Free Republic

December 2015 was a pivotal month in many respects. During the first week of December 2015, Donald Trump began to establish a substantial lead over his Republican primary opponents. Vice President Joseph Biden traveled to Ukraine to announce, on December 7th, a $190 million program to “fight corruption in law enforcement and reform the justice sector,” but behind the scenes explicitly linked a $1 billion loan guarantee to the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating the energy company Burisma, which employed Biden’s son Hunter. On December 9, 2015, the reported whistleblower Eric Ciaramella held a meeting...

Durbin Asks Bush To Put Partisanship Behind Him Bob Roberts Reporting CHICAGO (WBBM) -- The Democrats are talking co-operation with President Bush, but already there is evidence that controversial legislation backed by the Bush administration won't move forward. WBBM's Bob Roberts reports. President Bush has asked the lame-duck Congress to give him legislation that would specifically authorize the wiretapping of foreign phone calls and computer traffic of suspected terrorists. The issue came up Friday during a meeting hosted by the President with Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). Instead, Durbin told WBBM Saturday, he is asking Mr. Bush...

As the anniversary of September 11 approaches, a lawsuit filed by the families of the victims of the Islamic terrorist attacks against the Saudis has been granted permission to move forward. Saudi Arabia along with Qatar and Iran were the three Islamic terrorist states seen as most complicit in September 11. One of the big missing pieces of the puzzle is the complicity of the FBI in covering up the role of Saudi Arabia. During the trial, a video emerged that the FBI had spent a lot of time hiding of Omar Al-Bayoumi, a Saudi agent, filming key landmarks in...

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (WSMV) - The U.S Attorney’s Office in Middle Tennessee announced the arrest of a woman who allegedly threatened to kill Senator Marsha Blackburn. The release states that 22-year-old Penelope Convertino left a voice message at Sen. Blackburn’s office in Nashville on May 30, 2025. In the message, Convertino stated: “My name is mother**ker and I’m gonna kill Marsha Blackburn. I’m gonna shoot her with a gun. I’m gonna blow up her head on national TV. She will literally have brains splattered behind her because she will not be a person. She will be a dead f**king body.”...

FBI Director Kash Patel’s country music-singing girlfriend is suing the ex-FBI agent-turned podcast bro who suggested she was a “former Mossad Agent” sent as a “honeypot” to compromise Patel.Alexis Wilkins, 26, who has allegedly been dating Patel since 2023, is seeking $5 million in damages from self-professed “recovering FBI agent” Kyle Seraphin in a defamation lawsuit filed in an Austin, Texas federal court on Wednesday.Alekins Wilkins hugs Kash Patel after being sworn in as FBI director. Leah Millis/REUTERS In the complaint, Wilkins’ attorney wrote that Seraphin had “maliciously lied” about Wilkins by “falsely asserting that she—an American-born country singer—is an...

Armed civilians taking on active shooters: The Bureau’s numbers are off – by a lot.The Federal Bureau of Investigation has a lot to answer for, and, no doubt, the current leadership has its work cut out, depoliticizing the country’s supposedly premier law enforcement agency. The latest skeleton to fall out of the closet concerns how the Bureau has been vastly undercounting the number of cases of defensive gun use by armed Americans. The only reason for deliberately doing such a thing would have been orders coming down from Justice Department top brass – or from the White House – to...

When news hit last week that federal agents had raided John Bolton’s Maryland home and Washington office, the reaction was as predictable as it was hysterical. The left immediately leapt into hysterics, spinning the story as proof of Trump’s alleged obsession with revenge, tying it to Bolton’s bitter falling-out with him. Within hours, the usual chorus was screeching the same tired lines: Democracy is under attack! Trump is a dictator! This was pure political retribution! Only it wasn’t. A new report from—if you can believe it—the New York Times has thrown cold water on that absurd little storyline. According to...

New details have emerged surrounding the investigation into former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who may have allowed a foreign government to gain access to classified intelligence when publishing a memoir in 2020, according to a bombshell report from the New York Times. Despite constant allegations from Democrats and mainstream media pundits of political targeting on the part of the Trump Administration, The Times reported that the current investigation into Bolton “began to pick up steam” during the Biden presidency. Intelligence officials began to investigate after obtaining evidence that he may have mishandled classified information, according to unnamed sources familiar...

Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton transmitted classified emails over a private server system and they were intercepted by a hostile foreign country’s spy service, according to a leak to The New York Times. ..... Snip..... The New York Times on Wednesday reported that the US Government actually discovered John Bolton’s classified emails while gathering information from an “adversarial country’s spy service.” The New York Times reported: The investigation into President Trump’s former national security advisor, John R. Bolton, began to pick up momentum during the Biden administration, when U.S. intelligence officials collected information that appeared to show that...

