Free Republic

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Fox News "went all in for Trump" in the 2016 primaries in an interview with PBS's "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover." "I think Fox News went all in for Trump. That was the decision they made," Cruz said in an interview about journalist Tim Alberta’s book "American Carnage," which quotes Cruz as saying Fox News founder Roger Ailes's "dying wish" was to elect Trump as president. Ailes was forced out in 2016 over sexual misconduct allegations and died the next year. Asked about the quote, Cruz said, "I didn’t know Roger well, but I think...

A high-ranking official from Turkey’s second-largest state-owned bank was arrested in New York City March 27. On the orders of the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Joon H. Kim, FBI agents arrested Mehmet Hakan Atilla, Halkbank’s vice president for international banking, for violating the US-led sanctions against Iran. The press release from Kim’s office accused Atilla with participating “in a years-long scheme to violate American sanctions laws by helping Reza Zarrab, a major gold trader, use U.S. financial institutions to engage in prohibited financial transactions that illegally funneled millions of dollars to Iran.” Zarrab, a Turkish citizen...

The revelations of the so-called Panama Papers that are roiling the world’s political and financial elites this week include important facts about Team Clinton. This unprecedented trove of documents purloined from a shady Panama law firm that arranged tax havens, and perhaps money laundering, for the globe’s super-rich includes juicy insights into how Russia’s elite hides its ill-gotten wealth. Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO...

A lawyer for the Maltese professor who told former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton says his client will testify in front of the Senate. BuzzFeed reports that Stephan Roh, attorney for Professor Joseph Mifsud, wrote in an email that Mifsud “is to testify in front of the US Senate — we are working towards his appearance.” Lawyers for the Democratic National Committee wrote in a September court filing for their Russia lawsuit that they believed Mifsud was “missing and may be deceased.” According to the Daily Caller, an attorney for Republicans on...

One of the key turning points in the investigation happened in Italy. It is no coincidence that US Senator Lindsay Graham, one of Trump's closest allies and one of the leading critics of Mueller's investigation, has been visiting Rome over the last few days. There are many unanswered questions, one of the most important being: where is Joseph Mifsud? Il Foglio does not know, but it can reveal where he hid for seven months after disappearing: in Rome, in a rented flat paid by Link Campus University. Mifsud taught there, and Il Foglio understands that he owns 35 per cent...

Buried in special counsel Robert Mueller's 400-plus page report is the question of whether then-president-elect Donald Trump attended a 2016 championship chess tournament — an event that came under scrutiny as Mueller probed possible collusion between Trump's orbit and the Russian government. Although Trump said he did not attend the event, he told Mueller in written answers that he became "aware of documents indicating" that then-president of the World Chess Federation (FIDE) Kirsan Ilyumzhinov — a sanctioned Russian power player — invited the Trump Organization in March 2016 to host the tournament at Trump Tower. "I do not remember having...

Even $1.5 billion in subsidies and loan guarantees can’t save a “clean” energy company from bankruptcy. That’s the takeaway from the looming failure of SunEdison, a company that touts itself as the “largest global renewable energy development company.” Once a darling of Wall Street and the green Left because of SunEdison’s portfolio of wind and solar projects, the company’s stock is now in free fall. Furthermore, two related companies that were spun off from SunEdison — TerraForm Global and TerraForm Power — also appear to be in financial distress. On March 30, Brian Wuebbels, the CEO of both TerraForm companies,...

SunEdison, which bills itself as the world’s largest green energy company, may soon file for bankruptcy protection, according to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, as the company faces “liquidity difficulties” despite getting millions in government subsidies.

U.S. solar energy company SunEdison Inc, whose aggressive acquisition strategy has saddled it with almost $12 billion of debt, is at "substantial risk" of bankruptcy, one of its two publicly listed units warned on Tuesday. A bankruptcy would rank among the largest involving a non-financial company in the past 10 years, according to bankruptcydata.com. SunEdison declined to comment. SunEdison's shares - already reeling from a Wall Street Journal report on Monday that the company was being investigated for overstating its cash position - fell as much as 60 percent to a record low of 50 cents.

Ukrainian law enforcement officials believe they have evidence of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes. But, they say, they’ve been thwarted in trying to get the Trump Justice Department to act. **SNIP** In another instance, he said, Ukrainian authorities gathered evidence that money paid to an American Democrat allegedly was hidden by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) during the 2016 election under pressure from U.S. officials. “In the course of this investigation, we found that there was a situation during which influence was exerted on the NABU, so...

