Free Republic

The acrid smell of charred wood still permeates the air as Sasha Berleman, a fire ecologist, and I walk along a dirt path up through the middle of a canyon in the Bouverie nature preserve in Sonoma Valley. On the left side, the earth is black as tar, and scorch marks as tall as a person scar the trunks of the mature oak trees scattered throughout the field. But on the right side, the ground is tan and brown, and you have to look hard at the still-green oaks to see any evidence of the fire that raged through here...

A newly devised type of silica bead could help save melting glaciers from the onslaught of climate change, scientists say. The innovative new approach, developed by a company called Ice911, employs minuscule beads of 'glass' which are spread across the surface layer of glaciers. There they help to reflect light beating down on them and slow what has become a tremendous pace of melt throughout the last several years. 'I just asked myself a very simple question: Is there a safe material that could help replace that lost reflectivity?' Found of Ice911, Leslie Field, told Mother Jones. What they landed...

The FBI released 34 pages of notes, known as “302s,” of its 2016 and 2017 interviews with Bruce Ohr, the DOJ official who met with the British dossier author Christopher Steele and opposition research firm Fusion GPS’s Glen Simpson. Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, when they were hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Convention. The FBI was sued by the watchdog group Judicial Watch to comply with their requests for access to the notes via Freedom of Information Act. Read the documents below:

A right-wing meme was born this weekend after Portland police said they’d been informed that Antifa protesters had pelted far-right demonstrators with cement milkshakes. Conservative internet trolls, including Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and writer Ian Miles Cheong, pounced, tweeting that left-wingers were pelting people with cement drinks. Their followers ran with it, posting photos of concrete burns suffered by the demonstrators. Except that none of it was true. There’s no evidence that the milkshakes contained cement. The photos were fake. And the police got it all wrong, and in the process birthed a right-wing internet movement based on a...

A commenter at the wonderful blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money dug up this C-SPAN video of Joe Biden lying about his academic credentials in 1987. He later apologized for misrepresenting his record. Here’s the New York Times report published soon after the incident. In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: “I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inacurate.”As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: “I graduated from the University of Delaware...

Then Brennan turned to an even more sensitive issue: Russia’s interference in the American election. Brennan now was aware that at least a year earlier Russian hackers had begun their cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee. We know you’re doing this, Brennan said to the Russian. He pointed out that Americans would be enraged to find out Moscow was seeking to subvert the election and that such an operation could backfire. Brennan warned Bortnikov that if Russia continued this information warfare, there would be a price to pay. He did not specify the consequences. This was the first of several...

The nine Democrats selected by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to serve on the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis received a combined $198,000 from fossil fuel industry political action committees in the 2018 election cycle. The majority of the donations went to Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), who raised $117,000 from PACs connected to oil, gas, mining and electric utility corporations. Those donations constituted 6 percent of all contributions raised by Lujan. The rest of the appointees received scant funds from fossil fuel PACs. The data comes from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit that classifies campaign donations...

More than 15 journalists, several U.S. government officials and multiple lawmakers were shown or given the Steele dossier during the 2016 presidential campaign or shortly after. Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele disseminated the dossier far and wide in an apparent attempt to insert the document’s salacious allegations into the media. Newly unsealed court filings show how widespread this effort was. Court documents released last week in a lawsuit involving the Steele dossier revealed new details about the campaign to disseminate the infamous anti-Trump report to the press and within the U.S. government. Much was already known about Fusion GPS and...

David Kramer, a former State Department official, said in a deposition on Dec. 13, 2017 that he provided a copy of Christopher Steele's dossier to reporters from McClatchy, NPR, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed and to CNN's Carl Bernstein. He also shared the report with State Department official Victoria Nuland, Obama National Security Counsel official Celeste Wallander and Illinois GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger. ... Kramer said he also met Mother Jones's David Corn, The Guardian's Julian Borger, and Washington Post reporters Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman. Kramer also said that ABC News's Brian Ross showed him...

Mother Jones reporter and MSNBC analyst David Corn showed me a photo of the “obscene” anti-Ocasio-Cortez graffiti he found in an airport bathroom this week and, honestly, it was pretty underwhelming. Corn tweeted about the graffiti to his over-700,000 followers Tuesday but opted not to share the photo, sparking a flurry of responses from skeptical Twitter users who believed Corn was making up the story entirely or had written the graffiti himself. The speculation about the alleged graffiti only intensified after some odd tweets from Phoenix Sky Harbor, the airport where Corn claimed to have found the message. Corn shared...

