Free Republic

Here come the hyper-partisan hounds. A new nonprofit called American Oversight launched this week to combat President Trump's "culture of impunity." The outfit declared itself "nonpartisan" and claims its crusaders will fight for a "transparent and ethical government." But like Waylon Jennings once crooned, "Baby, that dog won't hunt." These Democrat operatives aren't interested in accountability. Their mission is to attack, obstruct and destroy their political opponents at all costs. Executive Director and Obama donor Austin Evers is certainly familiar with the "culture of impunity." He worked as a lawyer at Williams and Connolly -- the firm representing Hillary Clinton...

Roger Stone's lawyer on Friday clashed with a key witness in the longtime Trump adviser's trial over charges of lying to Congress. During a heated cross-examination, Stone's lawyer questioned the credibility of radio host and political activist Randy Credico, with the judge at numerous times intervening. Stone is accused of lying to lawmakers about his claims of having an intermediary with WikiLeaks as the organization was preparing to release stolen emails from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. He told the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 that Credico was his back channel to WikiLeaks. Credico has denied having...

“Dopey” Prince Alaweed Was Warned — Now He Sits In Prison In December 2015 Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal slammed Donald Trump for proposing a ban on Muslim immigrants in the US after the San Bernardino attacks. Donald Trump hit the “dopey prince” back twice as hard. "Detained members of Saudi elite have been hung by their feet and beaten by interrogates, source says. Among those hung upside down are Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, an investor worth at least $7 billion who is being held at Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton. Saudi princes and billionaire businessmen arrested in a power grab earlier...

Al Qaeda Recruiter Reportedly Tortured (Ex-Inmate in Syria Cites Others' Accounts) CASABLANCA, Morocco -- In January 2002, Driss bin Lakoul, a 38-year-old Moroccan committed to jihad, was arrested in Syria after unsuccessfully attempting to reach Afghanistan, where he wanted to fight against U.S. forces. For three months, the soft-spoken, bearded man with glasses recounted in an interview here, he was held in Damascus at the Far' Falastin detention center run by Syrian military intelligence. In the prison, inmates spoke of a German citizen held in the rat-infested basement, a warren of lightless cells each barely three feet long, three feet...

SAN DIEGO — Marines from Camp Pendleton wantonly killed unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover up the slayings in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha, military investigations have found. Officials who have seen the findings of the investigations said the filing of criminal charges, including some murder counts, was expected, which would make the Nov. 19 incident the most serious case of alleged U.S. war crimes in Iraq. An administrative inquiry overseen by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell found that several infantry Marines fatally shot as many as 24 Iraqis and that other Marines either...

The general leading the force to free the captive enemy from the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, and inflict a humiliating defeat on the United States is so-called “civil rights” and “Constitutional” attorney Michael Ratner. It was Ratner who led the way in recruiting elite lawyers to defend the enemy combatants being interrogated at Gitmo. But Ratner is a long-time leader of two pro-Communist and anti-American organizations who have for decades lent aid and comfort to America's enemies in the Cold War and beyond. Michael Ratner began his legal career in the late 1960s at the National Lawyers Guild,...

A medic testifying in the trial of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher – who is accused of killing an injured ISIS prisoner of war in Iraq – has shockingly testified Thursday that he is the one who killed the militant, not Gallagher. The medic told a court at Naval Base San Diego that he killed the fighter by asphyxiation. He also testified that Gallagher stabbed the fighter, but did not kill him. Gallagher, 40, has pleaded not guilty to premeditated murder and aggravated assault charges stemming from the alleged killing of a wounded ISIS fighter and alleged instances of firing sniper...

Here’s the left’s next great idea for bringing down President Trump: another women’s march. Which means another public instance of Trump haters shouting slogans to one another and mistaking it for constructive politics. What progressives need to defeat Trump is outreach, but all they have is outrage. On March 8, organizers seem to be aiming for a different vibe than the librarians-in-pussy-hats element that made the first women’s march after Trump’s inauguration so adorable. Instead of milling around Washington, organizers have in mind a “general strike” called the Day without a Woman. In a manifesto published in The Guardian on...

Michael D’Andrea goes by many names. To those in the CIA, he’s the Undertaker, the Dark Prince, Ayatollah Mike. To Hollywood, he’s the Wolf, immortalized in Zero Dark Thirty, a film about the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. To the general public, he is nobody, as he is still undercover, a man who has spent 38 years toiling at the CIA, his dutiful service resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people. He is stubbled and gaunt, with a preference for dark suits, his colleagues say, and he has a bad smoking habit and a bad attitude. {..snip..}

NSA whistleblower Russel Tice – a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping – told Peter B. Collins on Boiling Frogs Post (the website of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds): Tice: Okay. They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial. But they went...

