Free Republic

Over the past few months, a Russian political scientist named Valery Solovei has stoked a global frenzy with a sensational claim: that Vladmir Putin died last year and today is represented in public by a body double. The Kremlin’s elite, Solovei tells his half-million online followers, controls the double and has stuffed Putin’s body in a freezer. Then on Thursday, journalist Tucker Carlson aired a two-hour interview with Putin. Solovei shrugged it off as a sham. Carlson, he said, interviewed Putin’s doppelgänger, who will now be passed off as real to millions of viewers in the West. “Putin is dead,...

Preliminary findings indicate it wasn’t surface-to-air missile that took down Wagner leader’s plane. The plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, crashed as the result of an assassination plot but wasn’t shot down by a surface-to-air missile, U.S. officials said. The preliminary U.S. government assessments, which officials stressed are incomplete, suggest that a bomb exploded on the aircraft or that some other form of sabotage caused the crash northwest of Moscow.

More than 15 journalists, several U.S. government officials and multiple lawmakers were shown or given the Steele dossier during the 2016 presidential campaign or shortly after. Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele disseminated the dossier far and wide in an apparent attempt to insert the document’s salacious allegations into the media. Newly unsealed court filings show how widespread this effort was. Court documents released last week in a lawsuit involving the Steele dossier revealed new details about the campaign to disseminate the infamous anti-Trump report to the press and within the U.S. government. Much was already known about Fusion GPS and...

The rally last December was one of nearly a dozen paid-for protests organized by Russian émigrés in the U.S. in the past two years. They spent $150,000 to $200,000 in some months, accounting records indicate, to rally thousands of demonstrators near spots such as United Nations headquarters and the World Trade Center site. State-controlled Russian television, whose content is closely guided by Kremlin handlers, covered some of the events, often as the only news organ present, showing video of them on the evening news back home. Boris Barshevsky at a pay-for-protest rally in Queens, N.Y., last year. Organizers said the...

The September11 terror attacks in the US were staged to overcome disunity in al-Qa'ida, confidential computer records reveal. Alan Cullison reports on what happened after his laptop was wrecked while he was covering the combat in Afghanistan IN the autumn of 2001, I was one of scores of journalists who ventured into northern Afghanistan to write about the US-assisted war against the Taliban. After losing use of my computer in an accident, I scrawled stories by candlelight with a ballpoint pen and read dispatches to my editors at The Wall Street Journal over a satellite phone. When the Taliban's defences...