Free Republic

Even though the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records has ended, calls and emails are still being swept up by U.S. surveillance work targeting foreigners. Congress is making a renewed push to find out how many. Six Republicans and eight Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have asked the nation’s top intelligence official for the number of Americans’ emails and phone calls collected under programs authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. […] Intelligence officials have tried to assuage concerns of Congress and others by saying that any domestic communications collected are “incidental” to the targeting of...

"The Abedin emails include a mid-August 2009, email exchange in which Band urges Abedin to follow up on a request from Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy to set up a meeting with then-Ambassador to Panama Barbara Stephenson on behalf of lobbyist Amb. Otto Reich, President Reagan’s ambassador to Venezuela who maintained high-level government positions during the tenure of both President George H.W. Bush and President George Bush. In early September, Ruddy then was contacted by State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Roberta S. Jacobson, at the behest of Band and Abedin, in reference to Ruddy’s...

The FBI is investigating an attempted overseas cyberattack against the Trump Organization, summoning President Donald Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, for an emergency session with the bureau’s cybersecurity agents and representatives of the CIA, officials tell ABC News. Law enforcement officials who spoke to ABC News on the condition of anonymity confirmed the attempted hack and said the subsequent meeting took place at the FBI’s New York headquarters on May 8, the day before Trump fired FBI director James Comey. Spokesmen for the FBI, CIA and Secret Service all declined to comment. Reached by phone, Eric Trump, an executive...

We hope Sens. Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand are giving that devastating new profile of resident Obama’s foreign-policy guru a careful read. Because they’ll learn how they were all played for fools on the Iran nuclear deal by that aide, Ben Rhodes — and the resident. That applies especially to Schumer, who will be the Senate Democratic leader come January. Booker and Gillibrand hewed to the party line in backing the deal. Schumer gave it a thumb’s-down — but then refused to lobby his colleagues to take his side. Sen. Bob Menendez, on the other hand, is looking...

The State Department acknowledged Wednesday that someone in its public affairs bureau made a “deliberate” request that several minutes of tape be cut from the video of a 2013 press briefing in which a reporter asked if the administration had lied about secret talks with Iran. The embarrassing admission by State Department spokesman John Kirby came three weeks after another spokesperson insisted that a “glitch” had caused the gap, discovered only last month by the reporter whose questioning had mysteriously disappeared. “This wasn’t a technical glitch, this was a deliberate step to excise the video,” Kirby told reporters. Kirby said...

It reads like a cast of characters for a detective film noir: powerful politicians, shady businessmen, high-ranking law officers and an idealistic, persistent prosecutor. The plot includes allegations of corruption, cover-ups and the naked exercise of power. Let's title this movie "Rogue Runner" — only this story is not fiction. It's the code name Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings has given the sprawling probe he has spun off from the investigation that ensnared former Utah Attorneys General Mark Shurtleff and John Swallow. And now, in a dramatic twist, Rawlings wants a state grand jury this summer to hear the evidence...

I just discovered more PROOF verifying statements made on Project Veritas Rigging the Election by James O'Keefe cross referenced with a WIKILEAK (sources proved) Spread This Please! Rigging the Election Part I 10:59-11:04 Zulema Rodriguez says "I just had a call with the campaign and the DNC. Everyday at one o'clock." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5IuJGHuIkzY "...Everyday at o'clock." Wikileaks email id 12012 RE: Reminder -- Trump Rapid Response/Bracketing Call -- Today - Tues - May17 - 1PM Eastern ( Thread was started by Bob Creamer and look at the others copied on it) https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/12012

From: Gloria Allred [mailto:GAllred@amglaw.com] Sent: Monday, May 16, 2016 11:25 AM To: Vaughn, Jordan Subject: RE: Blast Language - Approval Needed Please delete the word "fellow". Also, his position on equal pay is unclear. I think you should delete that. Is there anything you can substitute for that, e.g. demeaning treatment of women in the work place or sexual harassment in the work place?

Here’s one outcome of the Turkish coup attempt that you can bet on: Washington lobbyists will be getting rich off it. The Podesta Group, a firm with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, registered in May to lobby for the “Alliance for Shared Values.” That comically named organization supports Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based imam that the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, blames, rightly or wrongly, for the coup.

Less than a week before Omar Mateen walked into an Orlando gay club and killed or wounded more than 100 people, the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) submitted its Countering Violent Extremism report to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson. The report instructs the DHS not to use any language that might be “disrespectful” to Muslims, including (but not limited to) the words “jihad,” “sharia” and “takfir.” The report was crafted by an HSAC subcommittee that Secretary Johnson created in November 2015. The head of that subcommittee, Farah Pandith, was appointed by Johnson in May 2015. The subcommittee...

NASA has revealed that a massive hole, measuring more than ten per cent of the Sun's surface area, has opened up on our star. ... NASA says the huge hole is actually not of great concern, but it remains unclear why the coronal holes actually form. ..

Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, is asking a federal judge to order a conservative group not to release audio or video recordings of a deposition Mills is scheduled to give Friday about Clinton's use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. Mills' attorneys filed a motion Wednesday afternoon saying they fear that the group that sought Mills' deposition in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Judicial Watch, will use any recording to distort Mills' testimony and advance the group's anti-Clinton agenda.

The mediasphere is boiling after the New York Times ran a piece on Ben Rhodes, Obama's foreign policy guru, a failed writer who openly boasted about manipulating the media. It was full of quotes like this... Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we...

A conservative legal advocacy group submitted plans Tuesday to question under oath seven current and former top State Department officials and aides to Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton — but not Clinton herself at this point — about her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. Judicial Watch said its deposition plan includes Cheryl D. Mills, who was Clinton’s chief of staff at State; Huma Abedin, a top aide who served as Mills’s deputy and who now is vice chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign; and Bryan Pagliano, a Clinton staff member during her 2008 presidential...

The outlook for the global economy next year is darkening, with a U.S. recession and China becoming the first major emerging market to slash interest rates to zero both potential scenarios, according to Citi. As the U.S. economy enters its seventh year of expansion following the 2008-09 crisis, the probability of recession will reach 65 percent, Citi's rates strategists wrote in their 2016 outlook published late on Tuesday. A rapid flattening of the bond yield curve towards inversion would be an key warning sign.