Free Republic

Former White House adviser Steve Bannon revealed some massive news on Monday about Rudy Giuliani and his upcoming efforts. During a segment on his podcast War Room, Bannon said it is “not by accident” that the deep state announced a probe on Giuliani for "FARA violations just as the investigations into the theft of the 2020 election are about to hit pay dirt."

Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City who was involved in the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia during the 2016 election, has fallen under the scrutiny of a grand jury convened by U.S. attorneys late last year for his own ties with Russia and other foreign governments, reports Insider. The grand jury is reportedly investigating McGonigal’s business dealings with a top aide to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who was at the center of allegations that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign, according to a recently obtained...

Politics Fact Checker Biden administration The 202s Polling Redistricting tracker June 8, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT Christina Pushaw, press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), has become a prominent protector of her boss and a fierce critic of the media. (Paul Hennessey/SOPA Images/Shutterstock) A spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) this week registered as a foreign agent of a former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, belatedly detailing work she performed for the politician between 2018 and 2020. The spokeswoman, Christina Pushaw, made the disclosure following contact from the Justice Department, according to her attorney, Michael Sherwin. She...

The Environmental Protection Agency has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations that U.S. environmental groups have received covert funding from China and Russia. EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler made the request after Rep. Lance Gooden (R., Texas) alleged that left-wing environmental groups—including the Sea Change Foundation, Sunrise Movement, and Sierra Club—have functioned as conduits for "foreign influence, financial involvement, and election interference." Wheeler noted that it is not against the law for a nonprofit to take contributions from foreign entities but nonetheless asked the DOJ to look into whether the groups should register as foreign agents. "Given heightened concerns that...

PART 2 OF 3. The Hunter Biden Files Hunter Biden and his business partners were involved in discussions about possible deals in dozens of foreign countries, often corrupt backwaters, at times invoking official channels like ambassadors, emails reviewed by The Daily Wire show. While most attention has focused on Ukraine, where a gas company paid the now-president’s son tens of thousands of dollars a month while he was in deep crack addiction, and China, Hunter and his partners at a consultancy called Rosemont Seneca were eager to do business in a vast array of other places. The map below highlights...

A federal judge agreed to appoint the same special master from the government's case against Michael Cohen in 2018 to review whether materials seized from the homes and offices of Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing are subject to attorney-client privilege....

President Biden and his allies raked in campaign cash from a top Russia lobbyist in 2020, just months before his administration’s decision to scrap sanctions on a controversial firm building a Russian oil pipeline to Germany. Richard Burt, a managing partner at McLarty Associates and a former U.S. ambassador to Germany during the Reagan administration, ponied up $4,000 for Joe Biden in October 2020 and dropped another $10,000 in the lefty-aligned political action committee Unite The County in March 2020, FEC records show. In addition to violating Biden’s own campaign pledge not to take lobbyist cash, the money from Burt...

Congress notified that CIA inspector general has received allegations from fund-raiser Imaad Zuberi, including targeting of U.S. lawmakers and misuse of news organization for spy operation. Imaad Zuberi, a major Democratic fundraiser facing 12 years in prison, has filed an extraordinary complaint with the CIA's chief watchdog alleging he witnessed "flagrant problems, abuses, violations of law" while working as an asset for U.S. intelligence, according to documents and interviews. Zuberi, of Los Angeles, recently hired the CIA's retired acting general counsel Robert J. Eatinger Jr. to review his case and help to appeal his conviction on a plea deal with...

Rudolph W. Giuliani says that the FBI secretly spied on his Apple iCloud account beginning in late 2019 when he was having regular messaging conversations with his client, President Trump, during House impeachment proceedings. Mr. Giuliani said the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan on Thursday informed his attorney, Robert Costello, that covert wiretapping took place. Mr. Giuliani, once the mob-fighting top prosecutor in New York and then the city’s mayor, said an assistant U.S. attorney made the disclosure because the operation will have to be detailed in court. The penetration happened under the Trump administration and then-Attorney General William P....

An opinion writer who frequently contributed op-eds to the New York Times has admitted to being paid well by the Iranian mission to the United Nations but insists that this did not make him an agent of the Iranian government or influence his writing. Kaveh Afrasiabi is currently under arrest, accused of violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). For its part, the New York Times, which still claims to publish "all the news that's fit to print," is dummying up, keeping its readers in the dark on the subject, and offering no comment.Ira Stoll of The Algemeiner has the...

