Free Republic

Sunday on MSNBC, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said The New York Times report that in June 2016 Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chair Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met with a Russian lawyer linked with the Kremlin meant we have “a criminal enterprise running this country now.” Dean said, “I think at this point, Trump is Trump. He’s going to lie. He’s going to do all these things he does. And the real savior for democracy is going to be Robert Mueller. He’s going to find out the truth. We’re never going to get the truth...

Radical left-wing icon former California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums was a hired lobbyist for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. June 9, 2016, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned. Dellums, who represented liberal San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., is a long-time darling of left-wing political activists. He served 13 terms in Congress as an African-American firebrand and proudly called himself a socialist. He retired in 1996. The former congressman is one of several high-profile Democratic partisans who was on Veselnitskaya’s payroll, working to defeat a law that is the hated object of...

Russia has been showing the world glistening scenes of the Winter Olympics. It's a rare opportunity to brighten a national image that often skates on the thin ice of corruption. One authority estimates that 20 percent of the Russian economy is skimmed by graft and a lot of that by government officials. It may be that no one knows more about this than American-born businessman Bill Browder. Browder tells a story of thievery, vengeance and death worthy of a Russian novel. He's a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin and he has torn a rift between Moscow and Washington....

The British spy whose body was found padlocked inside a bag in his flat had illegally hacked into secret data on former U.S. president Bill Clinton, it has been revealed. Gareth Williams, 31, was discovered in a holdall in the bath at his London home five years ago this month, but the mystery surrounding his death has never been solved. Today, it has been revealed the spy had dug out a guest list for an event Clinton was due to attend as a favour for a friend. The hack breached Mr Williams' security clearance and this sparked anger among MI6...

The Russian mafia is becoming “increasingly active” in Germany, with networks recruiting in German prisons and groups bringing in billions of euros each year, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has warned. “The Russian-Eurasian organized criminality is very dynamic,” BKA President Holger Münch told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. “They are already expanding in the west.” One of the most dangerous groups, according to Münch, is the so-called “Thieves in law” (Diebe im Gesetz) gang, founded in Stalin’s labor camps. The group from the former Soviet Union have their own “laws” and a secret language, and is thought to be...

Gore's, Talbott's Red Russian roots How they 'Hammer'-ed out Washington-Moscow policy Posted: October 3, 2000 Loutchansky's name surfaced again last year, when the Washington Post revealed that first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's two brothers, Tony Rodham and Hugh Rodham, were involved in a $118 million scheme to grow and export hazelnuts in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Their partner in the venture was Aslan Abashidze, who said his financial adviser was Loutchansky. Abashidze is a reputed member of a Russian organized crime family.The Rodham brothers at first balked and then agreed to national security adviser Sandy Berger's request that...

(Reuters) Vladimir Putin with Jose Maria Aznar, then Spain's prime minister, at Moncloa Palace on June 13, 2000. One of Russia's largest organized-crime syndicates allegedly operated out of Spain for more than a decade with the help of close allies of President Vladimir Putin, then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Bloomberg reports. Prosecutors in Madrid have filed a 488-page petition to charge 27 people with money laundering and fraud in connection to the St. Petersburg-based Tambov crime syndicate's setting up shop in Spain in 1996. Vladislav Reznik, now the deputy head of the finance committee in Russia's lower house...

Tuesday, Sep. 23, 2003. Page 1 Bike Boffins Pedal With General Clark By Kevin O'Flynn Staff Writer One was a doctor from Siberia, the other an American general now running for president, and best known in Russia for his brinkmanship in Kosovo. But now the fortunes of Alexander Pyntikov and former NATO commander General Wesley Clark -- who last week created a political sensation by declaring his candidacy for U.S. president -- are entwined in a company that makes push bikes. But these are no ordinary push bikes: The U.S. Special Forces Command currently freewheels on them, as do police...

Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition politician and former deputy prime minister, has been shot dead in central Moscow, the Interior Ministry said early on Saturday. Nemtsov, 55, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, had been due to take part on Sunday in the first big opposition protest in months in the Russian capital. He was shot four times late on Friday night, not far from the Kremlin in the centre of Moscow. Police cars blocked the street where he was shot. An ambulance was also nearby. "Nemtsov B.E. died at 2340 hours as a result of four shots in...

Death of a ProsecutorPosted By Kenneth R. Timmerman On January 21, 2015 @ 12:35 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments Alberto Nisman, the Argentinean prosecutor who indicted top Iranian regime officials for the July 1994 AMIA Jewish Center bombing in Buenos Aires, was found dead by gunshot in his apartment on Sunday night, in what initially was called a suicide.Nisman was scheduled to address members of parliament the next day to reveal new information about alleged efforts by Argentinean President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her foreign minister, Hector Timerman, to cover up the responsibility of the Iranian regime...

