Free Republic

In the last couple of days, I’ve written about how FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted that his agency concluded “quite some time ago” that the COVID virus escaped from a Wuhan, China virology lab, and how “sources” recently told the Washington Post that FBI agents were against the August 2022 raid on former President’s Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. What’s the commonality between the two stories? They both make the FBI look better, and they both indicate that Wray might be playing a game of CYA and distancing himself from the dictatorial, partisan Attorney General, Merrick Garland.

The court-ordered release of a trove of government photos, videos, maps and other documents involving the FBI’s secretive search for Civil War-era gold has a treasure hunter more convinced than ever of a coverup — and just as determined to prove it. Dennis Parada waged a legal battle to force the FBI to turn over records of its excavation in Dents Run, Pennsylvania, where local lore says an 1863 shipment of Union gold disappeared on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. The FBI, which went to Dents Run after sophisticated testing suggested tons of gold might be buried...

Slain DHS whistleblower declared a criminal and remains under investigation by Customs and Border Protection for “contraband” and possible U.S. Code violations. Tuesday February 21 marks three years since Philip Haney was “found deceased” in Amador County, California, killed by a gunshot to the chest. The victim, 66, was not the typical Sierra foothills resident. A UC Riverside alum, Philip Haney once worked as an agricultural entomologist in the Middle East, where he studied Arabic and the Quran. With that background, Haney seemed a good fit for the Department of Homeland Security, but it didn’t turn out that way. Philip...

A recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst told Congress in a whistleblower disclosure that agents in Boston were improperly pressured by Washington to open criminal cases on 140 people who had simply taken a bus ride to the Jan. 6 rally in Washington. The agents refused because there was no evidence the attendees engaged in any criminality, the whistleblower said. George Hill's testimony to the House Judiciary Committee also raised new civil liberty concerns about the FBI's Jan. 6 probe, including whether the Bureau mined Americans' bank records without court authority and whether the agency possesses video footage it is...

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) is turning up the heat on 51 U.S. intelligence veterans who signed a letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop story could be part of a Russian disinformation operation. Jordan and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael Turner (R-OH) signed letters sent Monday to 12 of these ex-intelligence officials, including former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Yet none of those officials has admitted that they were the ones spreading disinformation, for the purpose of electing Joe Biden

Special Counsel John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the “Trump-Russia collusion” investigation significant. The piece, by Kevin R. Brock, a former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, notes that for a year and a half, the country did not hear much of out Durham after he was appointed late in former President Trump’s term. Aside from indictments regarding “peripheral” figures, it looked to many of Trump’s supporters as though not much was going to come of Durham’s probe and “that elites higher up the stack are going to get away with their chicanery,” Brock wrote. “The problem...

The FBI will search Mike Pence’s Indiana home for classified documents, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Justice Department is in talks with Mike Pence’s lawyers to conduct the search. Last Tuesday it was reported that a “small number of documents bearing classified markings” were discovered at former Vice President Mike Pence’s Carmel, Indiana home. According to CNN, Mike Pence had one of his lawyers search his residence for classified materials “out of an abundance of caution.” "Vice President Pence was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence,” Pence’s rep. Greg Jacob wrote. “Vice...

Today, the heroes are few and outnumbered as the FBI has become the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party, which is the party of government. Who knew, only a few short years ago, that staring in our faces in 2023 would be the crisis posed by the title of this essential guide to the politics of our times: The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy, by former 33-year veteran FBI Agent Thomas Baker? Having followed his insightful columns on the FBI in the Wall Street Journal, I was excited to read Baker’s...

The GOP House can stop the project and rein in a runaway bureau. The federal government is proceeding with plans to build a new FBI headquarters complex twice the size of the Pentagon building. Riveted into the colossal new project are woke regulations to ensure that the FBI center will comply with diversity, equity, LGBTQ+, and climate change political goals. The plan, unveiled last September, has received little attention. For years the FBI has sought to vacate its present headquarters, a brutalist concrete bunker on stilts and occupying two city blocks between the White House and the Capitol. Plans for...

