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Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, November 1, 2019 U.S. Navy Officer, His Wife, and Two Chinese Nationals Charged with Conspiring to Smuggle Military Style Inflatable Boats and Evinrude Military Outboard Motors to China Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers and U.S. Attorney Maria Chapa Lopez for the Middle District of Florida announces the return of an indictment today of four individuals, including two Chinese nationals, an active-duty United States Navy officer, and his wife, on charges relating to a conspiracy to unlawfully smuggle military-style inflatable boats, with Evinrude MFE military outboard motors, to the...

DES MOINES, Iowa — Former Secretary of State John Kerry — one of Joe Biden's highest-profile endorsers — was overheard Sunday on the phone at a Des Moines hotel explaining what he would have to do to enter the presidential race amid "the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole." Sitting in the lobby restaurant of the Renaissance Savery hotel, Kerry was overheard by an NBC News analyst saying "maybe I'm f---ing deluding myself here" and explaining that in order to run, he'd have to step down from the board of Bank of America and...

Conservative author and commentator Jerome Corsi says special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators accused him of lying under oath only after he "couldn’t give them what they wanted.” Corsi spoke with Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tuesday night, one day after he announced he would reject a plea deal that would have required him to plead guilty to perjury. "I refused to plead to a lie," Corsi told Carlson. Mueller sent Corsi a draft plea agreement earlier this month stipulating that the special counsel would allow Corsi to request a sentence of probation if he agreed to plead guilty to one count...

VIDEO

Pardon the age of this item, but it's on an issue of campaign history. On March 13, NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed new CNN host Jake Tapper about politics and journalism, and whether there was blowback from presidents and candidates over tough questions. But Gross felt compelled to bring up the "lies" told about John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign -- without expressing anything specific. Tapper said he was assigned as a Swift Boat Veteran fact checker by ABC. Gross said, "So you were fact-checking some of the Swift Boat attacks against presidential candidate John Kerry. There...

Earlier this week, a group of former special forces and intelligence agents launched a media campaign criticizing President Obama for the White House’s poor handling of sensitive national-security information and for Team Obama persistently using the death of Osama bin Laden as a subject for bragging rights. The Obama campaign can’t have that — Obama almost certainly plans to bring up his daring OBL raid during any foreign policy discussions we have on our way to November, and members of the military and intelligence community rallying in criticism of Obama’s national-security creds would certainly put a damper on that. I’d...

American Crossroads raised $15 million in September and early October, with nearly half of that coming from one donor: Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, according to Crossroads officials. Robert Rowling, CEO of TRT Holdings, the owner of Gold’s Gym and another long-standing GOP underwriter, donated more than $2 million through both his corporate and personal accounts. Alliance Resource Group, which has interests in the coal industry in Tulsa, provided another $2 million, according to Federal Election Commission reports released Wednesday. And B. Wayne Hughes of Public Storage in Lexington, Ky., gave an additional $1 million. When combined, those three individuals and...

Hughs: Rumor mill fueled by Internet stories By Ina Hughs (Contact) Friday, July 11, 2008 Think about the Swift Boat campaign and what it did to John Kerry in 2004 and what rumors of a secret love child did to John McCain's bid for the White House in 2000. As a kid, we used to play a game called "gossip." We'd sit in a circle, and someone would whisper a sentence into the ear of the person next to her; that person would then whisper what she heard to the person next to her - and so on. By the...

WASHINGTON -It is already easy to imagine the Republican attack ads against Barack Obama. They open with video of his wife, Michelle, saying she was proud of America "for the first time in my adult lifetime" because of her husband's presidential candidacy. Cut to the Illinois Senator explaining that he doesn't wear an American flag lapel pin because it is a "substitute for true patriotism." Then flash a clip of Obama explaining that his Caucasian grandmother was a "typical white person" because she uttered racial epithets and was afraid of black people. Finally, the coup de grace, pictures of Obama's...

WASHINGTON - Even if Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides do not mention Barack Obama's fiery-tongued spiritual mentor, don't expect the Illinois senator's well-publicized speech Tuesday to make the controversy disappear, political strategists said this week. Reporters, talk-show hosts and others will keep asking about Obama's close and long-standing relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose most bombastic comments came to dominate the Democratic presidential contest recently, the strategists predicted in interviews. In video clips playing on Internet sites, Wright can be heard arguing that HIV-AIDS was a U.S. government plot to wipe out "people of color," and that God...