A retired Border Patrol officer outraged over the influx of illegal aliens entering the country this year has recorded an interview that reveals chilling information about the current situation at the U.S.-Mexico border and the long-term hazards it holds for the country as a whole. zacharytaylor0723In the self-produced interview, former Border Patrol Agent Zachary Taylor talks about a variety issues facing the Border Patrol the general public might not expect. He speaks of immigrants with various diseases coming into the U.S., how the Russian mafia is using Mexico as a base of operations and the concept of “asymmetric warfare” as...

The holiday data breach at Target Corp. appeared to be part of a broad and highly sophisticated international hacking campaign against multiple retailers, according to a report prepared by federal and private investigators that was sent to financial-services companies and retailers. […] Parts of the malicious computer code used against Target’s credit-card readers had been on the Internet’s black market since last spring and were partly written in Russian, people familiar with the report said. Both details suggest the attack may have ties to organized crime in the former Soviet Union, former U.S. officials said. …

The ObamaCare website is a Russian Mafia dream come true. Think about it. A completely UNSECURE website with the personal and financial information of thousands of highly gullible people. Gullible because the website is known to be UNSECURE and yet they STILL entered their personal info. Think the Russian Mafia won't take advantage of this HUGE payday for them? Of course not. And WHO are the gullible people to so readily hand over their info to the Russian Mafia? Mostly liberals or idiots and since they are not mutually exclusive, make that liberal idiots. One of those liberal idiots...

Nearly two dozen defendants were arraigned last Friday in a Manhattan federal court for their alleged roles in a gambling ring for the fabulous people but missing from the crowd was reputed Russian mobster Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov who remains a fugitive as reported by Richard Behar for Forbes: "The feds call him a 'major figure in international Eurasian Organized Crime' who has been involved in 'drug distribution, illegal arms sales and trafficking in stolen vehicles.' In the current gambling case, he's accused of using his status as a thief-in-law (or vory v zakone) -- a select group of the highest-level criminals...

Hillel "Helly" Nahmad, the art dealer and playboy whom federal prosecutors allege was involved with an illegal gambling and money laundering ring tied to the Russian Mafia, has retained criminal defense lawyer Benjamin Brafman who insists on his client's innocence as reported by Vivian Yee for The New York Times: "Mr. Brafman, who is representing Mr. Nahmad with another lawyer, Paul Shechtman, said in a statement after the hearing, 'We do not believe that Mr. Nahmad has knowingly violated the law.' He also said, 'We anticipate that he will be fully exonerated.'" Nahmad "is keeping himself out of jail by...

Former FBI agent missing in Iran photographed in Guantánamo jumpsuit By Barney Henderson 8:44PM GMT 08 Jan 2013 The family of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in Iran in 2007, have released pictures of him dressed in an orange jumpsuit like a Guantánamo Bay prisoner, as they continue to hold hope that he is still alive.

The 43-year-old died in November 2006 after he was poisoned with polonium-210 while drinking tea at a meeting in LondonAnd at the time of his death he was about to reveal details of links between the Kremlin and Russian organised crime, a pre-inquest hearing was told. The former KGB man, 43, was poisoned with polonium-210 after allegedly drinking tea at a meeting with former Russian colleagues Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, central London. Files submitted by the Government were yesterday said to indicate Russia had a “prima facie” case to answer over his 2006...

Former FBI agent missing in Iran By PAT MILTON, Associated Press Writer NEW YORK - An American who disappeared in Iran while on a business trip is a former FBI agent in New York and Florida known as a meticulous investigator and an expert in busting Italian and Russian mobsters. The retired agent was identified as Robert Levinson, 59, of Coral Springs, Fla., a U.S. official familiar with the case told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He was last heard from around March 11 while in a coastal area of southern Iran, where he was working for an independent filmmaker,...

NEW YORK — Christine Levinson's husband vanished while on a business trip to Iran. Five months later, she's going there to try to bring him back. The mother of the couple's seven children is planning her own trip to Iran in search of husband Robert Levinson even though she's been advised by the State Department not to travel to Iran because of the risk. "I am positive he is alive," Christine Levinson told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday from her home in Coral Springs, Fla. "If he were hospitalized or had been killed, we would have known by...

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – A U.S. senator revealed Tuesday that he believes a former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran nearly two years ago is being held in a secret prison there. Sen. Bill Nelson shed new light on the disappearance of Robert Levinson during a confirmation hearing for Hillary Rodham Clinton in Washington. Levinson, of Coral Springs, Fla., was last seen on Iran's Kish island in March 2007 where he had gone to seek information for a client of his security firm.