Free Republic

Assuming NBC’s report is true, then it would appear that Team Mueller has put the cart before the horse. Before chasing after Trump-Russia collusion in the hacking of the DNC’s email server, they need to first establish whether a hack even happened. Consider the following: On June 15, 2016, CrowdStrike, a private computer security company working for the Democratic National Committee, announced that it had detected Russian malware on the DNC’s computer server. The next day, a self-described Romanian hacker, Guccifer 2.0, claimed he was a WikiLeaks source and had hacked the DNC’s server. He then posted online DNC computer...

A website administrator appearing to be Emily McMullin (sister of Ex CIA #nevertrumper Evan McMullin) set up fake website Trump-email.com under the Trump Organization Brand three days after the FISA court warrant to wiretap Republican nominee Donald Trump was denied. -June 29th, 2016 Evan McMullin, Emily McMullin or someone who wanted to frame the McMullin family bought the domain (trump-email.com) from Godaddy.com -Trump-email.com was purchased three days after the first FISA court warrant to wiretap Trump Tower was requested and denied. Who is (the creator of trump-email.com) Emily McMullin? You remember Evan McMullin right? He tried to split the Republican voter...

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team has so far discussed with President Donald Trump's lawyers four main topics they want to talk about with the President. According to two sources, the areas that the special counsel investigators have indicated they want to pursue with Trump are the President's role in crafting a statement abroad Air Force One that miscast Donald Trump Jr.'s campaign June 2016 meeting with Russians in Trump Tower, the circumstances surrounding that Trump Tower meeting as well as the firings of FBI Director James Comey and national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Joe Bruno on Boxing – Muhammad Ali is Not a Hero. Muhammad Ali passed away Friday night, June 3, 2016. I wrote the article below around the year 2000. I got to know him fairly well in the 1980’s, when I was Vice President of the Boxing Writers Association. He was a real friendly man, and we had several nice conversations about what I have written below. Still, his death doesn’t change what he was, and what he did early in his career. It is with a sad heart that I stand by what is written below. It’s just the...

While the discredited FBI lead counter-intelligence agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, discussed forming a “secret society” which they now claim was a joke, there is a Sept. 20, 2017, article in True Pundit which describes how six U.S. intelligence agencies formed a “Stealth Task Force” headed by CIA Director John Brennan to run the unauthorized surveillance on Trump associates and possibly against Mr. Trump himself. According to the article, after being denied two FISA court warrants applications, this group used the British spy element, headed by Robert Hannigan, embedded at NSA, Ft. George Meade, Md....

Sunday on MSNBC, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said The New York Times report that in June 2016 Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chair Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met with a Russian lawyer linked with the Kremlin meant we have “a criminal enterprise running this country now.” Dean said, “I think at this point, Trump is Trump. He’s going to lie. He’s going to do all these things he does. And the real savior for democracy is going to be Robert Mueller. He’s going to find out the truth. We’re never going to get the truth...

In the shifting saga of how members of the Trump campaign/administration ended up having their phone conversations tapped under the Obama administration, the American people have been fed a series of shifting excuses on how the Obama administration would never violate the laws concerning surveillance of US Persons. We were told the President cannot order such surveillance (which we know is a false statement, see here and here). Then we were given the impression by the Fake News Media these “intercepts” were under a FISA court warrant. But later we learned the FISA court rejected the application by Team Obama...

[snip]The two U.S. officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the Turkish officer was working at the headquarters of NATO's Allied Command Transformation, located in Norfolk, Virginia. They did not name him or offer his rank. However, an official at Turkey's embassy in Washington said Turkish Navy Rear Admiral Mustafa Ugurlu had failed to report to authorities after Turkey issued a detention order for him last month. "On July 22, on that day he left his badges and his ID at the base and after that no one has heard anything from him," the official said, also...

The FBI released a series of email documents Friday afternoon detailing the Department of Justice response to the fallout of the secret Phoenix tarmac meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton in June 2016. The dates on the emails range from July 1-3, 2016. On July 5, 2016, FBI Director James Comey announced former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would not face criminal charges for mishandling classified information. A series of emails show one FBI official, whose name and email are redacted, fuming over leaks to the media about the meeting and what happened on the...

On Aug. 9, 1974, Richard Nixon bowed to the inevitability of impeachment and conviction by a Democratic Senate and resigned. The prospect of such an end for Donald Trump has this city drooling. Yet, comparing Russiagate and Watergate, history is not likely to repeat itself. First, the underlying crime in Watergate, a break-in to wiretap offices of the DNC, had been traced, within 48 hours, to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. In Russiagate, the underlying crime -- the "collusion" of Trump's campaign with the Kremlin to hack into the emails of the DNC -- has, after 18 months...