America loves an underdog and a good story. The rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had all the markings of just such a story. The 28-year-old unknown millennial Latina from the Bronx pulled off a stunning upset in a New York City Democratic congressional primary, knocking off a prominent party veteran in her first bid for public office. Ocasio-Cortez won 57.5% of the vote against Rep. Joe Crowley, a 10-term Democrat in the 14th Congressional District in New York widely seen by many as a possible successor to Rep. Nancy Pelosi for House Minority Leader was the fourth-ranked Democrat in the House....

On the Basis of Sex, a feature film on the pioneering legal work of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is due to roll out in theaters nationwide on Christmas Day. With Felicity Jones’ portrayal of Ginsburg as a hot, young ACLU lawyer, the canonization of “Notorious RGB” will be officially complete. The 85-year-old justice’s celebrity status as a badass feminist has never been higher. CNN, which earlier this year produced a Ginsburg documentary titled RBG, has declared her the “face of the resistance” against President Donald Trump’s agenda, and a new Ginsburg biography was published in October to coincide...

When Edward Snowden decided he wanted to release details about the NSA's intelligence operations to the public, he reached out to Laura Poitras, a 49-year-old film maker and political activist opposed to the war on terror. As the Washington Post noted on Monday, Poitras had "the odd distinction of sharing a byline in The Washington Post and in London’s Guardian newspaper last week on two blockbuster stories." snip But perhaps it isn't such a mystery why the U.S. government might want to question Poitras if you simply crack open John R. Bruning's 2006 book, The Devil's Sandbox: With the 2nd...

Over the past few months, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has faced fierce criticism for his role in the Trump administration’s family separation policy. But while the White House continues to deal with the fallout from tearing kids away from their parents at the border, Sessions has been busy orchestrating another, much quieter attack on the country’s immigration system. Tensions have been simmering for months between the attorney general and the hundreds of judges overseeing immigration courts, but they reached a new high in July. The flashpoint was the case of Reynaldo Castro-Tum, a Guatemalan man who was scheduled to appear...

Workers were given the impression the president wanted “pictures that appeared to depict more spectators.” Shortly after his inauguration, President Donald Trump boasted about the size of the crowds in attendance, and then-press secretary Sean Spicer, in his first press conference, sided with his boss and insisted that it had been “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period.” This wasn’t true, of course, but a government photographer did his best to make it seem like it was. Newly released documents obtained by the Guardian show that a National Park Service photographer, following a request from the White House,...

In a procedural ruling Friday before the High Court of Justice, Queen's Bench Division, former British spy Christopher Steele was ordered to appear for a videotaped deposition in London on June 18 for ongoing civil litigation brought against Buzzfeed by a Russian technology executive, Aleksej Gubarev. A last-ditch effort by Buzzfeed's legal team was denied today in their efforts to expand and question Steele about "the dossier as a whole" instead of a more limited area of questioning in the ongoing civil litigation in the UK. In the 15-page ruling obtained and reviewed by Fox News, Mr. Justice Jay wrote...

Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian military officials days before President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rosenstein also planned his press conference at the same time President Trump was meeting with the Queen of England. With the 12 Russians indicted Friday, the corrupt Mueller team has now indicted 31 individuals and 3 companies, with more than 80% of the indictments related to Russians who will never be prosecuted. But dirty cop Rosenstein forgot to mention the DNC allowed the Russians to infiltrate their servers. In her 2017 book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and...

Anyone following the investigation of the Clinton campaign's attempt to frame Trump probably already knows that while the primary vector for the Clinton-Steele dossier, a document alleging Russian control over Trump created by the Clinton campaign and used as the basis for the FBI investigation, was Fusion GPS and its media and Dem allies, a secondary vector was McCain. Now it turns out that McCain had a different version of the Clinton-Steele dossier. Fusion GPS has discussed doing more work on the dossier afterward and it's likely that the version McCain had was a newer copy. It would explain why...

The House Intelligence Committee memo about 2016 surveillance abuses, released Friday, lays out grave evidence that the FBI wasn’t fully forthcoming with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as it sought an order to wiretap former Trump adviser Carter Page. It’s possible the FBI’s lack of candor was even worse than the memo describes. Democrats are disputing the memo on lots of grounds, but they’ve said little about the FBI’s failure to inform the court that the bureau had itself decided one of its main sources, dossier author Christopher Steele, was unreliable. Mr. Steele in October 2016 gave Mother Jones an...

Fusion GPS was hired by the Obama for America campaign to perform opposition research against Mitt Romney. Fusion GPS’s job was to gather research and connect reporters who would publish hit pieces while the lawyers made the payments and managed the relationships. In early 2012, the Obama campaign launched a political hit job against Mitt Romney campaign donors.... .... It is clear now that David Corn and Michael Isikoff are all connected to the strategy of hitting “enemies” of Obama. It also seems apparent that Mother Jones and Fusion GPS may have multiple connection points. They may also have been...