Free Republic

Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan is coming to Washington, DC, on May 16 loaded for bear.  He has an ambitious agenda and apparently feels he can achieve it all because he holds “trump” cards against the President of the United States. Erdogan and his proxies have publicly said they want to convince the United States to jettison its budding alliance with the Syrian Democratic Union (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Kurdish group that has become the tip of the spear in the fight against ISIS in Syria. On this point, they will encounter resistance...

National Review, a once-venerable conservative publication, has officially gone off the rails entirely, publishing an article calling Sen. Jeff Sessions a “prostitute” for endorsing billionaire Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination. That abominable attack on perhaps the most revered conservative in the U.S. Senate ran in a National Review piece arguing that anyone who endorses Trump is a “rat” that is “scurrying” and is also a “sellout.”

On Tuesday The Guardian ran an exclusive claiming that “Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign.” According to The Guardian, Manafort met with the WikiLeaks’ founder at the embassy three times—in 2013, 2015, and in spring 2016. While acknowledging that the purpose of the claimed meeting is unknown, The Guardian implies Manafort’s supposed March 2016 secret rendezvous concerned WikiLeaks’ role in releasing the hacked Democratic National Committee emails. “The revelation could shed new light on the sequence of events...

In the shifting narratives of the Trump-Russia probe, a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud has remained a linchpin regarding claims of collusion. He is the professor who allegedly told Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians had emails related to the Clinton campaign. The FBI says it opened its investigation in late July 2016 after Papadopoulos relayed that information to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, and the Australians tipped off U.S. authorities. While some news accounts describe Mifsud as an accomplice to Russian clandestine operations or a “cut-out” (intermediary), others contend he is a full-fledged Russian spy. In an official...

Did Joseph Mifsud use George Papadopoulos as a pawn to set up Donald Trump? Did he feed Papadopoulos information about Russia to see how the Trump campaign responded? What if Donald Trump is wrong? What if the Russia collusion investigation isn’t a witch hunt? What if it was a set-up—from the get-go? That’s one—maybe the most—logical conclusion to reach after gathering the crumbs dropped over the previous two years in light of the Washington Post’s story last week confirming the existence of a “top-secret intelligence source” involved in the 2016 presidential election.

On or about Tuesday, 1 March 2016, CIA Director John Brennan flew to Moscow. He went to the offices of the Russian equivalent to the CIA, the Federal Security Service (FSB)—successor to the KGB—and he went “somewhere else” (yes, that’s exactly what Russia’s foreign ministry said about it). He did not to go to the foreign ministry. ... At almost the exact same time, in “late February or early March,” a world-class nobody living in London named George Papadopoulos somehow got his resumé pumped full of hot fluff by somehow becoming listed as a member of the London Centre of...

CIA officials, including the upper echelons, are required to be apolitical.  The main purpose of the CIA is to gather intelligence on America’s enemies and guarantee the safety and security of the citizens of this country. The administration of CIA chief John Brennan came nowhere near meeting this standard. Brennan used the CIA to lies for political ideological goals. This has been shown earlier when Brennan used the CIA to conduct illegal surveillance of the Senate Intelligence Committee and then lied about it. This the same investigations that Brennan lied to Senator Feinstein about, and Brennan later apologized to the...

The FBI warned the Clinton campaign that it was a target of a cyberattack last March, just weeks before the Democratic National Committee discovered it had been penetrated by hackers it now believes were working for Russian intelligence, two sources who have been briefed on the matter told Yahoo News. One of the sources said agents conducting a national security investigation asked the Clinton campaign to turn over internal computer logs as well as the personal email addresses of senior campaign officials. But the campaign, through its lawyers, declined to provide the data, deciding that the FBI’s request for sensitive...

Leaker, liar and ranking member of the House Intel Committee, Adam Schiff (D-CA) has some explaining to do. Carter Page says his interview with the FBI in March of 2016, before the Russia dossier was compiled, had nothing to do with Russian collusion or the Trump campaign, rather he was questioned about events that transpired in 2013 in a case where he was a witness in support of the FBI, reports Paul Sperry.

Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid  refuses to say why for months he has blocked a bipartisan bill designed to ensure inspectors general access all of the official documents they need to fight waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. Three months ago, the Nevada senator blocked an attempt to pass Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s IG Empowerment Act with unanimous consent, which would make it crystal clear that the 1978 Inspector General Act gives presidentially appointed IGs authority to access all agency records for investigations and audits. Reid still refuses to change his position or explain his objections....

A government watchdog who played a central role in the Hillary Clinton email investigation during the Obama administration told Fox News that he, his family and his staffers faced an intense backlash at the time from Clinton allies – and that the campaign even put out word that it planned to fire him if the Democratic presidential nominee won the 2016 election.

According to the venerable Encyclopædia Britannica, the word cabal is defined as a private organization or party engaged in secret intrigues. In the wake of Donald Trump's near clean sweep of the March 8 GOP primaries and caucus, the anti-Trump secret meeting recently held in Georgia certainly fits the definition. In what may be the most curious presidential race in the history of the United States, Anusha Asif of Tech News Today reports on Mar. 8, 2016, many of the Congressional leadership of the Republican Party have met on March 7 with a who's who of liberal billionaires behind closed...

"Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute's annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering. The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump. Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended. So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory...

Revelations that an FBI informant insinuated himself into the Trump campaign have led some congressional investigators to rethink their theories on how and why former President Barack Obama's Justice Department began investigating the 2016 Trump presidential effort. Most reporting has focused on the July 31, 2016, creation of a document formally marking the beginning of the FBI counterintelligence probe targeting the Trump campaign. The document, known as the electronic communication, or EC, is said to have focused on the case of George Papadopoulos, the peripheral Trump adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller about his...

The origin of the Obama administration’s investigation of imaginary Trump-Russia collusion remains murky, but this much is clear: John Brennan, Obama’s Trump-hating CIA director, stands at the center of it. Brennan pushed for a multi-agency investigation of the Trump campaign, using as his pretext alleged intelligence from an unnamed Baltic state. That “intelligence” was supplied at the very moment Baltic officials had their own political motivation to smear Trump. “Last April, the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was – allegedly – a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US...

The gathering winds for Crossfire Hurricane, after all, came largely from that blowhard. Panicking at the sight of Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday wins in March 2016, Brennan had by the following month formed the beginnings of a spying operation against him, and managed to enmesh a bunch of other agencies in it, thinking that would keep the outside of the CIA’s cup clean. How do we know this? Because a “senior” member of the intelligence community — back when such a figure thought talking out of school about such matters would serve the cause of delegitimizing Trump — leaked the...

George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted by three individuals with ties to British and/or U.S. Intelligence. Joseph Mifsud Alexander Downer Stefan Halper George Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud reportedly both worked at the London Centre of International Law Practice. Joseph Mifsud appears to have joined LCILP around November 2015. Papadopoulos appears to have joined LCILP sometime in late February or early March 2016 after leaving Ben Carson’s campaign. Per reports, Papadopoulos and Mifsud first met on March 14, 2016. The London Centre of International Law and Practice Limited (LCILP) is an odd institution. From their website: LCILP training emphasises the...

Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week. Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's team and one of the company's executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region. "Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool ... that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from," Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company's "Google Ideas" division, wrote in a July 2012...

A former Minneapolis FBI agent has been charged after allegedly leaking secret documents to a national news reporter, according to federal criminal charges filed in Minnesota this week. The charges, filed by prosecutors for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, are the first to come in Minnesota since Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a broad crackdown on government leaks last year. A two-page felony information, a charging document that typically signals an imminent guilty plea, outlines two counts filed against Terry J. Albury of unlawfully disclosing and retaining national defense information. Albury is accused of sharing a document on assessing...

In 2013 Carter Page was working as an under-cover employee (UCE) of the FBI, helping them to build a case against “Evgeny Buryakov”. In March 2016 Carter Page remained their informant pre-trial. [Note – Pay attention to the names in the following citations]