Free Republic

As John F. Kerry tries to bounce out of Boston and into a decisive fall campaign lead, a skeleton from the past will slink out of jail - possibly looking to score headlines and undercut the new nominee. David Paul, a central figure in a 1980s savings and loan scandal, is set to be sprung from a halfway house in Miami Sunday - a decade after his conviction on 97 counts of banking fraud. TV news outlets are scrambling to line up the first interview, hopeful the long-silent Paul might spill some beans about his close fund-raising ties to Kerry...

In the course of my work at Fox News, I am often asked by colleagues to review and explain documents and statutes. Recently, in conjunction with my colleagues Catherine Herridge, our chief intelligence correspondent, and Pamela Browne, our senior executive producer, I read the transcripts of an interview Browne did with a man named Marc Turi, and Herridge asked me to review emails to and from State Department and congressional officials during the years when Hillary Clinton was the secretary of state. What I saw has persuaded me beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty that Clinton provided...

NEW YORK – As former Sectary of State Hillary Clinton prepares to testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, new documentary evidence of a secret State Department gun-running operation is adding fuel to the controversy over the Department of Justice prosecution of arms dealer Marc Turi. A member of the independent Citizens Commission on Benghazi claims the publication Tuesday of new evidence that the State Department under Hillary Clinton’s leadership approved a California company to deliver arms to Libya with the goal of ousting Moammar Gadhafi exposes the hypocrisy of prosecuting Turi. Turi believed he also had State...

The Iranian Web of Influence in the United States   By Hassan Daioleslam FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, April 02, 2008 On March 21, 2008, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced its decision to penalize three Iranian-connected companies as "they knowingly exported three U.S. origin aircraft to Iran in violation of the Export Administration Regulations (“EAR”) and are preparing to re-export three additional U.S. origin aircraft to Iran in further violation of the EAR."1The principal firm among these is Balli Group PLC based in London. Iranian brothers Vahid and Hassan Alaghband own the company. Balli owns...

Thai authorities' high-profile inspection of 35 tons of North Korean weapons was nearing completion Friday, as clues emerging around the world shed light on the business of arms trafficking — and the lengths smugglers take to hide their identities. Two weeks after Thai authorities impounded the aircraft and arrested its five-man crew, the key questions of who organized the shipment and where it was headed remain unanswered. But a trail of companies and fake addresses from New Zealand to Barcelona has illustrated how the traffickers bounced around the globe to lightly regulated countries to disguise their movements. Over the past...

The government ordered the destruction of documents on an alleged international nuclear smuggling network involving three Swiss engineers, it has been confirmed. The head of a parliamentary control committee said the material was shredded last November. The father and sons – Friedrich, Marco and Urs Tinner - are suspected of helping to supply parts for Libya's nuclear weapons programme between 2001 and 2003 through a trafficking ring run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atom bomb. Reports say the three worked as undercover agents for the United States intelligence service. There is widespread media speculation that Washington asked...

The FBI has accused the BBC of wrecking an elaborate operation that was designed to infiltrate al-Qaida. The BBC, regarded by some as institutionally anti-American, is said to have aborted the operation by broadcasting an "exclusive" report about the arrest of a British arms dealer last Tuesday. The arms dealer was allegedly attempting to purchase ground-to-air missiles for terrorist clients who were seeking to shoot down civilian airliners in the United States. But what 68-year-old Hemant Lakhani did not know was that he was the subject of an elaborate, 18-month-long sting operation that involved Russian intelligence "suppliers" and FBI "customers."...