The United States will revoke or deny visas to International Criminal Court personnel seeking to investigate alleged war crimes and other abuses committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan or elsewhere, and may do the same with those who seek action against Israel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday. Pompeo,“If you are responsible for the proposed ICC investigation of U.S. personnel in connection with the situation in Afghanistan, you should not assume that you still have or will get a visa or will be permitted to enter the United States,”

A former CIA officer who was imprisoned for leaking classified information to journalists said he was initially was cleared of charges until Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan got involved. John Kiriakou said he had "no idea" he was under investigation in 2007 for sharing details of terrorists' interrogations to journalists. Kiriakou said his story should be relevant to President Donald Trump, who is dealing with the same officials in his Russia probe as Kiriakou did. "In 2007, the Bush administration investigated me and determined I hadn't committed a crime," he said. However, Kiriakou said that once President Obama took power...

Soon after speaking to President Trump about the firing of his boss James Comey, Andrew McCabe, who became the bureau's acting director, began obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigations involving the president and his ties to Russia. In his first television interview since his own firing, McCabe tells 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley he wanted those inquiries to be documented and underway so they would be difficult to quash without raising scrutiny. "I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion," McCabe tells Pelley in the interview. "That were...

Panetta orders internal probe of secret spy program after some members of Congress say CIA misled them. ### CIA Director Leon Panetta has ordered an internal inquiry into the agency's handling of a contentious and still highly classified intelligence program that has caused a heated dispute between the CIA and Democrats on the House intelligence committee. The move by Panetta appears to be an implicit acknowledgment by the agency that it should have disclosed information about the post-9/11 secret program to Congress much earlier than it did. *snip* CIA and congressional officials have refused to describe the nature of the...

The Daily Beast reports that Judge Beryl Howell is the jurist who signed off on Robert Mueller’s request to convene a Washington, D.C. grand jury for the Russia investigation. It also says that, going forward, Howell “will be the umpire-in-chief: deciding whether or not Trump allies’ lawyers can quash subpoenas, and whether or not people like Jared Kushner can invoke what’s known as executive privilege to get out of testifying under oath before Mueller’s grand jury.” Howell won’t have the final say. Her rulings will be subject to appeal and, to the extent they deal with matters like executive privilege,...

Senior Justice Department officials announced late Thursday criminal charges against Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-time director of security James Wolfe. The indictment charges Wolfe with making false statements to the FBI and details how Wolfe passed classified information, including presumably information related to one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page, to a series of media outlets, confirming long-standing suspicions of the career intelligence community’s complicity in leaks. The three-count indictment charges Wolfe with separate instances of making false statements to the FBI, not directly charging him for leaking classified information, but appearing to detail how he did allegedly leaked classified information to...

Special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly investigating Dick Cheney's former top national security aide, according to the Daily Beast. John Hannah, who worked on Trump's State Department transition team, has not been accused of any wrongdoing at this point, but he is affiliated with two men who are already being questioned by Mueller.

Here is video of Fox News' Megyn Kelly telling Democrat Rep. Jerrold Nadler, "Let me educate you," about the facts regarding the supposed CIA "torture" interrogations. Kelly was talking with Nadler about former Vice-President Dick Cheney's criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama for going forward with investigations of Bush-era CIA operatives who interrogated terrorist suspects. Kelly was "educating" Nadler about the idea that CIA agents should be subjected to investigation when they were following legal advice at the time. She also educated him that Career Prosecutors at the Department of Justice looked into this five years ago...

A Case Study In Distortion...Or Justified Criticism? Taking Issue With Media Monitor In a recent Media Monitor column("Dems Throw Stones From Glass Houses," May 31), Senior Editor Jason Maoz cited a handful of my votes on defense and intelligence over the last ten years to suggest that I have never much cared for supporting our nation`s military or intelligence agencies. The column was a case study in how one can selectively pull certain votes to distort the voting record of a Member of Congress. Another writer could have just as easily made the case that I was an irresponsible "hawk"...

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) will hold a hearing Friday to examine a report that allowed two Bush administration officials to escape any formal punishment regarding their role in drafting the legal justification for the harsh interrogations of detainees. Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two former high-level Bush administration officials who drafted the legal basis for the Bush administration’s treatment of overseas terror suspects, escaped any formal punishment in a long-awaited Justice Department report released Friday evening. Leahy also called on federal appeals court judge Bybee to step down from the lifetime appointment over his role in the...