Trump campaign and the Obama administration’s illegal wiretapping and unmasking of targets in the Trump camp reveal dangerous and unprecedented acts of collusion against the most transformational president in our recent history. The liberal mainstream media are pushing against this reality of course but the evidence is incontrovertible and the real Obama is being shown for the blatant criminal he truly is. “Spygate,” the false allegation that the FBI had a spy in the Trump campaign, explained, reads Vox’s typically incurious and misleading...

On Sunday a justifiably outraged President Trump called for the former Obama administration to be investigated for its unprecedented and profoundly un-American spying and sabotage operation against the 2016 Trump campaign. “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the [Federal Bureau of Investigation/Department of Justice] infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” Trump tweeted Sunday at 1:37 p.m. Just the day before, President Trump had written on Twitter, “If...

President Trump is correct. If an FBI -- or any “Deep State” -- informant was embedded within his campaign for the express purpose of spying on it, that would be a scandal “Bigger than Watergate.” Bigger and much more chilling. Over the course of the last two years, I have communicated with current and former government employees who told me that a number of operatives at various three-letter agencies have been actively working to undermine first the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, and then his presidency. Most of them are Obama appointees. All of them doing so for political...

WASHINGTON — President Trump and his critics actually agree on something. If a column he read in a magazine is correct, he wrote on Twitter on Thursday, “this is bigger than Watergate!” Never mind that he was thinking of something different than his adversaries when they use the same phrase. Mr. Trump was referring to what he deems a deep-state conspiracy to get him. His detractors are referring to the various scandals swirling around Mr. Trump. Watergate has long been the touchstone for modern American scandal, the mountain of misconduct against which all others are judged. In the 44 years...

Leakers to the New York Times confirmed in a story published on Wednesday that the FBI had run a spy operation on the Trump campaign that involved government informants, secret subpoenas, and possible wiretaps. The story comes ahead of the release of the pending Department of Justice inspector general report on the FBI’s actions during the 2016 election, and likely is an attempt by the leakers to paint the FBI’s efforts in the most flattering light possible. But the story revealed that the FBI – which is supposed to be an apolitical agency – was spying on the Trump campaign...

Former federal judge and conservative legal scholar Robert Bork died early Wednesday at his Virginia home, his family confirmed to CNN. He was 85. Perhaps best known for his nomination to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Bork was rejected for the post after a contentious confirmation battle led by left-leaning groups that opposed his conservative judicial philosophies. Bork had recently served as a senior legal adviser to Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. He was a solicitor general during the Nixon administration and first gained notoriety for carrying out the president's order to fire the special prosecutor...

Something changed last weekend, did it not? The firing of Andrew McCabe. The statement by Trump lawyer John Dowd to The Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff that Robert Mueller should end his probe soon. Donald Trump’s tweetstorm just after that, his first tweets mentioning Mueller by name along with promises by aides that more attacks are on the way. The amped-up speculation that Trump will fire Jeff Sessions and replace him with someone who hasn’t recused himself so that someone can fire Mueller. Somewhere in there also came an official reassurance by Trump lawyer Ty Cobb that the president has no...

Democrats scramble to misdirect in defense of their own as the Nunes memo remains unrebutted. . . snip The Schiff memo is cleverly written, making several assertions by which it attempts to confuse and misinform on the issues. It flails and fails in Schiff’s effort to discredit the principal findings of the Nunes memo. . . snip Watergate — the burglary, not the cover-up — was aimed to tilt an election to favor one candidate over another. In the FBI’s evident abuse of power in 2016-2017, it was the government acting to disrupt an election and its result. The former...

Journalist Carl Bernstein on Sunday expressed doubts that President Trump would sit down for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, citing the president’s “compulsive, continual lying.” “I think many of us will believe it when we see him sit down with Mueller. Look, we have no reason to believe almost anything that DT says. What is so extraordinary about him and his presidency is the incessant, compulsive, continual lying,” Bernstein said on CNN. “We’ve never had a president who lies like this, certainly in the modern era. Even Nixon,” the Watergate reporter added.