Former national security adviser John Bolton had his home raided by federal agents last week. It caused a stir among those in the liberal media, who immediately ran with the narrative that this FBI visit was politically motivated. Bolton is one of President Trump’s most vocal critics. The authoritarian hysterics from the liberal pundit class were deafening, along with some gaslighting about how Barack Obama and Joe Biden never gave an order to go after their enemies. Now, we’ve learned that the momentum to initiate the eventual raid at the Bolton home started under the Biden administration, which also hindered...

I went to prison for defending the Constitutional separation of powers. John Bolton (an occasional contributor to The Hill) may well wind up in prison, too if investigators uncover evidence and prosecutors decide to bring charges over his alleged classified disclosures. When Bolton wrote his book, “The Room Where It Happened” — reportedly receiving a $2 million advance — he wasn’t just dishing gossip. He was sharing information about Oval Office conversations and national security that should have stayed secret — either by law or under executive privilege. A federal judge already spelled this out in black and white. In...

Last week’s FBI raid targeting former National Security Adviser John Bolton reaches beyond alleged mishandling of classified documents in relation to a book he published in 2020, according to a report from Fox News citing a Trump Administration source. The report has fueled speculation that the former Trump official could face criminal charges. Legal experts have long speculated that Bolton could face legal troubles due to his 2020 book “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” in which he trashed his former boss extensively. A lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleged...

President Trump promised voters during his campaign for a second term that he had bigger things on his mind than retribution against opponents. But it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term. His revenge campaign took an ominous turn Friday as FBI agents raided the home and office of Mr. Trump’s first-term national security adviser John Bolton. They brought two broad warrants to search the “premises.” Agents showed up unannounced at his Bethesda, Md., home at 7 a.m. They confiscated his wife Gretchen’s phone...

Today marks a watershed moment in the fight for constitutional rights and the protection of government whistleblowers. The ACLJ is proud to announce a complete and total victory for our client, FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle, who has been fully vindicated through a comprehensive settlement agreement with the DOJ made possible by President Trump’s Administration and his new leadership at the DOJ and FBI. The DOJ has agreed to fully restore FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle with back pay, benefits, damages, and full reinstatement – including his security clearance – after years of persecution under the Biden Administration. As we...

The FBI has signed settlement agreements with Garret O’Boyle, Steve Friend, and six other FBI whistleblowers that will provide them with back pay, lump-sum damage payments, restoration of their security clearances, and, in some of the cases, reinstatement to jobs with the bureau. O’Boyle and Friend were among eight remaining whistleblowers whose settlements were announced Tuesday by Empower Oversight, which represented the current and former FBI employees in their retaliation cases. Two other settlements were previously announced on Aug. 1 and in 2024 under the Biden administration. “Whistleblowers risk it all for the sake of simply telling the truth. These...

Months after he refused to charge Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election for using a private, unauthorized server to transmit classified information, then-FBI Director James Comey's inner circle used personal email accounts to further a plan to make an "unauthorized disclosure" to journalists, newly declassified memos reveal. When investigators in a criminal probe codenamed "TROPIC VORTEX" sought permission in 2019 to gain access to those private emails, federal prosecutors turned them down, according to the memos recently uncovered by current FBI Director Kash Patel and declassified for release to Congress by Attorney General Pam Bondi. The U.S. Attorney's Office in...

The FBI recently raided the home of John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser-turned-outspoken Trump critic, seizing documents allegedly tied to classified material. From Bolton’s role in the Trump administration to prior warnings from a federal judge about his handling of sensitive information and why the DOJ under Biden dropped its earlier investigation, Victor Davis Hanson unpacks the full backstory behind the raid on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”

FBI agents raided the Maryland home and Washington, DC office of President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton Friday morning in a high-profile probe of allegations that he sent “highly sensitive” classified documents to his family from a private email server while working in the White House.Federal investigators went to Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Md., at 7 a.m. in an investigation ordered by FBI Director Kash Patel, a Trump administration official told The Post. Agents later went to Bolton’s office in downtown DC, but did not enter until a judge signed a warrant for that location late Friday morning.“NO...

Two of those arrested in Atlanta after far-left extremists torched the site of a future police training center, which they call "Cop City," were members of the National Lawyers Guild. One of those attorneys, Thomas Jurgens, is an attoney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which defended his precense as a legal observer at the site of the demostration. Jurgens can be seen wearing the customary green hat in video from the night of the attack. He was accused of domestic terrorism and was granted $5,000 bond after his arrest. His status as an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild...

10 Stories They Don’t Want You to Read Today #10 - Scott Jennings uses John Bolton’s own words to hang him after the FBI raid on his home. Jennings reminded everyone what Bolton said after the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump. Now, those words have come back to haunt him. Bolton said: “There is no evidence there is a partisan motive here. I think everybody just ought to calm down, whether you’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump, and let the process work its way through.” The process just worked its way through as Bolton’s morning began with FBI agents pounding on his door,...