Free Republic

In the summer of 1495, King Hans of Denmark and Norway anchored his warship off the southern coast of Sweden. While Hans was on land, his vessel—known as Gribshunden or Griffen—mysteriously caught fire and sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea.Hans was on his way to Kalmar, where he hoped to be elected king of Sweden and reunite the broader Nordic region under a single ruler. As such, Hans brought many opulent status symbols, including luxurious foods and spices, to help persuade the Swedish leadership to agree to his plan.Remarkably, many of those foods and spices have survived underwater...

Chefs and home cooks alike are renewing their passion for humanity’s oldest culinary pursuit.Danny Childs is offering pawpaws to a surprised couple in a park on an early afternoon in suburban New Jersey. "They're like a mix between a banana and a mango," he explains. "You just rip the skin open and eat the flesh." He demonstrates how by slurping the tender insides and handing each person one of the peanut-shaped fruits from his basket. They take them, dubious at first, their hesitancy quickly melting away as they take a taste, emboldened by his enthusiasm. Childs is used to this...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released new Clinton emails on the Benghazi controversy that had been covered up for years and would have exposed Hillary Clinton’s email account if they had been released when the State Department first uncovered them in 2014. The long withheld email, clearly responsive to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit seeking records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack,” contains Clinton’s private email address and a conversation about the YouTube video that sparked the Benghazi talking points scandal ( Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). This Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit led directly...

General Michael Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell a few days ago requested that the DOJ turn over the contents of two phones related to Joseph Mifsud.  We now know those phones were from the UK, the country that is more suspect than Russia ever was! Sidney Powell on Tuesday demanded the DOJ “produce evidence that has only recently come into [the DOJ’s] possession. This evidence includes the data and metadata of the following two devices:” Powell wrote in her request – “This information is material, exculpatory, and relevant to the defense of Mr. Flynn, and specifically to the “OCONUS LURES” and agents...

On Tuesday, attorney Sidney Powell struck again, revealing yet another huge development in the Spygate saga between the lines of her latest motion. That motion, filed in the still-pending criminal case against Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, demanded exculpatory evidence from federal prosecutors.But unlike her previously filed motion to compel, here Powell seeks evidence “that has only recently come into its possession.” And the evidence sought? The data and metadata from two Blackberry devices used by Joseph Mifsud.While Powell’s latest motion barely equaled two pages, the implications are multi-pronged and monumental.That the U.S. government has only recently obtained...

Michael Flynn's legal counsel says phones that belonged to Joseph Mifsud likely contain exculpatory evidence The Department of Justice (DOJ) has obtained two phones of Joseph Mifsud, one of the central figures of the 2016 Russia investigation, and the lawyer of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has requested them, saying they likely contain exculpatory evidence. The phones, two BlackBerry models, “only recently” came into the government’s possession, said Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, a former prosecutor, in an Oct. 15 court filing (pdf). Data and metadata on the phones “is material, exculpatory, and relevant to the defense of Mr. Flynn,” she said....

Yet another key member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe appears to have deep ties to the Democratic Party. Aaron Zebley served previously as Mueller’s chief of staff at the FBI and in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division and as a senior counselor in the National Security Division at the Department of Justice. He also was an assistant U.S. attorney in the National Security and Terrorism Unit in Alexandria, Virginia. He is often referred to in the media as Mueller's "right-hand man." Also, in 2015 when he was a lawyer, he represented Justin Cooper, the IT staffer who personally set...

The schemes of Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler are predictable. As we said three months ago, Robert Mueller would not be allowed to testify without a handler. Small group participant Aaron Zebly will now join Mueller for his testimony. This has always been the plan, but strategically announced today. Remember, Mueller’s team is working closely with Nadler’s team; they are part of the same purpose. They are all part of the same network. The impeachment objective is a group effort from inside government & outside (Lawfare). These are not separate groups. The pre-planning was why Chairman Nadler hired...

Apples originally evolved in the wild to entice ancient megafauna to disperse their seeds; more recently, humans began spreading the trees along the Silk Road with other familiar crops; dispersing the apple trees led to their domestication. Recent archaeological finds of ancient preserved apple seeds across Europe and West Asia combined with historical, paleontological, and recently published genetic data are presenting a fascinating new narrative for one of our most familiar fruits. In this study, Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History traces the history of the apple from its wild origins, noting that...

The Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Hillary Clinton have a HUGE Weiner problem that is even bigger than we first realized. According to the recently released inspector general report, on September 28 and 29, 2016 the New York office of the FBI immediately reported to the Washington headquarters its discovery of, first, 141,000 and then 350,000 emails on the laptop of Anthony Weiner — also known as “Carlos Danger,” a now-convicted sex offender. Mr. Weiner is the husband of Hillary Clinton’s inseparable aide Huma Abedin. Now we know by October 4, the New York office had...

