Free Republic

“Let’s get down to business: We’ll start the bidding for Warner Bros at $5. Do I hear $5?” “...so many A-listers — and by A-listers, I mean people who are on ‘A list’ that has been heavily redacted..." "The Golden Globe for best editing goes to… the Justice Department!” “the award for most editing goes to CBS News. Yes. CBS news: America’s newest place to see B.S. news.” Glaser singled out George Clooney for a very specific inquiry. “I’ve always wanted to ask you something, and I know this is unprofessional, but I may never get the chance again, so...

Since taking the helm at CBS News, Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss has shown no fear, and her response to Hollywood leftist darling George Clooney's attack on her is truly...magnifique. It all started after the 64-year-old actor took a swipe at Weiss' leadership, of course, using broad claims, lacking any detail, about Weiss. The comments came after she pulled a 60 Minutes piece about the alleged treatment of illegal aliens in a CECOT prison in El Salvador. She later explained the reason was that it wasn’t ready, RedState reported. Statement from CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss: "My job is to make sure...

In 1995, 60 Minutes made a decision that nearly destroyed the program. Producers killed an interview with Jeffrey Wigand, a tobacco industry whistleblower who had evidence that cigarette companies knew their products were addictive and carcinogenic. CBS’s lawyers were worried about a potential lawsuit, so the interview got shelved. The story eventually came out anyway, the lawyers’ fears proved overblown, and 60 Minutes spent years trying to rebuild its credibility. The whole debacle became the basis for The Insider, a 1999 film starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino that portrayed CBS executives as cowards who caved to corporate pressure at...

We’ve reported extensively on the shenanigans at CBS News, the network that was forced to fork over $16 million in July to settle Trump’s lawsuit concerning their deceptive editing of a Kamala Harris interview a month before the 2024 presidential election. Much drama ensued at the outlet as veteran diehards continued to insist that resisting Trump and spewing anti-American rhetoric was part of their job description. Give credit, however, to David Ellison, Chairman and CEO of Paramount (Skydance Corporation), who brought on independent journalist, former NY Times opinion editor, and nowadays free thinker Bari Weiss to oversee the hopelessly biased...

Christopher Hohn, a British billionaire and hedge fund manager, is cutting off funding to left-wing groups and causes after a report by Americans for Public Trust (APT). APT said in its report that the groups that received funding from the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which lists Hohn as its founder and chair of board, "pushed for nothing less than the complete radicalization of the U.S. political landscape." CIFF, which has a reported $6 billion endowment, is "heavily funded by Hohn’s nearly $60 billion activist hedge fund," according to APT. "For far too long, Christopher Hohn, and other foreign billionaires...

If you’re old enough to have admired CBS in its heyday, watching its decline has been painful.Decades ago, it was dubbed the Tiffany Network – home of the great journalist Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America”), and innovator of the top-flight magazine program, 60 Minutes.Even outside its news division, the network was a place where the variety-show host Ed Sullivan could break down racial exclusion by inviting outstanding Black entertainers to his Sunday night program; that was controversial in an era of intense racial turmoil. The CBS news department had some of the best journalists in the nation,...

There is a concerted effort underway lately by so-called dissident or “anti-woke” liberals to police speech on the right, declaring certain opinions or ideas taboo, unworthy of a platform, beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. Although couched in the language of morality and principles, this effort isn’t really about fending off rising right-wing racism and antisemitism, much less saving western civilization. It’s about power. Over the past decade, the media landscape has been destroyed. Through its own corruption and duplicity, the corporate press has lost credibility and influence — to the tremendous benefit of conservative voices and outlets. But this...

A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Thursday to lying about a $10 million bribe that a Ukrainian businessman paid to then-vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter to “protect” his firm from a looming corruption investigation. Alexander Smirnov, 43, entered into a plea agreement with special counsel David Weiss and confessed to having created “a false and fictitious record” as part of a multi-year federal probe into the Bidens. The falsehoods included the bribery allegation, which was memorialized in an FBI FD-1023 form in 2020 and released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) last year, and other aspects of...

A fired Colorado school district official was found dead Wednesday amid allegations he was involved in possessing "child sexual assault material," authorities told Crisis in the Classroom (CITC) on Thursday. David Weiss was fired as chief of schools for Jeffco Public Schools last month. The Washington County Sheriff's Office in Maryland notified the Jefferson County, Colorado Sheriff's Office on Wednesday it was conducting a death investigation into Weiss, the Colorado office said. Weiss was in Maryland with family to celebrate the holidays at the time of his death, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. The Washington County Sheriff's Office...

Kamala Harris has strong ties to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves and his activist wife. Which is why a Harris Department of Justice could be more dangerous than Biden's DOJ. Democrats ended their four-day convention on Thursday with a vacuous speech by the party’s installed candidate, Kamala Harris. Her short stint on the main stage made the regime media, which has blessed her with 84 percent positive news coverage since the Pelosi coup according to one analysis, drunk with joy. Harris, like the roster of speakers before her, spent most of the speech demonizing her general...

