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A retired CIA leader coordinated a letter from former intelligence chiefs claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation because he wanted to help Joe Biden's presidential campaign. Mike Morell told the House Judiciary Committee that he was asked by Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State - who at the time was a senior member of the Biden campaign - to help discredit the laptop reporting. Morell was a former acting CIA director, serving for two months in 2011 and four months from 2012 to 2013. He retired from the CIA in September 2013. The House Judiciary Committee, led by...

MOUNT PLEASANT, SC (WCSC) - Officials with the Coast Guard say federal and state authorities are continuing to investigate a potential threat which was reported at the Wando Terminal Wednesday night. Coast Guard officials say the FBI is investigating a report of a "dirty bomb" aboard a vessel.

“Goods were being transported from one country to another, and they ended up in a third country with nobody owning the goods. Why did they end up here?” said Ghassan Hasbani, a former Lebanese deputy prime minister and opposition figure. Those linked to the shipment and interviewed by Reuters all denied knowledge of the cargo’s original owner or declined to answer the question. Those who said they didn’t know included the ship’s captain, the Georgian fertilizer maker who produced the cargo and the African firm that ordered it but said it never paid for it.

...The Rhosus left for its last journey from Batumi, Georgia, in September 2013. Its cargo was destined for Mozambique, but the captain was ordered to make an unscheduled stop in Beirut to take on additional freight. Captain Prokoshev said they needed to make extra cash to pay for their passage through the Suez Canal. Lawyers for the ship’s creditors said the additional cargo was supposed to be transported to Jordan. ...The Rhosus was left abandoned, and Lebanese authorities transferred its cargo to a warehouse in the port. In 2015, the ship was moved 1,000 feet up the pier where it...

Iran threatens rape of Obama daughter Warns of mass abductions, brutal killings of American citizens if U.S. hits Syria (Daily Caller) As Congress debates whether to support President Obama’s call for a limited strike against Syria for the alleged use of chemical weapons, Iran is vowing to back Bashar al-Assad’s regime to the hilt and threatening to unleash terrorism should the U.S. strike. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Forces, Wednesday told the Assembly of Experts — the body that chooses the supreme leader — that “[w]e will support Syria to the end.” And in an unprecedented statement, a...

(WIkipedia...."During the certification process, the FAA delegated many evaluations to Boeing, allowing the manufacturer to review their own product.[48][49] It was widely reported that Boeing pushed to expedite approval of the 737 MAX to compete with the Airbus A320neo. That aircraft hit the market nine months ahead of Boeing's model.") Article excerpt... ...During his time as President of the United States, Barack Obama promoted the sale of Boeing planes—including the 737 Max 8 planes—around the world. In November 2011, in Bali, Indonesia, President Obama announced an agreement between Boeing and Lion Air. "For the last several days I’ve been talking...

n a rare diplomatic snub, President Obama is canceling plans to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow next month. The decision reflects both U.S. anger over Russia's harboring of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and growing frustration within the Obama administration over what it sees as Moscow's stubbornness on other key issues, including missile defense and human rights. Obama will still attend the Group of 20 economic summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, but a top White House official said the president had no plans to hold one-on-one talks with Putin while there. Instead of visiting Putin in...

Last Thursday, the United States Senate confirmed President Obama’s choice Victoria Nuland as chief envoy to Europe. This was done by a voice vote with no debate, one day after the one year anniversary of last year’s deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya. Victoria Nuland served as the State Department spokeswoman during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s tenure, which included the Benghazi attack in which Ambassador Chris Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and former Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were all killed. ... Ms. Nuland had a direct hand in the changing of these talking points and has...

Fox confirms Vice President Joe Biden will have dinner Sunday night with a group of GOP Senators who could be swayed on Syria. The topic of conversation is expected to be what the President needs to say in his Tuesday address.

The longtime head of public affairs at the FBI -- who was a confidant of former director James Comey -- is planning to retire, Fox News has learned. A notice went out this week for a retirement get-together for Michael Kortan scheduled for Feb. 15. Since 2009, Kortan has served as assistant director for public affairs, an influential job that controlled media access. He also served under former director Robert Mueller, now leading the Russia probe. The FBI confirmed to Fox News that Kortan is retiring. It's unclear whether the retirement was long-planned or in any way precipitated by recent...

