Free Republic

The special counsel named by the Biden administration to investigate Donald Trump oversaw a Justice Department unit rebuked by the Supreme Court for its prosecution of a prominent Republican and was linked by Congress to the IRS scandal that targeted conservative groups. Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague and former chief of the DOJ public integrity section, was named Friday by Attorney General Merrick Garland to take over two investigations of Trump related to Jan. 6 and classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. In 2014, the House Oversight Committee concluded that during Smith's earlier stint at DOJ he...

Stevens, the son of prominent U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, was hiking near Seward, Alaska, on Thursday evening when he suffered a fatal medical emergency Email Former Alaska politician Ben Stevens died late last week at the age of 63, after suffering a medical emergency while hiking near Seward. On Thursday evening Alaska State Troopers, U.S. Forest Service officers and medics were dispatched to the Chugach National Forest to respond to a report of a hiker needing CPR on the Lost Lake Trail. Life-saving measures were unsuccessful, according to online dispatch records, and the deceased hiker was later identified as Stevens....

Aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow made a cryptic announcement in September 2008 in a radio interview with George Knapp. Bigelow revealed that he had just created BAASS, a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace, and that BAASS had entered into a partnership with an unnamed entity to study the UFO mystery and related phenomena. The public didn’t know it at the time, but one week earlier, Bigelow had signed a contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency to carry out an investigation under the umbrella of AAWSAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program. The impetus for the program had occurred a year earlier...

Back in 2014, I worked freelance for a public relations firm in New York City. It was there that I met an unusual woman. I didn’t know many lawyers or Texans, but I knew better than to chalk up her qualities to either her profession or her home. It’s rare that I encounter someone who I’m afraid to argue with, because of her sheer brain power and towering personal rectitude. But this was such a person. This woman had quite a career behind her. An evangelical Christian, she’d been a federal prosecutor — and quit, outraged at the corruption she...

Maybe Judge Luttig was right all along. I had the misgivings you’d expect back in late May, when I disagreed with J. Michael Luttig, the stellar scholar and former federal appeals court judge, regarding how the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals should handle the Flynn case. At the time, that court’s three-judge panel had not yet heard oral argument on Michael Flynn’s mandamus petition — i.e., Flynn’s request that the panel find that federal district judge Emmet Sullivan was acting lawlessly. Sullivan had not only failed to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn; he...

A federal judge on Thursday ordered that the videotape of Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff giving a deposition later this week be sealed so it can’t be used in political attacks against the former secretary of state and likely Democratic presidential nominee. Judge Emmett G. Sullivan said the transcript will be made public, so the public will know what Cheryl Mills says. He said it was “unnecessary” to have the video released. He extended that order to all of the depositions being taken in the open-records case, which also applies to Mrs. Clinton’s closest personal aide, Huma Abedin. Neither...

She favours Boeing on Air Force contracts for hiring daughter and daughter's boyfriend and, later, to protect daughter, who got a poor performance reviewWhile overseeing contracts, she meet Boeing secretly for $422,000 job there HE had long insisted that her work decisions were strictly professional. Then, she failed a lie-detector test. Finally, Darleen Druyun, the No 2 weapons buyer for the US Air Force, admitted that her weapons-buying decisions were influenced by a desire to curry Boeing's favour for herself and her family. The career of Druyun, once the most powerful woman in the Air Force, is over. Last...

RUSH: What I want to start with today on the Trump stuff, two things here that are equally important. One of them that’s important, potentially, the judge in the Michael Flynn case is named Emmet Sullivan. Emmet Sullivan is the judge in the Ted Stevens case, the Ted Stevens trial. And, in that trial, the prosecutors, the same group of people on Mueller’s team, the prosecutors in that case suborned perjury from the star witness against Ted Stevens, a contractor, a home repair guy. They got Ted Stevens kicked out of the Senate for supposedly accepting a kickback of 150...

One day after former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's legal team made the bombshell allegations that the FBI had pushed him not to bring a lawyer to his fateful Jan. 24, 2017 interview with agents at the White House, the federal judge overseeing Flynn's criminal case late Wednesday ordered Special Counsel Robert Mueller to turn over all of its highly secret documents related to the questioning. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan -- who overturned the 2008 conviction of former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens after government misconduct came to light -- is weighing how to sentence Flynn, who pleaded guilty to...

Judge Sullivan, who is assigned to General Flynn’s case is demanding to see the FBI summary 302 report about the ambush Flynn interview according to a new court filing. Counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok showed up to the White House on January 24th, 2017 along with Special Agent Joe Pientka to interview General Flynn; the meeting was arranged by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Flynn was told not have his lawyer with him and soon after the FBI agents began to question him he realized he was being ambushed over his phone calls to Russian Ambassador Kislyak. The FBI agents...

