Free Republic

,a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/27/hundreds-dhs-badges-guns-cell-phones-lost-or-stolen-since-2012.html">Hundreds of DHS badges, guns, cell phones lost or stolen since 2012Hundreds of badges, credentials, cell phones and guns belonging to Department of Homeland Security employees have been lost or stolen in recent years -- raising serious security concerns about the potential damage these missing items could do in the wrong hands. Inventory reports, obtained by the news site Complete Colorado and shared with FoxNews.com, show that over 1,300 badges, 165 firearms and 589 cell phones were lost or stolen over the span of 31 months between 2012 and 2015. The majority of the credentials belonged to employees...

Few in the odd coalition of Left and Right pushing for reauthorization of the 81-year-old Export-Import Bank have been louder than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “It’s wrong that candidates for president, who really should know better, are jumping on this bandwagon,” she said at a May 22 campaign stop in New Hampshire. “It’s wrong, it’s embarrassing. . . . The idea that we would remove this relatively small but vital source of funding for our businesses to compete is absolutely backwards.” Clinton’s defense of Ex-Im may be motivated by more than mere concern for American businesses. Critics have argued...

(ELK POINT, S.D.) In this rural outpost of just over 1,900 residents, a local college student has become a courtroom sketch artist, trailers on Main Street are ersatz offices for a major law firm and members of an agricultural youth club are puzzled by a new metal detector at the local courthouse. The changes are part of Elk Point's selection as site of a multibillion-dollar defamation case pitting ABC News against South Dakota-meat processor, Beef Products Inc. The company contends that ABC and reporter Jim Avila defamed it by referring to its signature product as "pink slime" in 2012 broadcasts....

'El Chapo' and El Banco: What You Haven’t Been Told CRIME POLITICS-US media are celebrating the arrest of alleged Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, whose Sinaloa Cartel is thought to be the most powerful trafficker in the world and "a main combatant in a spasm of violence that has left tens of thousands dead in Mexico" (New York Times, 2/22/14). US Attorney General Eric Holder called the arrest a "landmark achievement": "The criminal activity Guzman allegedly directed contributed to the death and destruction of millions of lives across the globe through drug addiction, violence and corruption." But...

November 4, 2014BREAKING: DOJ Turns Over 64,000 Fast and Furious Documents Held Under Obama's Executive PrivilegeKatie PavlichAfter years of legal battles between the House Oversight Committee and Attorney General Eric Holder, 64,280 redacted Operation Fast and Furious documents held under President Obama's assertion of executive privilege since 2012, have been turned over by the Department of Justice after an order from U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson. The Justice Department was originally ordered to turn over a list of documents, better known as a Vaughn Index, with explanations as to why documents fall under executive privilege claims by November...

An iconic photograph of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton using her BlackBerry while wearing sunglasses on a military plane in 2011 prompted a recordkeeping official in her office to inquire about whether Clinton had been assigned a State.gov email address, the State Department disclosed this week.Clarence Finney, who oversaw an office responsible for Freedom of Information Act searches, raised the question about an official account after seeing the photo in the media, according to testimony at a deposition held Wednesday and released Thursday. The image went viral on social media in 2012, prompting a "Texts from Hillary" meme."When Mrs. Clinton's...

[snip]The murky case has so far thrown up far more questions than answers, but one thing is clear: US authorities are determined to extradite the 29-year-old Muscovite, who drove a Lamborghini and socialised with the children of top Russian officials, and Moscow is determined to get him back, filing its own extradition request. [snip] The affidavit relates solely to the hacking of LinkedIn, Dropbox and Formspring in 2012, and does not mention any election hacking. However, Nikulin wrote in a letter from prison that Miller had interrogated him in Prague on 7 February and raised the election hacking. Excerpts of...

June 12, 2013 State Department Whistleblower, a Career Foreign Service Officer, Seeks Congressional Protection After State Threatens Her Kids Bryan Preston The State Department whistleblower is Aurelia Fedenisn. She worked in the department’s inspector general’s office until her retirement in December 2012. According to USA Today, she has sought protection as an official whistleblower after the State Department directly threatened her, once at her home. It threatened her with criminal charges when she turned over documents to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) showing evidence that the department had watered down her report, in which she alleged that the department at the...

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...

A Russian citizen accused of being a hacker by both Russia and the U.S. has claimed U.S. officials offered to cut him a deal if he admitted to interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Yevgeniy Nikulin, 29, has found himself in the middle of an international dispute between Washington and Moscow, at the very center of which lies U.S. allegations that Russia sponsored a series of hacks targeting Democratic Party candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in favor of Republican candidate and current President Donald Trump. On October 5, 2016, days before U.S. intelligence publicly accused Russia of...

