Free Republic

For less than a half-million dollars, Russian President Vladimir Putin got what he most wanted out of the Kremlin's campaign to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election: a destabilized American democracy and Hillary Clinton out of his hair, U.S. officials say. The Kremlin views its influence campaign, which it called an "active measures" operation, as a remarkable return on investment, U.S. officials briefed on post-election intelligence told The Washington Post. Not only did it shake up Americans' faith in their democratic process, but the operation also achieved Putin's primary goal of stymying Clinton's White House aspirations, one official told the...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 25 (UPI) -- John McCain's campaign manager reportedly helped arrange the introduction of the Arizona senator to politically connected Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska. The Washington Post Friday said the meeting took place in 2006 at a dinner party in Switzerland and was followed up by a similar encounter in Montenegro seven months later. The Post said there was no evidence that McCain, a Republican presidential hopeful, and Deripaska had any further contact, but the newspaper contended the meeting illustrated the obstacles McCain faces in campaigning as a Washington "outsider" despite his long Senate career. The Switzerland meeting was...

But for the bomb, the four would be in their 60s, probably grandmothers. Three were 14 and one was 11 in 1963 when the blast killed them in the 16th Street Baptist Church, which is four blocks from the law office of Doug Jones, who then was 9. He was born in May 1954, 13 days before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. He was 16 when he attended, at this city’s Legion Field, the Alabama Crimson Tide vs. the University of Southern California Trojans football game in which USC’s Sam Cunningham, an African...

Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama sought to refocus his campaign on the conservative religious ideals most likely to motivate his base voters, dismissing the national firestorm over allegations of sexual misconduct while Breitbart News worked to discredit his accusers. Addressing a gathering at the Huntsville Christian Academy in Huntsville, Ala., on Sunday night, the former judge suggested that he was investigating his accusers, threatened to sue The Washington Post and called on the United States to restore its culture by going “back to God.” “We can be proud of where we came from and where we’re going if...

The mother of Leigh Corfman, who says that Alabama Senatorial Candidate Roy Moore tried to engage in a sexual encounter with her when she was 14, told Breitbart News that the Washington Post worked to convince her daughter to give an interview about the allegations against Moore.Speaking by phone to Breitbart News on Saturday, Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, 71, further stated that her daughter would not have come forward if it weren’t for The Post reporter’s alleged actions. Corfman went public with her accusations against Moore in a Washington Post interview published last week in which she alleged that Moore...

Washington Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen, who co-wrote today’s hit piece on Judge Roy Moore, has a history of writing fake checks, according to a 2011 report reviewed by GotNews. According to left-leaning New York Magazine, McCrummen has an extensive criminal record, committing four infractions in three different states.

Senate Republican leadership is calling for Alabama GOP candidate Roy Moore to step down as the party's nominee if new allegations of his inappropriate sexual conduct against a 14-year old girl in 1979 are true. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) released brief statements on Thursday, shortly after The Washington Post published the allegations. "If these allegations are true, he must step aside," McConnell said. Gardner's statement echoed that from McConnell. “The allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore are deeply troubling,” he said. “If these allegations are found...

State-sponsored hackers penetrate the systems of other nations. It happens regularly. The United States does it. China does it. Russia does it. Iran does it. Sometimes, hacking reveals that someone in the hacking nation is working with the enemy. When that happens, someone dies. Sometimes, a secretary of state receives e-mails — on her unsecured, private e-mail server — about an Iranian scientist who is providing information to the United States and then that scientist is later executed for espionage.Throughout the scandal surrounding her use of an unsecured, private e-mail server, Hillary Clinton claimed that she “never sent or received...

The coauthor of the Washington Post’s bombshell story on the National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance program is a long-time activist filmmaker who has railed against U.S. counterterrorism policies put into place after the Sept. 11 attacks. Filmmaker Laura Poitras, who shared the lead byline with former Post journalist Barton Gellman on the paper’s front-page NSA story, is not on the Post’s staff and is not a print reporter. Poitras has criticized the “illegal” Guantanamo Bay detention facility, described enhanced interrogation techniques as “legalized torture,” and criticized the intelligence community’s surveillance methods in her films and public comments. While traditional media...

For years, the Washington establishment held up Sally Quinn, the wife of the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, as the society doyenne par excellence and a “serious” reporter. The Great and Good would gather at her mansion to bat around the issues of the day. Much talk of a sinister religiosity afoot in the land would ensue. But it turns out that Quinn, when not passing around drinks and appetizers to these self-proclaimed rationalists, was in the back playing with her tarot cards and concocting hexes for her enemies. In her new “spiritual memoir,” Finding Magic, Quinn discloses her...

