Free Republic

A small British firm based in south Wales had secured a contract to provide security for American diplomatic facilities in Benghazi despite having only a few months experience in the country. Sources have told the Daily Telegraph that just five unarmed locally hired Libyans were placed on duty at the compound on eight-hour shifts under a deal that fell outside the State Department's global security contracting system. Blue Mountain, the Camarthen firm that won a $387,000 (£241,000) one year contract from the US State Department to protect the compound in May, sent just one British employee, recruited from the celebrity...

Break out the champagne The New York Times reported last Friday that “an exodus is underway” in the State Department. The Times didn’t think this was good news; it gave space to one career diplomat who lamented that there was “complete and utter disdain for our expertise.” This could be the best news to come out of Washington since the Trump administration took office. We can only hope that with the departure of these failed State Department officials, their failed policies will be swept out along with them. Chief among these is the almost universally held idea that poverty causes...

Holy congressional probe, Robin! Former FBI chief Robert Mueller is the hero America needs to investigate Russia’s meddling into the 2016 presidential election, his former second-in-charge said Sunday. “A line in New York would be Batman’s back to save Gotham, but I think in this case, Batman is back to save America,” Timothy Murphy told John Catsimatidis during an interview on “The Cats Roundtable.” Murphy served as the agency’s deputy director under Mueller, who was named as a special counsel in the investigation this week, following James Comey’s ouster as FBI director. Murphy insisted any investigation headed by his old...

McChrystal and a few other key figures converted JSOC from a Ferrari in the garage to the long-haul truck of the war on terror. The targeting of low-level insurgents continued when JSOC shifted resources from Iraq to Afghanistan in 2009. But the enemy’s continual replacement of losses with recruits from Pakistan and unpacified eastern Afghanistan eventually eroded JSOC’s morale. One Ranger officer tells Mr. Naylor that, by 2011, morale had sunk to the point that he had to yell at his noncommissioned officers just to go out on operations.

This column has already told the story of Frank VanderSloot, an Idaho businessman who last year contributed to a group supporting Mitt Romney. An Obama campaign website in April sent a message to those who'd donate to the president's opponent. It called out Mr. VanderSloot and seven other private donors by name and occupation and slurred them as having "less-than-reputable" records. Mr. VanderSloot has since been learning what it means to be on a presidential enemies list. Just 12 days after the attack, the Idahoan found an investigator digging to unearth his divorce records. This bloodhound—a recent employee of Senate...

Four days after Judge Schnider unsealed the custody records, Ryan dropped out of the race for the horror of (allegedly) propositioning his own wife and then taking “no” for an answer. Alan Keyes stepped in as a last-minute Republican candidate. And that’s how Obama became a U.S. senator. He destroyed both his Democratic primary opponent and his Republican general election opponent with salacious allegations about their personal lives taken from “sealed” court records. Obama’s team delved into Sarah Palin’s marriage and spread rumors of John McCain’s alleged affair in 2008 and they smeared Herman Cain in 2011 with hazy sexual...

When Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Arizona in 2011, the media knew exactly what to blame: hateful right-wing rhetoric. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=7oSLR3bW4vI

A former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the FBI says played a role in a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 U.S. servicemen, accompanied Iraq’s prime minister to the White House on Monday, attending an event at which President Obama trumpeted the end of the Iraq War. Hadi Farhan al-Amiri, transportation minister in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, was part of the delegation that visited the White House to discuss Iraq’s future and Iran’s influence there, among other topics. -excerpt - Louis J. Freeh, who served as FBI director in the Clinton administration and the early months...

[Associated Press, so I'm not going to excerpt at all, just link]

Or someone even higher up? The quote is from the film National Treasure. It is a terrific film about the theft of the Declaration of Independence from the National Archives. The film is chock full of real American history mixed with actual patriotism, the bête noire of the left. But we Americans find ourselves at a tipping point. It appears that the Obama administration, with the willing submission of our intelligence agencies, surveilled Donald Trump, his campaign and his transition team beginning as early as October 2015 and escalated the activity after he won the election. Why? No one thought...

