Free Republic

A review launched by Attorney General William Barr into the origins of the Russia investigation has expanded significantly amid concerns about whether the probe has any legal or factual basis, multiple current and former officials told NBC News. The prosecutor conducting the review, Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, has expressed his intent to interview a number of current and former intelligence officials involved in examining Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, including former CIA Director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, Brennan told NBC News. Durham has also requested to talk to CIA...

Full title EXCLUSIVE: Disgraced FBI Officials Claimed ‘Insurance Policy’ Text Was About Whether To ‘Burn Longstanding Sources’ Peter Strzok and Lisa Page told Congress that a text they exchanged referring to an “insurance policy” against a Trump presidency was a reference to a discussion about potentially “burning” a longtime FBI source in the event of an aggressive investigation of the Trump campaign. Page described the unnamed source as “sensitive and reliable.” Strzok said the source was “very sensitive.” Both told lawmakers that they and FBI officials were concerned that ramping up an investigation of the Trump campaign might expose the...

During his testimony before Congress in August, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson said that the FBI had a source inside the Trump campaign who gave credence to the infamous dossier the company created for the Democrats. He repeated the claim in a New York Times op-ed on January 2. But today, Fusion GPS is retracting that statement, saying that Simpson "mischaracterized" the source. Washington Times: Then suddenly, as quick as the headlines went up, some one close to Fusion was waving off reporters. Mr. Simpsonhad “mischaracterized” the source. It was not some one on the Trump inside, but apparently an...

There is no way to evaluate the trustworthiness of anonymous sources and unpublished documents, so why try?At this point, it’s safe to say the publicly available reports muddle the Mueller investigation so much that the only thing we “know” is all sides have more than enough circumstantial evidence to justify their pre-existing hopes and dreams. Left-wing partisans would have you believe that Mueller has the goods on Trump, and that conservative critiques of Mueller’s team or the Clinton campaign’s role in creating the so-called Steele dossier are nothing more than bad-faith attempts to discredit the investigation and undermine faith in...

A former Trump campaign aide who took a guilty plea in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe was the linchpin of the FBI’s investigation of Kremlin influence in the 2016 election, new reports say. In a drunken gossip session with an Australian diplomat in London in May 2016, Trump aide George Papadopoulos claimed that Russia held political dirt on Hillary Clinton, The New York Times said Saturday. Months later, e-mails hacked from the Democratic National Committee showed up on WikiLeaks, and the Australians told the FBI about the Papadopoulos conversation. The disclosure sparked the FBI’s probe into possible collusion between...