Free Republic

For the past year, defenders of the FBI have consistently downplayed the significance of an FBI staff lawyer falsifying evidence in the government’s investigation into Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia. They argue Kevin Clinesmith’s crime of altering a CIA document to obscure the fact that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page worked for U.S., not Russian, intelligence was a rare lapse in judgment by an overworked bureaucrat. It was not, his apologists say, part of any broader conspiracy to conceal exculpatory information from surveillance court judges, who never learned of Page’s history with the CIA before approving FBI warrants to...

Stefan Halper's story of Flynn trip with Russian woman deemed 'not plausible … not accurate.' Five days before the FBI formally opened the Michael Flynn probe in summer 2016, a confidential informant alleged to agents that Donald Trump's national security adviser had left a 2014 foreign meeting alone with a Russian woman. Agents ultimately deemed the account "not plausible" and "not accurate" but proceeded to investigate Flynn anyway, newly declassified documents show. FBI confidential human source (CHS) reports show Stefan Halper, an academic who long worked for the bureau as a trusted informant, was the original source of a story...

Evidence suggests our intelligence agencies launched the Russia-collusion hoax months before the Clinton campaign joined in full force.Tuesday’s explosive news — that long before the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community had asked foreign intel agencies to surveil 26 people connected to Donald Trump — raises the question of whether our intelligence community colluded with the Clinton campaign in these efforts. After all, it was then-Biden campaign adviser and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who “set in motion the events that led to” 51 former intel officials issuing the public statement that falsely framed...