President Obama on Tuesday pardoned retired Gen. James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff accused of lying to the FBI about his conversations with reporters regarding U.S. efforts to cripple Iran's nuclear program. Cartwright pleaded guilty in October to one felony count of making false statements during the FBI's investigation into leaks about the government's role in a highly classified operation known as Operation Olympic Games. The clandestine effort -- untaken with Israel -- deployed a computer virus known as Stuxnet that destroyed Iranian centrifuges. New York Times journalist David Sanger exposed the operation in...

Partisan political advantage, gained at the real or potential life-threatening expense of American personnel undertaking high-risk assignments, was the deep moral issue driving prosecutors in the 2005 Valerie Plame name exposure scandal. An even more disturbing and exploitative example of high-level Washington political operatives exposing low-level American field personnel to greater physical risk is the moral issue at the core of the on-going Benghazi scandal. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said national security concerns drove his pursuit of Bush Administration officials involved in exposing Plame's status as a covert CIA agent. For Fitzgerald, Plame's precise operational status at the time her...

Illinoispaytoplay.com (IP2P) has learned that Daniel S. Mahru, former business partner of Antoin "Tony" Rezko, made a deal with the Department of Justice (DoJ) for his silence. IP2P is the first to report that on, October 4 2012, Daniel S. Mahru will receive probation at his sentencing hearing. IP2P has also learned that this is being done to insure Mahru will not speak of crimes, of which he has knowledge, that implicate Barack Obama, Valarie Jarrett, Allison Davis, Tony Rezko and others. (Remember Tony recently saying he committed crimes for which Fitzgerald did not charge him.) IP2P is also investigating...

Disgraced ex-IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, once tipped to win France's presidential vote, has made a dramatic incursion into the campaign with a claim Nicolas Sarkozy orchestrated his downfall. The accusation came as the battle between Mr Sarkozy and Francois Hollande grew ever more bitter, with the incumbent accusing the front-running Socialist of subjecting him to a “Stalinist trial” over his bid to woo the far right. Mr Strauss-Kahn, in his first major newspaper interview since his disgrace a year ago, told Britain's The Guardian newspaper that his spectacular fall was orchestrated by opponents to prevent him standing as Socialist candidate....

WikiLeaks details CIA infiltrating and influencing the 2012 French Elections. First of many releases of 'Vault 7' to come.

The White House on Friday rebuked two visitors who were photographed last week at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue flipping the middle finger below a portrait of the late President Ronald Reagan. The guests had been invited to a reception last Friday marking gay pride month. The images of them -- with both middle fingers raised, pointing up toward Reagan -- were first published by Philadelphia Magazine. The White House did not approve. "While the White House does not control the conduct of guests at receptions, we certainly expect that all attendees conduct themselves in a respectful manner. Most all do," Shin...

WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is asking whether a suspected former Russian intelligence officer-turned U.S. lobbyist and the firm behind the unsubstantiated anti-Trump dossier should have registered as foreign agents for their efforts to bring down a U.S. law on behalf of the Kremlin. According to a complaint filed with the Justice Department, Fusion GPS, which was also involved in the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, was involved in the pro-Russia campaign to kill the Global Magnitsky Act around the same time. In 2012, President Obama signed into...

An influential activist who met with members of the Obama Administration to promote net neutrality campaigned on behalf of a convicted Al Qaeda supporter, Breitbart Tech can reveal. Evan Greer is the campaign director for Fight For The Future, which led grassroots efforts to promote net neutrality to the Obama Administration. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, and she describes herself as a “touring queer riot-folksinger.” For three years, she also campaigned on behalf of Tarek Mehanna, an open admirer of Osama Bin Laden who was convicted of aiding al-Qaeda in 2012.Mehanna was convicted in 2012, after prosecutors proved that in 2004...

A legal filing prosecutors submitted in advance of a hearing set in federal court in Washington on Wednesday for Libyan militia leader Ahmed Abu Khatallah is vague about his role in the 2012 attack that killed four Americans at a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi. Abu Khatallah was captured in Benghazi last month by U.S. military special forces and FBI personnel. He was brought across the Atlantic in a Navy ship before being helicoptered into Washington on Saturday morning for an arraignment in federal court on an indictment charging him with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists in connection...

In a 2012 Wired article, entitled, “CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher,” then CIA Director David Petraeus heralded emerging technologies in relation to spying.