Commenting on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating President Trump for alleged "collusion" with Russia, Judicial Watch said that, as FBI director under President Obama, Mueller purged the Bureau of all anti-terrorism training material that was deemed "offensive" to Muslims. This was done, said Judicial Watch, "after secret meetings between Islamic organizations and the FBI chief." Judicial Watch obtained the documents on Mueller and the Muslim groups after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the FBI in July 2012. Mueller had met with the Muslims groups on Feb. 8, 2012, after which the curricula purge took...

AFP - South Korea's film community reacted angrily Monday to a major cinema chain's decision to stop screening a documentary that questions whether North Korea was really behind the 2010 sinking of the warship Cheonan. Megabox withdrew the movie "Project Cheonan" from 27 of its theatres on Saturday, citing customer safety concerns after unidentified conservative activists threatened to stage protest rallies outside the multiplexes. The Megabox move "does serious violence to our cultural vitality which prospers on the basis of diversity and the freedom of expression," the representatives of 11 film industry groups, including directors, producers, critics and others said...

The Clinton Foundation scandal continues to spread ever since the news broke that it did not disclose millions of dollars of donations from foreign governments and businessmen. It’s already infected ABC, as anchor George Stephanopoulos was forced to apologize for personal undisclosed donations to the foundation. He has yet to acknowledge or apologize for some of the other connections that have surfaced. But the connections don’t stop there, they extend to other prominent lefties and to a Spanish-language media outlet. Through its Too Small to Fail initiative, The Clinton Foundation is tied to Tom Steyer and the American Spanish language...

On the day the news broke that Hillary Clinton had used a private email account as secretary of state, the man who would soon be named to chair her presidential campaign fired off a note of distress, venting frustration about some of Clinton’s closest aides. “Speaking of transparency, our friends Kendall, Cheryl and Phillipe sure weren’t forthcoming on the facts here,” John Podesta complained in the March 2015 note, referring to Clinton’s personal lawyer David Kendall as well as her former State Department staffers Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines. “Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago?...

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, allowed on NPR this morning that American action in Syria might not be legal:

An office tower is subject to forfeiture because revenue from it was secretly funneled to a state-owned Iranian bank in violation of a U.S. trade embargo, a judge ruled Monday. … The U.S. government had said the Alavi Foundation’s sole partner in the ownership of the 36-story Manhattan building was a shell company fronting for a secret interest held by the state-owned bank of Iran, Bank Melli. The Iranian government has been designated by the U.S. as a sponsor of international terrorism, an allegation it has repeatedly denied. …

Gehad El-Haddad, the now-imprisoned former spokesman for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's so-called "Freedom and Justice Party," was effectively the "Baghdad Bob" of the Arab Spring. Educated in the UK and the son of a top Muslim Brotherhood leader, Gehad served as the special advisor on foreign policy to deposed Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi. Gehad incited violence, justified the torture of protesters, recycled fake news stories, and staged fake scenes of confrontation during the 2013 Rabaa protests. He was arrested in September 2013 after the fall of Morsi and the bloody confrontations during the breakup of the Muslim Brotherhood's protest...

Retired Marine Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright has reportedly lost his security clearance as an investigation into his involvement in national security leaks continues, Foreign Policy reports. Cartwright, a retired four-star general who served for 40 years and last served on the Joint Chiefs, has been the subject of an ongoing investigation into an alleged leak of classified information of the "Stuxnet" virus that targeted and temporarily disabled Iran's nuclear facilities in 2010. The general's legal team has called that assertion "preposterous." Gordon Lubold of FP reports that multiple current and former administration sources said Cartwright lost his clearance earlier this...

For months, a small team of U.S. Navy investigators and federal prosecutors secretly devised options for a high-stakes international manhunt. Could the target be snatched from his home base in Asia and rendered to the United States? Or held captive aboard an American warship? Making the challenge even tougher was the fact that the man was a master of espionage. His moles had burrowed deep into the Navy hierarchy to leak him a stream of military secrets, thwarting previous efforts to bring him to justice. The target was not a terrorist, nor a spy for a foreign power, nor the...

Recently we reported that Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe was under investigation by the FBI and prosecutors from the Justice Department's integrity unit regarding donations to McAuliffe's campaign during his time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative. Specifically, investigators were scrutinizing a $120,000 donation McAuliffe received from Wang Wenliang, a Chinese businessman, who was also a donor to the Clinton foundation, pledging $2 million. The Daily Mail has obtained footage that shows the two men entering Hillary Clinton's residence off D.C.'s Embassy row as they attended a fundraiser on September 30, 2013.