Free Republic

To understand Russia’s current obsession with Ukraine, it is important to recognize that Russia was never a state in the common usage of the term. Unlike the modern Turkish state that emerged from the Ottoman Empire, or Great Britain, which acquired and lost an empire, Russia never had an identity separate from empire. As British historian Geoffrey Hosking observed, “Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire.” The Kremlin’s preferred narrative of Russia rising from present-day Ukraine (“Kyivan Rus”) is a Moscow-concocted fairy tale. The officially endorsed 1000-year history of Russia is a self-created and self-perpetuated myth that generations...

51 is an interesting number, isn’t it? It’s one shy of a deck of cards. It’s the mysterious “Area” where a top-secret U.S. military installation associated with UFOs is located. It’s exactly three times the number of intelligence agencies who confirmed Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election. It’s a large number — an impressive one, even. And when 51 current and former intelligence officials sign and publicize a letter, it’s designed to get your attention and, undoubtedly, persuade you of the import of what is being said. And so it did — for many Americans, the characterization of...

Aformer acting CIA director has admitted to Congress that he organized the letter that falsely portrayed Hunter Biden's laptop as Russian disinformation in an effort to influence the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden and that he did so at the direction of current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a letter released Thursday by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. The extraordinary admission by career intelligence officer Michael J. Morell provides stunning evidence that the now-infamous letter from 51 security officials in October 2021 was not an organic intelligence community initiative but rather a political dirty trick...

WASHINGTON – A former top intelligence official who signed on to a letter attacking The Post’s bombshell 2020 reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation has now admitted he knew a “significant portion” of the recovered files “had to be real” – but doesn’t regret dismissing the exposé. ... The Oct. 19 letter — whose signatories included former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, former Director of National intelligence James Clapper, and former CIA Director John Brennan — went out of its way to cast doubt on the legitimacy of The Post’s scoop, devoting five paragraphs to explaining “factors that make...

Donald Trump’s attorney fired off a letter to the CIA demanding “immediate legal action” against 43 ex-agency employees who signed an October 2020 letter saying the Hunter Biden abandoned laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” according to Just the News, which obtained a copy of the letter. Hunter’s laptop of course contained evidence of extensive international business dealings – including a relationship with a Chinese energy company that paid his company nearly five million dollars. In total the younger Biden took in $11 million from international dealings over the course of five years –...

Former US officials and diplomats in recent days have sharply criticized the Biden administration over a New York Times report based on conversations with senior officials that said US intelligence was helping Ukraine kill Russian generals. "Shut up about it," John Sipher, a former CIA officer who served in Russia, said in a tweet on the Times report. Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, in a tweet responding to Sipher said, "Exactly. No one should be talking to press about such things."

It’s not too much to ask that Congress debate and vote on whether to authorize a U.S. march to war that’s now well underway. The New York Times claimed this week that the United States is providing real-time battlefield intelligence to Ukraine that has enabled the Ukrainians to target and kill approximately a dozen Russian generals, and helped >locate and strike the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet last month. Described as a “classified effort,” the U.S. provision of targeting intelligence to Ukraine “also includes anticipated Russian troop movements gleaned from recent American assessments of Moscow’s secret battle plan for...

About three weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published a bombshell, election-changing story about presidential candidate Joe Biden's son, Hunter, that, if true, derailed Joe Biden's claim to know nothing about his son's multimillion-dollar influence peddling. The Post claimed: "Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post. "The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that...

One of the former CIA officers who signed a letter claiming stories about a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden were disinformation says he helped swing the 2020 election from former President Donald Trump. “I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump,” John Sipher, who served for decades as a senior operations officer at the CIA, wrote in a recent post on Twitter. “I lost the election for Trump? Well then I fell [sic] pretty good about my influence,” he also wrote. Sipher and 50 other former U.S. intelligence officials signed the letter on Oct. 19,...

A CIA officer has confessed that the ‘Deep State’ rigged the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor, and has boldly admitted that the agency would do it again. Former CIA officer John Sipher claimed in a stunning Twitter thread that he took “particular joy” in discrediting the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” narrative and enthusiastically admitted to “shifting” the election away from Trump. Sipher was among the many “intelligence experts” who falsely claimed the Hunter Biden laptop story from the New York Post back in October of 2020 was part of a “Russian disinformation campaign.” Redvoicemedia.com reports: A March 18th...

A former CIA officer recently took to Twitter to gleefully boast about how he took a “special pride” in his efforts to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story as being part and parcel of Russian disinformation aided in “swinging” the 2020 election “away from Trump.” The comments coming from this ex-CIA officer, John Sipher, stem from a back-and-forth between him and former Trump White House official Richard Grenell over the Hunter laptop discrediting efforts. Sipher was one of many so-called intelligence experts who slapped their name and reputation on alleging that the Hunter Biden laptop story from the New York...

The former head of US intelligence blasted one of the officials who signed the letter casting doubt on Hunter Biden’s laptop - calling him a lying “phony” and igniting a Twitter war over the weekend. The spat erupted Saturday when Richard Grenell, the former Trump-appointed acting director of national intelligence, reacted to a post from John Sipher, who retired from the CIA in 2014, about ethical behavior among public servants. “Didn’t @john_sipher sign a letter 3 weeks before the 2020 elections saying don’t look at Hunter Biden’s laptop because it’s Russian disinformation?” Grenell tweeted Saturday. “Now he’s lecturing people about...

It seems that lately, the CIA is only working to help the Deep State. They forget that they should protect the President elected by the people! It seems that the time is running out for Democrats and CIA veterans that committed a reason, they are terrified of Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia hoax so they’re lashing out.

[Editor’s Note: In this special Just Security article, highly respected former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, John Sipher examines the Steele dossier using methods that an intelligence officer would to try to validate such information. Sipher concludes that the dossier’s information on campaign collusion is generally credible when measured against standard Russian intelligence practices, events subsequent to Steele’s reporting, and information that has become available in the nine months since Steele’s final report. The dossier, in Sipher’s view, is not without fault, including factual inaccuracies. Those errors, however, do not detract from an overarching framework that has proven...