The House Intelligence Committee plans to compel testimony from a career Justice Department attorney who met during the election campaign with the writer of the infamous unverified Trump-Russia dossier. The committee has learned that Bruce Ohr, an associate attorney general, not only spoke with dossier writer Christopher Steele but also met after the election with Glenn Simpson, whose Fusion GPS hired Mr. Steele with Democratic Party money. “Pursuant to the House Intelligence Committee’s prior subpoenas and information requests, the Department of Justice should have provided the committee with information on contacts that DOJ official Bruce Ohr had with Fusion GPS...

Recently filed court documents revealed that Fusion GPS, the firm that produced the Trump dossier, paid three journalists who reported on Russia issues, and the House intelligence committee is trying to find out why. The payments to journalists occurred between June 2016 and February 2017 and raise questions as to whether the firm paid journalists in connection with its efforts to advance the narrative that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. The payments were revealed in court filings by the deputy general counsel for the House intelligence committee on November 21 to the U.S. District Court for the District of...

Gerald Walpin, the inspector general who was at the center of controversy in 2009 when he was fired by the White House amid an investigation of an Obama friend, died today. He was 84. Walpin's son-in-law, Allan Tananbaum, said Walpin was struck by a car while crossing a street in Manhattan. Walpin was fired in June 2009 for his investigation of the misuse of money in AmeriCorps, the service organization that was part of the Corporation for National and Community Service, where Walpin served as inspector general. The investigation focused on Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star who became mayor...

Gehad el-Haddad, a top communications official for the Muslim Brotherhood, was seized by Egyptian security forces over his loyalty to former President Mohamed Morsi. However, it’s his previous job that has Americans concerned. Prior to his stint as a senior Brotherhood official and adviser to Morsi, el-Haddad reportedly served for five years as a top official at the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit group founded by former President Bill Clinton. El-Haddad was the face of the Muslim Brotherhood and became well-known for supporting the organization’s crackdown on civil liberties in Egypt as part of their Islamist agenda. He achieved this role...

Yesterday’s mystery meeting on the tarmac between former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch has now been clarified. Obviously, it wasn’t a social visit as Lynch publicly claimed, but an arrangement clarifying how the powerful Clinton dynasty would be kept above the law in the face of heated publicly scrutiny as Hillary Clinton seeks the presidency. Instead, the Justice Department filed a motion that would keep from release thousands of emails potentially exposing conflicts of interest on the part of the Clinton Foundation and overlapping state department officials, such as Hillary’s chief of staff Huma Abedin.

SNIPAnd a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI requested more information from him.SNIPIn June, the former Western intelligence officer—who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients—was assigned the task of researching Trump's dealings in Russia and elsewhere, according to...

audio 11:08 Fusion GPS was hired by Democrats in 2012 to do opposition research on Mitt Romney. Some of the work that received the most media attention was focused on investigating the marriage records of a large donor to the Romney presidential campaign, Frank VanderSloot.[2][3] Planned Parenthood[edit] In August 2015, Planned Parenthood retained Fusion GPS to defensively investigate the veracity of a series of undercover videos released by pro-life activists that they claim showed Planned Parenthood officials agreeing to sell fetal tissues obtained through abortions to medical researchers.[2] Fusion GPS hired video and transcription experts to analyze the videos and...

The African Union this week called for a “regional protection force” to bolster a 12,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission in the East African country and separate warring parties. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has supported reinforcing the mission. The spokesman for South Sudan’s former rebel leader Riek Machar, now first vice president, says Machar has also called for a “third force” to secure the capital, Juba, after President Salva Kiir’s forces bombed his house during the fighting that raised fears of a return to civil war. The spokesman, James Gatdet Dak, said Machar fled Juba and will not return, despite Kiir’s invitation,...

When we last checked in on newly released information regarding that infamous tarmac meeting between then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, we learned that the media wasn’t terribly interested in discussing the matter any more than absolutely necessary. But as reporters continue to dig through the trove of Justice Department emails obtained by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, we find out that there were some people who were very interested in talking. The people in question would be Lynch’s staff and they were having a flurry of discussions with...

Our federal lawsuit against the DOJ bureaucracy over the secret meeting between former Attorney General Lynch and former President Clinton has already unearthed documents proving the FBI lied that it had “no” documents, that the media was colluding with the Obama DOJ to bury the story, and that AG Lynch (AKA Elizabeth Carlisle) was using a secret email address to conduct official business. Now we’ve uncovered that the White House was involved. On the afternoon of June 29, 2016, two days after the Clinton-Lynch meeting, senior DOJ officials forwarded an email containing a transcript of AG Lynch’s press availability where...