Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- The Securities and Exchange Commission tapped Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive Adam Storch on Friday to serve as the agency's first-ever chief operating officer of the enforcement division. The new hire represents the latest personnel change at the SEC in its effort to improve its operations following its failure to detect Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme. Enforcement Division Director Robert Khuzami created Mr. Storch's position of managing executive as part of the major re-structuring effort he announced earlier this year. Mr. Storch will oversee division operations that include budget, information technology and administrative services. He will also supervise...

SNIPPET: “..."For the Love of Islam: A Second American Woman Is Arrested in Cartoonist Case,” by Vanessa O’Connell, Stephanie Simon and Evan Perez in the Wall Street Journal, March 13..." Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”” SNIPPET: “On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim...

A top White House national security adviser and key proponent of the Obama administration's diplomacy with Iran is the focus of a congressional inquiry following disclosures the FBI may have denied him top-level security clearances, according to communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser who led the administration's efforts to mislead Congress about the terms of the Iran nuclear agreement, is under scrutiny in the wake of disclosures he was declined interim clearance status by the FBI in 2008, when the administration was moving into the White House. Since that...

As this discussion of gun control and mental health continues to evolve, let's keep this quote in mind from one of the Left's domestic terrorist: "I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious." Bill Ayers I have no doubt if Ayers and his ilk though they could have gotten away with it they would.They had models from the former Soviet Union, China, North Korea,...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals on Friday for attempting to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, so naturally, CNN is doubling down on its coverage of possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. In fact, the network sent chief international correspondent Matthew Chance to St. Petersburg, Russia to literally dig through the garbage of an office building housing the alleged “troll farm” in order to try and find some clues. “This is the office in which that atmosphere of chaos was stoked from the Russian side,” Chance told guest host Jim Sciutto. “That’s...

Since the allegations about Donald Trump’s business connections to Russia started to fly last year in the middle of his presidential campaign, the fog of political war has made it difficult to tell the real from the shadow. Except for one very visible landmark: a sprawling, rococo seaside mansion in Palm Beach that Trump himself liked to boast about as an example of his real-estate acumen. “What do I have to do with Russia?” he replied to reporters’ questions at a press conference in Doral last summer. “You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a...

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Feb 7 (Reuters) - An HNA Group company has failed to make an early payment it had agreed to on a 1.7 billion yuan ($271.9 million) trust product that falls due next week, two sources with direct knowledge of the situation said, the latest indication of financial stress at the highly leveraged conglomerate.

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...

A week after Josh Meyer’s Politico expose,“The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off the Hook,” former Obama officials are still berating Meyer for his 13,000-word article detailing how the Obama administration killed a nearly decade-long DEA effort to stem a global Hezbollah cocaine-smuggling-and-organized-crime ring to help secure its nuclear deal with Iran. “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” former Defense Department analyst David Asher explained in the article. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.” Asher helped establish and...

NOTE TO ADMIN MOD: this is not a commercial solicitation. I have no expectations of selling the item for $37,500. The point is to expose the story. After three false FEC returns, the FEC gave Hillary an immunity agreement and ordered her to file a fourth report. She filed a fourth false report and the crime thus continues. FREEPERS --- please ask questions on the item and allow me to tell the story and further skewer her. I hope this story can make the news. Thanks. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Bill Clinton signed directors chair seatback from concert that evidenced a crime Hillary...

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...

See also: Ben Smith and the Memory Hole. Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith has had a rough week. As the man who decided to publish the “secret dossier” about Donald Trump’s alleged hijinks in Moscow, he has suffered the ultimate indignity of having even MSNBC call him out for publishing fake news. Earlier he sent a note to Buzzfeed staff explaining his decision. “Our presumption is to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers,” he wrote. “We have always erred on the side of publishing.” If true, Ben Smith has come a long way...

The Paul Manafort indictment is much ado about nothing . . . except as a vehicle to squeeze Manafort, which is special counsel Robert Mueller’s objective — as we have been arguing for three months (see here, here, and here). Do not be fooled by the “Conspiracy against the United States” heading on Count One (page 23 of the indictment). This case has nothing to do with what Democrats and the media call “the attack on our democracy” (i.e., the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 election, supposedly in “collusion” with the Trump campaign). Essentially, Manafort and his associate, Richard W....

Congressional investigators this week released emails suggesting that staff at the Federal Election Commission have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with help from the IRS's infamous Lois Lerner. This means more than just an expansion of the probe to the FEC. It's a new link to the Obama team. In May this column noted that the targeting of conservatives started in 2008, when liberals began a coordinated campaign of siccing the federal government on political opponents. The Obama campaign helped pioneer this tactic. In late summer of 2008, Obama lawyer Bob Bauer took issue with ads run against...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

Today in United States v. Rod Blagojevich: following up on his 2008 claims that then-Senator Barack Obama was one of a few people who could testify to his innocence, his defense team issued a motion today to subpoena the President to testify in court. Most of the juiciest bits involving Obama’s role in choosing a new Senator are blacked out, or so we thought. It turns a lucky PDF glitch gave us VIP access. Who wouldn’t want to see the blacked out part? Let’s investigate! Most of the non-blacked out portions of the motion are predictably tame general knowledge: the...

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day. The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

German authorities have banned the most influential internet website of Antifa – the country's militant left -- in the wake of violence that occured last month outside the G20 summit in Hamburg. In an unprecedented move against violent left-wing extremism, Germany’s Interior Ministry informed the owners of the left-wing site about the crackdown Friday, the Local reported. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière claimed the website helped incite the violence in Hamburg and warned of “serious consequences” of left-wing radicalism, the New York Times reported. “The prelude to the G-20 summit in Hamburg was not the only time that violent actions...

The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard. The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for...

The case was over the abduction of Dong-Shik, a South Korean who was a permanent resident of the US and had spent seven years providing aid and proselytizing to North Korean defectors. An Israeli NGO announced on Monday that a US federal court in Washington, DC has granted it a historic $330 million default award judgment against North Korea in a civil damages trial for wrongful death, torture and kidnapping. The judgment, only announced Monday, but written on April 9, included $15 million dollars each to the son and brother of Reverend Dong Shik Kim, presumed dead, as well as...