Free Republic

The special counsel investigating whether Russia tried to sway the 2016 U.S. election has taken over FBI inquiries into a former British spy’s dossier of allegations of Russian financial and personal links to President Trump’s campaign and associates, sources familiar with the inquiry told Reuters. A report compiled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele identified Russian businessmen and others whom U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded are Russian intelligence officers or working on behalf of the Russian government. Trump was told by former FBI director James Comey that Steele’s report contained salacious material about the businessman-turned-president. In a report published in...

GOP power broker Haley Barbour’s lobby shop, BGR Group, represents a Russian bank that has financed a company that helped build Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant, according to corporate documents and lobbying disclosure records. The bank is owned by a secretive oligarch, Mikhail Fridman, who has met at least twice with White House officials in the last few years, according to visitor logs.

MOSCOW -- Two have fled the country. Another is in jail, his oil empire in ruins. Russian President Vladimir Putin has largely succeeded in his campaign pledge to make oligarchs -- the powerful tycoons who emerged in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia -- disappear "as a class." Now, most of the country's super-rich are either packing up or hunkering down and trying to stay on the government's good side. Except Mikhail Fridman. Using bare-knuckles business tactics, the 41-year-old built an $8 billion empire spanning oil, telecoms, banking and retail. Now, he's picking a fight with Leonid Reiman, Russia's telecommunications minister...

In a procedural ruling Friday before the High Court of Justice, Queen's Bench Division, former British spy Christopher Steele was ordered to appear for a videotaped deposition in London on June 18 for ongoing civil litigation brought against Buzzfeed by a Russian technology executive, Aleksej Gubarev. A last-ditch effort by Buzzfeed's legal team was denied today in their efforts to expand and question Steele about "the dossier as a whole" instead of a more limited area of questioning in the ongoing civil litigation in the UK. In the 15-page ruling obtained and reviewed by Fox News, Mr. Justice Jay wrote...

Elite special forces are some of the best-trained and most formidable units a country can boast. They go where other soldiers fear to tread, scoping out potential threats, taking out strategic targets, and conducting daring rescue missions. These really are the best of the best. Although it's extremely difficult to rank these forces relative to one another, there are some units that rise above the rest in their track record and the fear they instill in their adversaries. These soldiers have been through rigorous training exercises designed to weed out those who can't hit their exacting standards. In a world...

<p>David Kramer, a former State Department official and former director at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, filed a motion in federal court in Florida asking a judge for a protective order to block the public release of his deposition.</p>

During the closed-door testimony of Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, an even deeper cesspit of corruption at the FBI has been exposed.

A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks. The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Barack Obama and Trump. Now...