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/289290-jeff-bezos-neil-degrasse-tyson-join-pentagon-innovation-board July 26, 2016 - 02:15 PM EDT Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jeff Bezos join DOD innovation board By Rebecca Kheel Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson were among the big names Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced Tuesday as joining the Pentagon’s recently formed Defense Innovation Advisory Board. “I've given them the very specific task of identifying innovative private sector best practices that could be of use to DOD [the Department of Defense] — not unlike our recent Hack the Pentagon pilot program, which invited hackers to help find vulnerabilities in our networks," Carter said during an...

Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan is coming to Washington, DC, on May 16 loaded for bear.  He has an ambitious agenda and apparently feels he can achieve it all because he holds “trump” cards against the President of the United States. Erdogan and his proxies have publicly said they want to convince the United States to jettison its budding alliance with the Syrian Democratic Union (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Kurdish group that has become the tip of the spear in the fight against ISIS in Syria. On this point, they will encounter resistance...

National Review, a once-venerable conservative publication, has officially gone off the rails entirely, publishing an article calling Sen. Jeff Sessions a “prostitute” for endorsing billionaire Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination. That abominable attack on perhaps the most revered conservative in the U.S. Senate ran in a National Review piece arguing that anyone who endorses Trump is a “rat” that is “scurrying” and is also a “sellout.”

On Tuesday The Guardian ran an exclusive claiming that “Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign.” According to The Guardian, Manafort met with the WikiLeaks’ founder at the embassy three times—in 2013, 2015, and in spring 2016. While acknowledging that the purpose of the claimed meeting is unknown, The Guardian implies Manafort’s supposed March 2016 secret rendezvous concerned WikiLeaks’ role in releasing the hacked Democratic National Committee emails. “The revelation could shed new light on the sequence of events...

In the shifting narratives of the Trump-Russia probe, a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud has remained a linchpin regarding claims of collusion. He is the professor who allegedly told Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians had emails related to the Clinton campaign. The FBI says it opened its investigation in late July 2016 after Papadopoulos relayed that information to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, and the Australians tipped off U.S. authorities. While some news accounts describe Mifsud as an accomplice to Russian clandestine operations or a “cut-out” (intermediary), others contend he is a full-fledged Russian spy. In an official...

Did Joseph Mifsud use George Papadopoulos as a pawn to set up Donald Trump? Did he feed Papadopoulos information about Russia to see how the Trump campaign responded? What if Donald Trump is wrong? What if the Russia collusion investigation isn’t a witch hunt? What if it was a set-up—from the get-go? That’s one—maybe the most—logical conclusion to reach after gathering the crumbs dropped over the previous two years in light of the Washington Post’s story last week confirming the existence of a “top-secret intelligence source” involved in the 2016 presidential election.

On or about Tuesday, 1 March 2016, CIA Director John Brennan flew to Moscow. He went to the offices of the Russian equivalent to the CIA, the Federal Security Service (FSB)—successor to the KGB—and he went “somewhere else” (yes, that’s exactly what Russia’s foreign ministry said about it). He did not to go to the foreign ministry. ... At almost the exact same time, in “late February or early March,” a world-class nobody living in London named George Papadopoulos somehow got his resumé pumped full of hot fluff by somehow becoming listed as a member of the London Centre of...

CIA officials, including the upper echelons, are required to be apolitical.  The main purpose of the CIA is to gather intelligence on America’s enemies and guarantee the safety and security of the citizens of this country. The administration of CIA chief John Brennan came nowhere near meeting this standard. Brennan used the CIA to lies for political ideological goals. This has been shown earlier when Brennan used the CIA to conduct illegal surveillance of the Senate Intelligence Committee and then lied about it. This the same investigations that Brennan lied to Senator Feinstein about, and Brennan later apologized to the...

The FBI warned the Clinton campaign that it was a target of a cyberattack last March, just weeks before the Democratic National Committee discovered it had been penetrated by hackers it now believes were working for Russian intelligence, two sources who have been briefed on the matter told Yahoo News. One of the sources said agents conducting a national security investigation asked the Clinton campaign to turn over internal computer logs as well as the personal email addresses of senior campaign officials. But the campaign, through its lawyers, declined to provide the data, deciding that the FBI’s request for sensitive...

Leaker, liar and ranking member of the House Intel Committee, Adam Schiff (D-CA) has some explaining to do. Carter Page says his interview with the FBI in March of 2016, before the Russia dossier was compiled, had nothing to do with Russian collusion or the Trump campaign, rather he was questioned about events that transpired in 2013 in a case where he was a witness in support of the FBI, reports Paul Sperry.