Last week, I had the chance to sit down with Jeff Beatty, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate for the state of Massachusetts. Beatty is currently rallying support in order to offer a strong challenge to the current seat holder, Senator John Kerry. Jeff, who was in town to receive the prestigious "Guardian Award" from the International Association of Counter-terrorism and Security Professionals (IACSP), left me confident that we are putting our best foot forward in November's race and that Kerry will be facing a worthy opponent. Jeff's unique background as a counterterror professional and businessman positions him well to unseat...

Senator Hillary Clinton, among others, has begun using “swiftboating” as a verb. Her use is courtesy of the New York Times. Now, with extreme and unintended irony, the Times has sought to “swiftboat” Senator John McCain, and has been swiftboated in return by its own ombudsman, To sort all that out, we go back to the beginning, so the original swiftboaters don’t get “swiftboated” in the bargain. Does that make sense? I thought not. Hang on and it will all become clear. The original swiftboaters were crews of Swift Boats in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. These were small, fast...

I posted a squib on the National Review Web site about a robo call I received from John McCain. (Virginia's primary is Tuesday.) The call stressed that he would, if elected, be a down-the-line limited government conservative who would never raise taxes, would defend life, would enforce immigration laws and would win the war on terror. The candidate is trying, I said, to meet conservatives "more than halfway." The response of readers was, shall we say, emphatic. One lady wrote that she would never vote for him as "He is the most disloyal, ill-tempered man and he brings out the...

My favorite professor, philosopher, student of American history, and columnist, is Dr. Thomas Sowell. One or twice a year he writes a column of individual thoughts – that are worth writing but not worth a column. I now borrow that idea for this column. John Kerry and the Swift Boats: John Kerry has just attacked the Clintons for trying to “swiftboat” Barack Obama. His invented verb, “swiftboat” is intended to mean that the charges are false, but potentially dangerous. He’s right about the charges, but wrong about the verb. I knew John Kerry in college. He was a self-important prig...

More than three years after John Kerry's bitter defeat, at the dawn of what looks like a far more promising campaign cycle for the Democrats, the party is still haunted by the specter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Once upon a time, "Swift boat" denoted an obscure military vessel, but thanks to the activities of this group it has come to represent movement conservatism's penchant for ruthlessly (and effectively) smearing any and all political opponents, from a sitting senator and war hero to an 11-year-old boy with a cranial fracture. Research by The Nation into Federal Election Commission...

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 29 (OneWorld) - U.S. war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have announced they're planning to descend on Washington, DC this March to testify about war crimes they committed or personally witnessed in Iraq. "The war in Iraq is not covered to its potential because of how dangerous it is for reporters to cover it," said Liam Madden, a former Marine and member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. "That's left a lot of misconceptions in the minds of the American public about what the true nature of military occupation looks like." Iraq Veterans Against the...

Senator John F. Kerry already has a Democratic opponent for his U.S. Senate seat. He is not from the party's right since there is barely anyone sitting in those seats in blue Massachusetts. Kerry's antagonist is Ed O'Reilly, a Gloucester lawyer who, according to the Wednesday Boston Globe, is targeting Kerry from the anti-Iraq war left. And, lo and behold, he wants to know the truth about Kerry's military record and has questions himself about the Swift Boat record and the Swift Boat ads. Besides, like a lot of the senator's tormentors, he is suspicious about whether Kerry is really...

BOSTON --Sen. John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential campaign was torpedoed by critics of his Vietnam War record, said Friday he has personally accepted Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens' offer of $1 million to anyone who can disprove even a single charge of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In a letter to Pickens, who provided $3 million to bankroll the group during Kerry's race against President Bush, the Massachusetts Democrat wrote: "While I am prepared to show they lied on allegation after allegation, you have generously offered to pay one million dollars for just one thing that can be proven...

Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) whose bid for the presidency in 2004 was damaged by attacks on his vaunted Vietnam War record by a group called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” says he is now ready to refute their allegations. “We have put together a powerful and irrefutable rebuttal to the scurrilous charges made against me by these right wing fanatics,” Kerry asserted. Kerry declined to disclose any of his reputedly irrefutable proof at this time saying that “the American people have not yet shown a sufficient measure of regret and contrition for voting against me. They disrespected me—a decorated veteran—and...

The man who flustered White House hopeful John McCain last week by questioning his standing among fellow Vietnam prisoners of war was a contributor to rival Fred Thompson's campaign. Ed Nowokunski, a retired Air Force major and fighter pilot, gave $500 to Thompson's testing-the-waters committee in July, Federal Election Commission records show. He also gave $1,000 to President Bush a month after his bitter 2000 primary defeat of McCain in South Carolina, and again in 2004 when he wasn't opposed. McCain supporter Orson Swindle, a former Marine POW, suggested afterward that an opposing campaign planted Nowokunski in the retirement community...