Free Republic

One of the challenges of Spygate is that it's such a sprawling, complicated tale, filled with competing narratives and motives open to interpretation. We understand that this is a serious situation – possibly the biggest scandal in U.S. history. But how can one get the message across to the average American without his eyes glazing over? To cut through the complexity, it helps to focus on specific actions by individuals that we all can agree are suspect. This brings us to Samantha Power. Of all the political stories from 2017, surely the most curious is this: why is everyone ignoring...

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Thursday he would make “unmasking” requests to reveal the identity of a U.S. citizen every “couple of weeks” during a more than six-year period. His comments about unmasking were made to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who asked about then-President Barack Obama’s U.N. Ambassador Samantha Powers’ testimony in which she said other people had used her name to make unmasking requests. Mr. Clapper said he did not know how that could happen, and that during his time as DNI director, he would make a unmasking request “once every couple of weeks, something...

On March 16, 2016, I posted on www.freerepublic.com that Trump would easily win enough delegates for the nomination, estimating he would finish with 1,300 (at a time when Nate Silver’s vaunted 538 and the Hill still said Trump would “fall more than 100 delegates short of 1,237.” In reality, Trump had 1,400 delegates at the Republican Convention. Why does this matter? It matters greatly as more and more evidence of Deep State/FBI spying on the Trump campaign emerges. It matters even more because in May 2017, Senator Ron Paul said that “we have several sources telling us that mambers of...

RUSH: To New York City. John, great to have you. I’m glad you waited. How are you doing, sir? CALLER: Okay. I’d like to speak about the pen register on Michael Cohen’s phone. RUSH: Yes, sir. On his office and home and apartment and so forth? Yeah. CALLER: All right. Let me explain about how a pen register works. It’s the same… It is a wiretap. The only thing is the court order doesn’t allow you to listen in. But you can listen in illegally. You can attach a listening device — a phone — and a recording device on...

Meanwhile, There's A War On by John HinderakerWe noted here the mysteriously under-covered story of the three would-be terrorists who were arrested in Italy after vowing to launch an attack on America that would dwarf September 11. A reader sent us a link to this article, which has more: The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. - because it would tend to support President Bush's use of NSA domestic surveillance, according to media watchdog groups. News of a planned attack masterminded by three Algerians operating out of Italy was widely...

Discussion of a classified government wiretap program is expected to dominate Thursday's confirmation hearing for Gen. Michael Hayden, tapped by the White House to be the next CIA chief. Ahead of the hearing, details of the National Security Agency's wiretap program were given for the first time to the intelligence committees of both the House and Senate on Wednesday. Previously only a handful of senior senators and congressmen were told about the domestic spying operation authorized by the president, which is run outside the court system. The wiretapping will be a "central" topic of discussions on whether to approve Hayden...

Regulations recently signed into effect by Attorney General Eric Holder allow the National Counterterroism Center (NCTC) to monitor records of citizens for any potential criminal activity, without a warrant and without suspicion. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the records that will be subject to seizure and examination by the NCTC include “flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign exchange students and many others.” Prior to the promulgation of these new regulations, such records were stored on only those citizens suspected of terror-related activity or as part of ongoing criminal investigations. Furthermore, this information...

Apparently, #NeverTrump candidate Evan McMullin attended the June 15 House leadership meeting. McMullin then announced he would run for president against the Republican primary winner Donald Trump in August. Republican leaders now believe McMullin taped the meetings. Earlier this week McMullin confirmed to the Washington Post that a tape leaked to the liberal rag was accurate. Republicans trusted this clown — Now they are worried he is going leak more audio from their meetings — trashing Trump no doubt — to the liberal media.

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul on Sunday blasted former CIA Director John Brennan for suggesting that President Trump will be remembered as a “disgraced demagogue,” saying that Brennan spying on Americans while running the agency was disgraceful. “This man had the power to search every American’s records without a warrant,” Paul tweeted Sunday. “What’s disgraceful is attacking the Bill of Rights and the freedom of every American.”

Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency By GINGER THOMPSON and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables. In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be...

FOX News host Sean Hannity tonight invited Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, Rep. Jim Jordan and Circa News reporter Sara Carter on to discuss the latest breaking news that the intelligence community used the phony Russia dossier to spy on the Trump campaign. Sean Hannity told his audience he spoke with three separate sources who told him the phony Trump dossier was used to obtain the FISA warrant to spy on Donald Trump. The only item that was verified from the phony dossier was that Carter Page traveled to Moscow. Fusion GPS, the company behind the Hillary Clinton funded dossier,...

For instance, a ruling declassified this month by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) chronicles nearly 10 pages listing hundreds of violations of the FBI’s privacy-protecting minimization rules that occurred on Comey’s watch. The behavior the FBI admitted to a FISA judge just last month ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight the bureau promised was in place years ago.

Privacy advocates and journalists want to know what Sen. Ron Wyden is up to -- and whether the Oregon Democrat elicited another lie about surveillance from a director of national intelligence during Wednesday's Senate intelligence committee hearing. Wyden asked one of the final questions at the hearing that dealt with the investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election and with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires later this year if Congress does not act. Wyden, a forceful privacy advocate, asked Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, with whom he had sparred earlier, a simple standalone...

Agency watchdogs are up in arms over a Justice Department memo questioning the legality of turning documents they say are crucial to their investigations. The new policy protecting certain portions of sensitive documents — announced last month by the DOJ’s office of legal counsel — came under fresh fire from lawmakers during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. Lawmakers in both parties, including the top Republican and Democrat on the panel, disagree with the policy shift, saying it goes against the specific intent of the Inspector General Act of 1978. The law specifies that inspectors general have access to...

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. Faulk said he joined in to listen, and...

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) spoke with Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Thursday regarding a proposed Mueller amendment to limit the special counsel investigation to between March 2015 and the present, and also tax reform in the House. “We know now without a shadow of a doubt that the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, paid Fusion GPS and Steele to acquire this dossier, which required colluding with Russian operatives and Russian nationals. So, they produced this dossier and I believe, yesterday I called for the FBI, the Justice Department to declassify all the FISA applications involving Trump associates because...

On Sunday, President Barack Obama traveled to Afghanistan to do a photo op with the troops amid fallout from the burgeoning Veterans Administration scandal. Announcing his visit, the White House promptly released a list of guests, including the name of the top CIA officer in Afghanistan. That officer is responsible for intelligence and drone warfare. The information was sent to over 6,000 email addresses. Oops. This is not the first time the Obama administration has compromised national security with leaks, either purposeful or inadvertent. SEAL Team Six. After the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the Obama administration steadfastly refused to...

Many in the media are diving deeply into minutiae in order to discredit any notion that President Trump might have been onto something in March when he fired off a series of tweets claiming President Obama had “tapped” “wires” in Trump Tower just before the election. According to media reports this week, the FBI did indeed “wiretap” the former head of Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort, both before and after Trump was elected. If Trump officials — or Trump himself — communicated with Manafort during the wiretaps, they would have been recorded, too. But we’re missing the bigger story. If these...

Washington (CNN)US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe. The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump. Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence...

Evidence shows that John Roberts, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, was “hacked” by a Deep State surveillance operation overseen by Obama administration CIA director John Brennan and Obama director of national intelligence James Clapper. Roberts, the Bush appointee who made the decisive vote to uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare before the 2012 election, was allegedly the victim of the same Deep State surveillance program that spied on President Donald Trump. Tapes released by Federal Judge G. Murray Snow — preserved on a Whistleblower Soundcloud page — show real estate billionaire Timothy Blixseth explaining Brennan and Clapper’s surveillance...