@RudyGiuliani : A meeting is coming out in 1-2 days in State Dept. in which Hunter snuck in the back door ... That meeting took place with Tony Blinken."

Hunter Biden wanted to avoid registering as a foreign agent as part of a deal with a Chinese energy company, according to text messages obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. In a message to Tony Bobulinski on May 1, 2017, Hunter Biden also proposed creating a U.S.-based shell company so that the joint venture could bid on contracts with the U.S. government. A day after sending the message, Hunter Biden set up a meeting with his father, Joe Biden, and Bobulinski in Los Angeles. He claims that Joe Biden is referenced as an equity shareholder in early documents for...

China Global Television Network (CGTN) has been identified as a “long-standing weapon in Beijing’s arsenal of repression” whose raison d’être is “to attack designated enemies of the Communist Party,” chiefly the U.S. Headquartered in Beijing, funded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and controlled by the regime’s Publicity Department, the outlet is inundated with anti-U.S. and anti-Trump content. As a result, CGTN was forced to register with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in 2019. CGTN’s international disinformation campaign – which has resulted in airing forced confessions and deeply biased coverage of Hong Kong protests – aligns with President Xi...

Newly released documents reveal the FBI never had even preliminary evidence of a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia, and instead used a rarely enforced statutory relic – the Foreign Agents Registration Act – as the legal rationale for opening investigations in 2016-2017 and surveilling Trump campaign aides. On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened a counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia – nicknamed Crossfire Hurricane – not under espionage conspiracy laws but under FARA. The next month the FBI opened four separate FARA cases into people associated with the Trump campaign. Two other FARA cases were...

[Subtitle: “I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests,” Browder writes.]The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways,...

The governmentÂ’s effort to withdraw the departure motion means Flynn can ask to withdraw his guilty plea. Now the prosecutors are changing their tune. The furor over U.S. Department of Justice leaders openly intervening in the Roger Stone prosecution to overrule line prosecutorsÂ’ sentencing recommendation has led some commentators to report that Attorney General William Barr may have played a role in the governmentÂ’s shifting sentencing recommendations for retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn.In FlynnÂ’s case, prosecutors have twice reversed course on their sentencing recommendation. The latest reversal in the governmentÂ’s position, however, was more likely caused by the line...

George Papadopoulos A junior member of the Trump foreign policy advisory team in 2016, George Papadopoulos was approached by FBI agents in Chicago, where he lived with his mother after the election while waiting for what he hoped would be an offer to join the new administration. The agents said they just wanted to talk to him about contacts he’d made with people in London during the campaign. He spoke to them without a lawyer or the benefit of notes, emails or a calendar to refresh his recollection — a decision he would later regret. One of the interviews was...

After a flurry of court filings and blockbuster developments last month, the Michael Flynn criminal case has been dormant for nearly three weeks. The parties and the public now await word from presiding Judge Emmett Sullivan on the pending motion to compel and motion for sanctions filed by Sidney Powell, the lead attorney who took over FlynnÂ’s case shortly after the special counsel team disbanded.PowellÂ’s motion seeks to force federal prosecutors to provide Flynn an array of documents withheld from his attorneys and to sanction government lawyers for their failure to provide relevant evidence to the defense team in...

Full title: Judicial Watch: AP Reporters Gave DOJ/FBI Ukraine Info and Code to Private Locker of Paul Manafort in Apparent Effort to Push Criminal Prosecution Andrew Weissmann organized off-the-record DOJ/FBI meeting with AP to exchange ‘clarification’ and ‘assistance’ in their investigation for details on former Trump Campaign Director Paul Manafort (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released two productions of heavily redacted FBI documents – 28 pages and 38 pages – about an April 11, 2017, “off-the-record” meeting set up by then-Chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Fraud Section Andrew Weissmann, between the DOJ, the FBI and the Associated Press...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, October 22, 2019 Campaign Fundraiser Agrees To Plead Guilty To Falsifying Records to Conceal Work as Foreign Agent, Evading Taxes on Income Obtained by Lobbying on Behalf of Foreign Entities, and Illegal Campaign Contributions Federal prosecutors today filed a criminal case charging Imaad Shah Zuberi, a Southern California campaign fundraiser, with falsifying records to conceal his work as a foreign agent while lobbying high-level U.S. government officials. The criminal charges allege that Zuberi engaged in lobbying efforts that earned him millions of dollars, most of which was pilfered...