Federal Judge John Roll was killed in Tucson trying to save another man’s life. As soon as madman Jared Lee Loughner finished his attempt to murder Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, he turned his gun on the people to his left, then the people to his right. Recently released video shows his first target to the right was Ron Barber, Gifford’s district director, who was standing next to Justice John Roll. Barber was shot in the arm. Judge Roll then pushed him down and, shielding Barber with his own body, steered him to shelter under a nearby table. While under the table,...

Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says he is confident the story behind the IRS’s targeting of tea-party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status will eventually come out. But patience will have to be a virtue. Issa’s staff acknowledged late last month that the IRS had handed over to the committee a little more than 10 percent of the documents the IRS itself has admitted are relevant to the committee’s investigation. Issa mentioned the case of “Susanne,” a lawyer whom he said had worked for Democrats on the House Oversight Committee until 2008....

The State Department doled out $13 million in grants for longtime friend and Clinton Foundation donor Muhammad Yunus during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, according to federal records. The grants were provided in 18 separate transactions from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the Bangladesh-based Grameen bank, according to a Sunday evening report from the Daily Caller News Foundation, for which Yunus served as a founding board member. Groups associated with Yunus through business relationships received an additional $11 million. Yunus oversaw the distribution of microcredit loans to impoverished borrowers for the bank for over 30 years....

Carroll Quigley, in the course of his examination of the failure of most Latin American / South American nations-states, delivered an astonishing analysis of what he believed to be the root cause of these failures in the first edition (1966) of his renowned Tragedy and Hope. Here, in almost an aside, he defines what he calls the "Pakistani-Peruvian axis" - a combination of Asian despotism and Arabic outlook (key word, that - outlook), both of which have their roots in Bronze Age antiquity, that pervade what Quigley calls the shattered cultures that dwell on its axis from Pakistan to the...

Hillary Clinton asked a top aide in 2011 whether she could fly on a separate airplane from former first lady Michelle Obama to Betty Ford's funeral, according to a newly released email.Judicial Watch released on Thursday more than 2,000 emails from Clinton's unauthorized private email server she used as secretary of state. One of the documents revealed a conversation between Clinton and then-Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin about how she would rather not ride the same plane as Obama en route Ford's funeral in Palm Desert, Calif."I'd be honored to speak," Clinton said in reference to Betty Ford's funeral....

During his appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Schweizer alleged that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta probably violated federal law when he failed to disclose his stock holdings in a Kremlin-funded company. “In 2011, John Podesta joins the board of this very small energy company called Joule Energy based out of Massachusetts," Schweizer said. "About two months after he joins the board, a Russian entity called Rusnano puts a billion rubles -- which is about 35 million dollars -- into John Podesta’s company. Now, what is Rusnano? Rusnano is not a private company, Steve. It is a fund directly funded by...

The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward. Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used...

Then there is Teneo Holdings, a global consulting firm with deep Clinton connections. Teneo serves as a kind of private-enterprise satellite to Clinton Inc. Doug Band, Mr. Clinton’s right-hand man for many years, is a Teneo founder. Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s right-hand woman for many years, was a senior advisor to Teneo at the same time she held a top position as part of Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle at the State Department. Bill Clinton was both a paid adviser to Teneo and a client. Secretary of State Clinton’s former Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland, Declan Kelly, is a Teneo co-founder...

North Korea is so isolated that rather than bring the Internet to its hackers, it brings them to it—in a swank hotel in China. The luxury hotel that has been called a command post for North Korean hackers would make for a unique holiday getaway and give you lots to talk about back home. “Surprisingly Great Hotel - Clean, Tasteful.... and North Korean!” says a trip advisor review for the Chilbosan Hotel in Shenyang, China. For just $53, you get “a deluxe twin room,” including a North Korean breakfast considerably more substantial than those enjoyed by the vast majority of...

In an interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC Tuesday, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice broke her silence over this week’s stunning reports that she requested the names of Trump campaign and transition officials be “demasked” from National Security Agency (NSA) intercepts. It was an awkward interview. Rice confirmed that she requested the demasking of Americans while she was National Security Adviser. While Rice would not deny that she asked that names of Trump officials be demasked, she insisted the Obama administration did not spy on Mr. Trump or his staff for political purposes. As a former CIA analyst who...