A key witness’ to a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing exploring Russian meddling in the 2016 election has reaffirmed his testimony that the secretive Washington firm, Fusion GPS, which commissioned the sensational anti-Trump campaign research dossier, received payment from the Kremlin.Last week a Washington Post “Fact Checker” article assessed a statement by White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders in which she said, “The Democrat-linked firm Fusion GPS actually took money from the Russian government while it created the phony dossier that’s been the basis for all of the Russia scandal fake news.”The article—which awarded Mrs. Sanders “Three Pinocchios” for what...

A leaked memo appears to undermine significant details in a new book from a witness to the embassy attacks. But its alleged author tells The Daily Beast he didn't write it. The debate over the Obama administration’s actions before and after the attack on the U.S. mission was reignited following an Oct. 27 60 Minutes report featuring an interview with Morgan Jones Controversy over Jones’s interview and book reached a high pitch on Oct. 31 when The Washington Post published details of an incident report allegedly written by Jones that contradicts the account in his book and reveals his real...

Washington Post employee Itai Ozderman, 35, was arrested after his Gaithersburg, MD home was raided by Montgomery County Police on February 22nd at around 6 a.m, according to court documents. Ozderman is charged with impersonating an ICE officer on several occasions throughout Falls Church, VA. When the warrant was served on Feb. 22 at Ozderman's home in the 100 block of Elmira Lane, court documents say 10 weapons, including handguns, assault rifles, and a shotgun, were recovered. Sources tell ABC7's Kevin Lewis that Ozderman impersonated an ICE officer throughout Falls Church, Va. on more than one occasion. According to sources,...

James Comey may have misled senators on May 3, when he testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had never been an anonymous source in news reports related to the Russia investigation. By that time, he had already leaked several private conversations he had with President Trump to his friend Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of the blog Lawfare and former editorial writer for the Washington Post.

Officials with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) blasted The Washington Post Friday over a story alleging that the FCC’s Chairman Ajit Pai is getting too cozy with the White House. Pai’s chief of staff, Matthew Berry, said in a tweet that WaPo reporter Brian Fung invented a fake meeting between President Donald Trump and Chairman Pai. {..snip..}

The establishment media became upset this weekend after President Donald Trump canceled the “White House Muslim Iftar Dinner tradition started by Thomas Jefferson.” But the media is wrong in every respect. Thomas Jefferson never held any Iftar dinner and only three out of 45 presidents ever hosted one, so there is no such “tradition” to cancel. Amy B. Wang of the Washington Post led the pack with this nonsense that Thomas Jefferson held the “first Iftar dinner” with a June 24 piece entitled, “Trump just ended a long tradition of celebrating Ramadan at the White House.” The often-used claim that Thomas Jefferson...

arly last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides. Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.

A pro-immigration advocate says the hard-hit mostly white working-class communities in the United States must be wheeled into “political hospice care,” and a Washington Post columnist commended his solution “as a way forward.” “Economic dislocation and demographic changes are fueling discomfort and desperation among white working-class voters,” wrote WashPo columnist and editorial board member Jonathan Capehart, continuing: While [university professor and author] Justin Gest says that both Republicans and Democrats have exploited these voters, he sees a way forward. “The only way of addressing their plight is a form of political hospice care,” [Gest] said. “These are communities that are on the...

The surprise tweet from a little-used FBI account came about 1 p.m. Tuesday, announcing that the agency had published on its website 129 pages of internal documents related to a years-old investigation into former president Bill Clinton’s pardon of a fugitive Democratic donor. The seemingly random reminder of one of the darkest chapters of the Clinton presidency a week before the election drew an immediate rebuke from Hillary Clinton’s campaign — with its spokesman tweeting that the FBI’s move was “odd” and asking whether the agency planned to publish unflattering records about Republican candidate Donald Trump. “Will FBI be posting...

Reporters on Monday fell for a fake "White House" document that supposedly showed President Donald Trump making unusual demands of his Israeli hosts during his trip abroad. The Twitter account Rogue White House Senior Advisor on Friday shared what it claimed was Trump's demands ahead of a trip to Israel, including roughly a metric ton of sugary and non-kosher junk food. .. Some elements of the purported demands were obvious jokes. The demand that microwaves remain unplugged was a mocking reference to White House advisor Kellyanne Conway's bizarre comment that the appliance could be used for spying, and the request...