RUSH: Well, well, well, if anybody doubts the political nature of the Mueller investigation, all you have to do is take a look at the news today. For crying out loud, they really want us to believe that Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange three times before WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails? Where’s this story been? If this were true, they would have known this all the way back when Obama and his buddies were spying on the Trump campaign. And we would have heard about this long before today. So what the heck is going on? Greetings, my friends,...

If one wonders how Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation employees like Bruce Ohr and Peter Strzok felt such impunity while actively meddling with the 2016 presidential election, one need look no further than the legacy of DoJ’s meddling in the Alaska Senate election of 2008. ---snip-- Not only did Stevens lose the election in 2008, his loss paved the way for a filibuster-proof majority for the Democrats in April of 2009. That means the misconduct paid off handsomely for Democratic partisans at no cost to the perpetrators. This DoJ election meddling helped a Democrat even though the...

Elizondo said. "You DOD, you CIA, you DHS, have the responsibility of protecting us, how did this happen? And yet, here we have the same scenario but there are no flags or numbers on the tail. In fact, there may not even be a tail on some of these things, and yet it's crickets. Nobody wants to have that conversation." ... "The communications in the missile defense installation was shut down. It didn't happen once. It happened more than once," former Senator Harry Reid said. "We have things in ships at sea, things in the water. What is that?"  Reid says he was...

Tom DeLonge...spent many years studying UFOs, and essentially left his previous lucrative career to devote himself to this pursuit, using his own personal income and resources to set up an entertainment company called To The Stars (TTS). It had the goal of disseminating information about UFOs, consciousness, the paranormal and other unexplained mysteries through artistic pursuits such as fiction and non-fiction books, feature films, and television productions. Most importantly, while doing so, Tom was gradually able to establish relationships with flag officers and other highly placed insiders in the aerospace industry, intelligence, the Department of Defense and NASA. These independent...

The existence of UFOs has "proved beyond reasonable doubt", a former Pentagon official has said. Luis Elizondo, the former head of a secret US government programme, believes that Earth may well have been visited by alien life via the unidentified aircraft and that there is also proof. He resigned from the US Department of Defence in October to protest against the excessive secrecy and opposition to the programme he was in charge of. Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph , he said: "In my opinion, if this was a court of law, we have reached the point of 'beyond reasonable doubt'....

In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find. Which was how the Pentagon wanted it. For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze. The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down...

A recent news item involving UFOs has caught the public’s attention. A Navy pilot’s gun camera shows an unknown aerial object above the ocean near San Diego. It was performing aerial maneuvers not known to be possible by any U.S. technology. The pilot’s description of the object included the sensational phrase, "I can tell you, I think it was not from this world." The government’s interest in this sort of sighting is that there may be a national defense issue involved. If the reported objects are from a potentially hostile nation, let’s say China or Russia, then of course they...

Elizondo was not able to discuss specifics of the program, but told The Telegraph that there had been “lots” of UFO sightings and witnesses interviewed during the program’s five years. Investigators pinpointed geographical “hot spots” that were sometimes near nuclear facilities and power plants and observed trends among the aircrafts including lack of flight surfaces on the objects and extreme manoeuvrability, Elizondo told The Telegraph. "There was never any display of hostility but the way they manoeuvred, in ways no-one else in the world had, you have to be conscious something could happen,” he said. Despite Pentagon funding running out...

"I don't think it's plausible that there's any alloys that we can't identify," Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society's panel of experts, told Live Science.... Alloys are mixtures of different kinds of elemental metals. They're very common — in fact, Sachleben said, they're more common on Earth than pure elemental metals are — and very well understood. Brass is an alloy. So is steel. Even most naturally occurring gold on Earth is an alloy made up of elemental gold mixed with other metals, like silver or copper. "There are databases of all known phases...

The story that followed has circulated in the military aviation world and fighter community for several years, including this write-up by former Navy F-14A Tomcat pilot Paco Chierici at Fighter Sweep. With orders to intercept the object, Fravor in his jet — callsign FASTEAGLE 01 — headed toward with aid from an E-2 Hawkeye early warning and control plane. The Hawkeye’s sensors, however, couldn’t detect the object and vector him toward it, so Princeton directed FASTEAGLE 01 and Fravor’s wingman, FASETEAGLE 02 to the location, and even asked Fravor whether he was carrying weapons — he wasn’t. He just had...