Free Republic

Now that Republicans have narrow control of the House of Representatives, the GOP is investigating the Biden administration with gusto. Still, Republicans seem not to have noticed one major foreign policy scandal that's hiding in plain sight. As I recently reported , the rising scandal surrounding retired FBI senior official Charles McGonigal is perhaps the worst in the bureau’s history. Multiple sources have told me that McGonigal, while still serving with the FBI as head of counterintelligence in New York, shook down Balkan business people, most of them Albanian, in an audacious political corruption scheme worth many millions of dollars....

The shocking indictments against the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York raise many dark questions.In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it? Specifically, I knew that: -Starting in 1980, an alleged “spotter agent” for the KGB began cultivating Trump as a new asset for Soviet intelligence. -The Russian...

Charles McGonigal, a former FBI agent who helped lead the investigation into Trump-Russia connections, is expected to plead guilty to charges of unlawfully working for a Russian oligarch.In an ironic turn of events, one of the individuals who worked tirelessly to take down former President Donald Trump by falsely accusing him of secretly collaborating with Russian officials and hackers was, in fact, the one engaging with influential Russians at the time.McGonigal, 54, a former top FBI counterintelligence agent based in New York, was charged in January with money laundering and violating United States sanctions by working for a Russian oligarch...

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...

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that he believed supporters of former President Donald Trump were “engaging in threats of violence,” while supporters of President Joe Biden were not prone to violence. Strzok said, “My biggest concern is that we have the presumptive Republican nominee for president who has and continues to engage in calls for violence from his supporters. Look, there’s an interesting data point here. Just shortly after the Michigan Supreme Court indicated they weren’t going to take this up, Donald Trump took to Truth Social and lauded their decision, talked about how they...

A former high-ranking FBI official has been sentenced to over four years in prison for colluding with Russian oligarchs.Charles McGonigal, once the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in New York, faced charges for conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and committing money laundering.McGonigal, 55, from New York City, was sentenced to 50 months in prison and ordered to pay a $40,000 fine on Thursday.McGonigal was arrested earlier this year for conspiring with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch sanctioned by the U.S. government.His guilty plea in August followed a detailed investigation revealing...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) obtained private communications and other personal records of multiple Republican House and Senate staffers who were investigating the department’s role in the origins of the Russia collusion hoax, according to former senior Trump administration official Kash Patel. A recently-revealed subpoena shows that the DOJ sought the records for not only Patel when he was an investigator for then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), but also those of Jason Foster, who was at the time chief investigative counsel to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (I-IA) and was also looking into the DOJ’s role in the hoax. According...

Many of the highest-ranking members of the Biden administration came from the same shadowy firm. It is a relatively new name among revolving-door power brokers in Washington D.C., which makes it all the more surprising. Founded in 2017, WestExec describes itself as a “diverse group of senior national security professionals with the most recent experience at the highest levels of the U.S. government. With deep knowledge and networks in the fields of defense, foreign policy, intelligence, cybersecurity, international economics, and strategic communications, our team has worked together around the White House Situation Room table, deliberating and deciding our nation’s foreign...

Lisa Page, the Trump-bashing ex-FBI lawyer who had an affair with a senior official she worked with investigating Russiagate, has split from her husband of 15 years, DailyMail.com can reveal. Divorce papers filed in the District of Columbia Superior Court show the 44-year-old's divorce from non-profit executive Joseph Burrow, 46, was finalized on June 29. Page blamed 'unhappy and irreconcilable differences' when she asked a DC judge to grant her a divorce in May, just days before the anniversary of their 2008 wedding in Naples, Italy. The secret trysts between her and Peter Strzok, one of the Bureau's top counter-intelligence...

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was recently sentenced to 22 years in prison for his involvement in January 6, has come forward with bombshell allegations that the Justice Department pressured him to falsely tie former President Donald Trump to Jan. 6 in exchange for a plea bargain. “They asked me to LIE about President Trump in order to indict him,” Enrique Tarrio said on Saturday. “I told them to pound sand, and because I refused to lie about President Trump it cost me twenty-two years of my life.” “The truth is, I could have been home,” said Tarrio. “I...