If this is how the FBI moves with dispatch, it is chilling to think of the schedule for lower-priority matters. The FBI waited to conduct their search until both counsel and the president went to the house. They will now see if they can find anything. The search of the president's small Delaware beach house is also telling in that it sits roughly 80 miles from a massive trove of Biden documents that neither counsel nor the FBI has shown much interest in. The University of Delaware is currently holding a colossal collection of Biden documents from the time before...

Questionably elected Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a former lawyer for Mexican drug cartels, sent out a new letter on Monday, asking questionably elected Attorney General Kris Mayes to “investigate and take appropriate enforcement action against Kari Lake” for sounding the alarm about the stolen 2022 Election. This comes just TWO DAYS before Kari Lake’s Arizona Court of Appeals is set to hold a February 1 conference in Kari Lake’s lawsuit contesting the stolen Midterm Election. They are terrified and will stop at nothing to cover up the truth.

It’s a story as old as time. Something bad happens and completely unexpectedly, it turns out the FBI was involved. Sure enough, despite years of the left dismissing the possibility as a conspiracy theory, a new legal filing serves as an admittance that the FBI was very much involved in the events of January 6th. Ironically, we are finding that out because the government is once again trying to cover up exactly what happened. Regarding the case of Proud Boy Ethan Nordean, federal prosecutors are asking a judge to limit defense questions on the matter. ... JUST IN: Proud Boy...

The website Just Security, author former CIA operative Douglas Johnson, is very concerned about the House Subcommittee on Federal Government Weaponization. [SEE ARTICLE HERE} The concern is clouded under the auspices of fearing politicization by questioning the intelligence community about weaponized government. The article is a mainstream bureaucratic outlook where the professional intelligence apparatus views themselves as beyond being accountable to the elected public officials, specifically the House members of the committee. The permanent unelected officials have a self-perception above the reach of the elected officials. In essence, there is no public accountability model within their view of their operation....

There is A LOT going on inside this story, and the pair of indictments only scratch the surface.[WaPo – New York Times – ABC News]According to the DOJ, “A former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI New York Counterintelligence Division [Charles F. McGonigal, 54, of New York City] and a former Soviet and Russian diplomat [Sergey Shestakov, 69, of Morris, Connecticut] were arrested Saturday on criminal charges related to their alleged violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering.Interestingly, there are two sets of indictments. The...

Tucker Carlson made some explosive assertions Friday, suggesting that the CIA and the FBI brought down Richard Nixon because he was on to their efforts to undermine the American system as the Founding Fathers had intended it to run and knew that the CIA was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Carlson’s segment quickly became wildly controversial, but is it true? We may never know for sure — and that in itself demonstrates yet again the need to demand and enforce complete transparency and accountability from these agencies that all too easily can go rogue.Carlson said: “Richard Nixon...

Charles McGonigal, who had been the special agent in charge of the FBI‘s counterintelligence division in New York, is accused of taking secret payments from Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska in exchange for investigating a rival oligarch, according to court documents. Mr. McGonigal, 54, is one of the highest-ranking FBI officials ever charged with a crime. He faces one count of violating U.S. sanctions, one count of money laundering and two conspiracy counts.

A former top FBI counterintelligence agent based in New York who investigated the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia in 2016 is accused of illegally working for — a Russian!Charles McGonigal was charged with money laundering and violating US sanctions law by working for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the Justice Department said Monday. McGonigal, who led the bureau’s NYC counterintelligence division between 2016 and his retirement in 2018, was arrested Saturday evening at JFK Airport. He pleaded not guilty to four counts in Manhattan federal court Monday and was released on $500,000 bond. Sergey Shestakov, a court interpreter who also...

Charles McGonigal, a retired counterintelligence investigator from the FBI’s New York Field Office, was just arrested because he allegedly took substantial sums of money from Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, to get the latter off a U.S. sanctions list. Where this goes beyond the ordinary corruption that periodically crops up among people with too much power, too few morals, and too little accountability is that McGonigal was one of the people investigating Trump over the Russia Hoax, while Deripaska employed Christopher Steele, whose false dossier seeded the Russia Hoax. Anyone who paid attention during the “hot” years of the Russia...

here’s a massive amount of irony in the news today, and it starts here: ABC News @ABC · Follow BREAKING: A former top FBI official in New York has been arrested over his ties to a Russian oligarch, law enforcement sources tell @ABC News.