Thursday’s report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz was, as Canadian pop-punk degenerates Sum 41 might have put it, “All killer, no filler.” There were so many jaw-dropping moments of, “No, wait — FBI employees can’t do that, can they?” that it transformed an actual government report into a veritable page-turner. One of those minor gems, however, comes when you find out why the FBI didn’t investigate the Blackberries and other email devices of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle. “We found that the FBI team and the prosecutors decided together to generally limit...

FULL TITLE: VIDEO: Imran Awan’s Attorney’s Epic Meltdown: Slams Trump, Offers to Sell Case Evidence to Reporter for Cash, Calls Marine a Criminal Imran Awan’s attorney Chris Gowen is not the brightest bulb in the shed. The attorney snapped Thursday, unleashed an epic meltdown that could jeopardize his client’s scheduled plea hearing on July 3. Unglued is not a strong enough word to describe Gowen’s rant, triggered by Crowdsource the Truth editor Jason Goodman who recorded the phone call. Gowen likely crossed the legal line, offering to sell Goodman evidence in the Awan case for $1,000. That offer came after...

Soon after the House of Representatives found that Democratic IT aide Imran Awan and his family made “unauthorized access” to congressional data, Imran hurriedly vacated his house, renting it in February 2017 to a former Marine. Imran angrily told his new tenant, Andre Taggart, that he was homeless and to refuse any certified mail in Imran’s name, Taggart said. A lawyer contacted Taggart about some items Imran left behind in the house and threatened to sue if he didn’t return them, saying he’d accuse Taggart of theft, Taggart said. The equipment included Blackberries and “hard drives they look like they...

An iconic photograph of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton using her BlackBerry while wearing sunglasses on a military plane in 2011 prompted a recordkeeping official in her office to inquire about whether Clinton had been assigned a State.gov email address, the State Department disclosed this week.Clarence Finney, who oversaw an office responsible for Freedom of Information Act searches, raised the question about an official account after seeing the photo in the media, according to testimony at a deposition held Wednesday and released Thursday. The image went viral on social media in 2012, prompting a "Texts from Hillary" meme."When Mrs. Clinton's...

FBI Director James Comey’s decision to not file charges against Hillary Clinton over her unauthorized and unsecure email server was controversial. It led to a backlash against him by conservatives that was also dotted with disbelief and shock. It led to him appearing before congressional hearings for further questions, given how damning his press conference was on July 5 about the agency’s findings. During that press conference, he said that 110 emails on 52 separate chains contained classified information, that Clinton and her staff were extremely careless in handling sensitive information, and that there were three emails that they...

Hillary Clinton purchased some of the BlackBerries she used as secretary of state on eBay, Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz said on Wednesday.“That’s what she liked, so she did it. It creates this huge vulnerability. And it’s unnecessary,” Chaffetz, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said during a forum hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.The forum was held to discuss last year’s hack of the Office of Personnel Management.“I don’t want to get into this too much, but part of what was happening with the secretary of state is, she was acquiring technology that wasn’t even supported by...

A 2013 video, obtained exclusively by Fox News, raises fresh questions about how Hillary Clinton handled sensitive information at the State Department. In the video, veteran diplomat Wendy Sherman reveals that in the interest of speed, Clinton and her aides would share information that "would never be on an unclassified system" normally. The questions surround a 2013 speech in which Sherman compared the technology differences between serving at the State Department in the administrations of President Bill Clinton and President Obama. "Now we have BlackBerrys, and it has changed the way diplomacy is done," Sherman, who was undersecretary of state...

Full title: Judicial Watch: State Department Documents Reveal Intense Debate over Security Risk Poised by Clinton Blackberry Use in Foggy Bottom Executive Offices More than 50 emails, many marked "Sensitive," focused on security problems surrounding "Use of Blackberries in Mahogany Row" March 2009 internal memo from Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security warned of "vulnerabilities and risks" by Clinton and staff's use of Blackberries in executive suites (Washington, DC) - Judicial Watch announced today that it hasobtained documents as result of a federal court order containing more than 50 State Department internal emails from February through March 2009 warning of serious...

State Department BlackBerry devices issued to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin have likely been destroyed or sold off, the department said in a court filing on Wednesday. Mills and Abedin “were each issued BlackBerry devices,” department Executive Secretary Joseph Macmanus wrote in the filing. The department, however, “has not located any such device,” and believes that they would have been destroyed or removed from the department's control.

BERLIN (AP) — The U.S. National Security Agency is able to crack protective measures on iPhones, BlackBerry and Android devices, giving it access to users' data on all major smartphones, according to a report Sunday in German news weekly Der Spiegel. The magazine cited internal documents from the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ in which the agencies describe setting up dedicated teams for each type of phone as part of their effort to gather intelligence on potential threats such as terrorists. The data obtained this way includes contacts, call lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information, Der Spiegel reported....