Fox News is rejecting pressure from the White House to retract stories about alleged Biden family corruption in the aftermath of the FBI’s arrest of a former informant. In a letter from Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House, the regime demanded that the conservative news network take down its reporting about Alexander Smirnov’s allegations that then-Vice President Joe Biden was involved in a foreign bribery scheme with Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings which employed his son Hunter in a highly paid position despite his lack of industry experience. Smirnov, the source identified in the FD-1023 document that has...

Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI informant indicted for lying about President Joe Biden’s family and their alleged dealings in Ukraine, has been re-arrested in Nevada. Though prosecutors fought to keep him behind bars, Smirnov was released by Magistrate Judge Daniel Albregts in Nevada on Tuesday with several conditions, including GPS monitoring and the surrender of his two passports. Prosecutors asked the Nevada judge to delay his release, but the judge declined and Smirnov was allowed to walk out. Now, Smirnov’s defense lawyers say their client was re-arrested Thursday on a new warrant for the exact same charges – this time...

The informant accused of fabricating a story about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden taking $5 million each in bribes allegedly had high-level Russian intelligence contacts, according to newly filed court documents. In the filing, Special Counsel David Weiss reveals that after his arrest last week, Alexander Smirnov told the FBI "that officials with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story" about Hunter Biden. Prosecutors argued in their filing Smirnov should be held pending trial, with Weiss saying that Smirnov's claims he has active contacts with "multiple foreign intelligence agencies" and had planned to leave the U.S....

One of the most disturbing scandals of the Hunter Biden saga is the imprisonment without trial of former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov. The Ukrainian-born Israeli-American, who once told his FBI handler about Ukrainian claims of a $10 million bribe to the Bidens, has been languishing in a Los Angeles prison for nine months on charges that he lied to the FBI. Last week, federal prosecutors slapped new tax-evasion charges on Smirnov, 43, which suggests they know their original indictment is too weak for a jury to convict him when he faces trial beginning Jan. 8. Smirnov was one of the...

Three days ago, Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment against Donald Trump. That's highly significant for a reason. It demolishes the veneer of impartiality and destroys something else. Three years ago, I wrote an article about how US Attorney David Weiss tipped the election in favor of Joe Biden by burying the Hunter Biden tax and laptop scandals. Weiss was praised for his restraint in not indicting the younger Biden. Last summer, federal officials in Delaware investigating Hunter Biden faced a dilemma. The probe had reached a point where prosecutors could have sought search warrants and issued a flurry of...

Special Counsel David Weiss appears to have finally made the long-awaited case exposing years of concealment and political corruption. No, it is not the case against Hunter Biden. The allegations of tax fraud in California are obvious and unavoidable. Weiss just made the case against the Justice Department and himself in protecting Hunter Biden from the most damaging charges of being an unregistered foreign agent. In a new filing, Weiss released evidence on Hunter seeking money to advance the interests of a Romanian on United States policy. I have previously testified on the Foreign Agents Registration Act and have previously...

The FBI has released internal records on Moms for Liberty, the non-profit activist group that opposes the public-school system’s attempts to indoctrinate students to favor genital mutilations, mask mandates, racial profiling and other un-American ideals. However, the internal records are unrelated to the Justice Department’s targeting of Moms for Liberty and other protesting parents—a scandal from October 2021, when Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo directing the FBI to divert counterterrorism resources towards tracking alleged threats at school board meetings. Instead, the records detail threats Moms for Liberty members apparently received in 2022. A December 2022 FBI memo details...

Attorneys for Hunter Biden insinuated Monday that special counsel David Weiss was doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding by trying to prosecute the 54-year-old first son. Attorneys Abbe Lowell and Bartholomew Dalton blasted Weiss for slapping tax and gun-related charges on the younger Biden after his plea deal imploded last July and argued his actions advanced the Kremlin’s interests. “The Special Counsel has done exactly what the Russian intelligence operation desired by initiating prosecutions against Mr. Biden,” the attorneys wrote in a scathing six-page filing Monday. The filling was a supplemental in Lowell’s motion to get the case against Biden...

The depth of the corruption in this administration is utterly mind boggling. The fate of the country is on the line. David Weiss, the US Attorney from Delaware, who torpedoed the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 to help elect Biden, and who crafted a Hunter Biden get-out-of-everything plea deal (before a judge blew it up) asked Merrick Garland to appoint him as Special Counsel - not to give him more authority (which he already had) but to allow him to destroy Alexander Smirnov, a long time FBI confidential informant who can potentially bring down the entire Obama/Biden operation. Isn’t...

In what can only be described as incredible timing, Special Counsel David Weiss (who quashed the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 and who tried to finagle an agreement to allow Hunter Biden amnesty and freedom from all future prosecutions) announced an indictment of long time FBI confidential informant Alexander Smirnov. Special counsel David Weiss has indicted an FBI confidential source who provided derogatory information about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden on felony false statement and obstruction charges. Weiss indicted Alexander Smirnov, 43, on one count of making a false statement and one count of creating a...