Free Republic

Sam Bankman-Fried, the man at the center of the FTX scandal, is back on US soil after having been extradited from the Bahamas to face federal charges. Naturally, because our justice system is about as coherent as a two-year-old quoting Shakespeare, the notorious fraudster was immediately granted bail and is now spending the holidays with his family. The American oligarchy is alive and well.But I digress, there’s a lot more to the FTX scandal than just Bankman-Fried’s fate, and one of the more interesting aspects of the entire ordeal is just how close many Democrats were to him. In fact,...

FIRST ON FOX: Unearthed Hillary Clinton tweets from days before the 2016 presidential election show the candidate pushing now-debunked information that Donald Trump was using a "covert sever" linking him to Russia. Just a day after Fox News first reported that Special Counsel John Durham alleged that lawyers from her campaign had paid to "infiltrate" servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in order to establish an "inference" and "narrative" to bring to government agencies linking Trump to Russia.

The "Tech Executive-1" in John Durham's indictment of a Democratic cybersecurity lawyer testified in a lawsuit that he had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights when asked to testify by the special counsel. Rodney Joffe, former senior vice president at Neustar, coordinated in 2016 with Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was indicted last year for allegedly concealing his clients, including Hillary Clinton's campaign and Joffe, from the FBI in September 2016 when he pushed debunked claims of a secret back channel between the Trump Organization and Russia's Alfa Bank. Alfa Bank filed a "John Doe" lawsuit and deposed Joffe in...

Cybersecurity experts who held lucrative Pentagon and homeland security contracts and high-level security clearances are under investigation for potentially abusing their government privileges to aid a 2016 Clinton campaign plot to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia and trigger an FBI investigation of him and his campaign, according to several sources familiar with the work of Special Counsel John Durham. Durham is investigating whether they were involved in a scheme to misuse sensitive, nonpublic Internet data, which they had access to through their government contracts, to dredge up derogatory information on Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016...

Businessman Erik Prince says he has not been contacted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller about a January meeting in the Seychelles between himself and a Russian reportedly close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prince added that whoever leaked to the press should be questioned instead. The Washington Post reported in April on what it called a "secret meeting" in the Indian Ocean country, citing "officials, who did not identify the Russian." The Post wrote that the Jan. 11 meeting was "part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to...

In 2008, the Bush administration, along with the “six powers,” was negotiating with Iran concerning that country’s nuclear arms program. The Bush administration’s objective was to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. On July 20, 2008, the New York Times headlined: “Nuclear Talks With Iran End in a Deadlock.” What caused the talks to founder? The Times explained: Iran responded with a written document that failed to address the main issue: international demands that it stop enriching uranium. And Iranian diplomats reiterated before the talks that they considered the issue nonnegotiable. The Iranians held firm to their position, perhaps because...

National security insiders are trying to claim treason for the fact that President Donald Trump’s transition team discussed potentially setting up a phone call with the Russian ambassador to the United States.Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin have met publicly on several occasions, and Russia maintains an active embassy in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.The Hill reported: Former national security adviser Michael Flynn spoke with a “senior official” in President Trump’s transition team at the Mar-a-Lago resort to discuss what he should communicate to the Russian ambassador in a highly-scrutinized series of phone calls in December of 2016,...

he United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with...

The liberal network shows were all busy Sunday morning pushing accusations and speculation about President Trump and his adviser Jared Kushner. Their discussion was drive by more anonymous sources telling The Washington Post that Kushner tried to set up a backchannel discussion between Trump and the Russians to talk about Syria. CNN even accused the action of being “treasonous.” The hysteria was also present on NBC’s Meet the Press, but theirs was shattered by The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel after she introduced facts to the discussion. “I think we are having a discussion that is absolutely divorced from reality...