The D.C. Appeals Court ruled Friday that former President Trump can be deposed in suits against the FBI brought by former agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The Department of Justice appealed a ruling from a lower court in July, which came to the same conclusion. Strzok is suing the bureau for wrongful termination and Page is suing for invasion of privacy after the pair were embroiled in a political scandal due to work on the bureau’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia in 2018. Text messages became public in which the pair spoke about how they personally disliked Trump,...

FBI lovebird Peter Strzok has a special little cold spot for President Trump, and not just because he got fired for unprofessional behavior on while on the government's dime during Trump's term of office. He hates the guy insanely, enough to plot against him with his famous "insurance policy" as he told the FBI official he was having an affair with, and all one needs to do to see it now is to look through the convoluted logic of his Trump-hating tweets. His banner picture at the top of his Twitter account features legal indictment papers of Trump.So he tweeted...

Special Counsel John Durham on Wednesday testified before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigation into the origins of Spygate. Last month John Durham released his final report concluding the FBI had no verified intel when it opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump in 2016. In July of 2016, Peter Strzok opened a counterintel investigation into Trump’s camp dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane” on suspicions (based on no evidence) that the Russians had infiltrated Trump’s circle. John Durham didn’t charge any of the FBI officials involved in the coup. Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was charged with a process crime (false...

“Strzok agreed to provide information to the Office concerning matters related to the FBI's Alfa Bank investigation, but otherwise declined to be interviewed by the Office on matters related to his role in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

“As we continue to review the report, we noticed that several high-level former government officials directly involved in Crossfire Hurricane either declined or partially declined to cooperate with your investigation,” the senators wrote. “It seems odd that individuals would be allowed to avoid fully cooperating with your office, particularly given your authority to compel testimony and records.”

This week, the four year investigation overseen by Special Counsel John Durham was published. It revealed that the Democrat claim that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election was a fabrication concocted by the Clinton campaign to discredit Trump and carry her to the White House. The FBI knew the collusion claim was false, yet improperly spent public resources to promulgate this hoax, spy on Trump, and persecute his supporters. The media also knew the collusion allegation to be false, but still spent years pushing this lie because they hated Trump and the policies he advocated for...

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok, a key figure in the “Russia collusion” hoax, attacked Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer on Thursday for his work on alleged corruption by Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden. Strzok, who had been one of the agents assigned to investigate Trump for supposed links to Russia, before his incendiary anti-Trump text messages with a lover were discovered, took to Twitter to attack Schweizer’s work: If you have the slightest concern about the FBI’s relationship with Christopher Steele, you should be losing your mind about the FBI’s relationship with Peter Schweizer. New reporting from...

Below is my column in the New York Post, which turned out to be the theme for the cover. The Durham Report highlighted two scandals. First, there was a comprehensive effort of the political and media establishments to perpetrate one of the great hoaxes in history — a political hit job that ultimately derailed an American presidency. Second, there was no real accountability for that effort for the main players from Clinton to Comey to Congress. It was much like The Murder on the Orient Express. The question is not “whodunit” but who didn’t. Spoiler alert: they all did it...

The special counsel’s report provides the summary Americans need to understand the breadth of the malfeasance.. Special Counsel John Durham released his long-awaited report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation Monday. While the 306-page report includes some new details of the Russia-collusion hoax, the Clinton campaign’s role in the plot, and the FBI and intelligence agencies’ misconduct, much of the content merely rehashes what conservative media have reported for the last five years. Still, our country needed a public record of the events that represent one of the biggest political scandals in American history, and on that front Durham delivered. FBI’s...

Disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok appeared to take a victory lap Monday while reacting to the release of Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Strzok, who was fired from the FBI in 2018 following the surfacing of anti-Trump texts he sent his then-lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, took to social media after the report’s release, listing multiple individuals who ultimately faced federal charges stemming from the Russia investigation. In his tweet, Strzok listed the names of nine individuals, including former Trump 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort and advisor Roger Stone, and noted that...