Free Republic

The State Department has informed Congress that it plans to shutter its last two consulates in Russia over caps set by Moscow on the number of diplomats that are allowed in the country. In a letter to congressional leaders sent Dec. 10 and obtained by The Hill, the administration said it will permanently close its Vladivostok consulate and temporarily halt work at the consulate in Yekaterinburg. The letter confirming the closures was sent three days before news broke of a major hack of U.S. government agencies that is believed to have been conducted by an elite Russian cyber espionage unit....

Remember as we wait for the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin 2.0 to drop, Tucker still has that interview he did months ago with Julian Assange inside Belmarsh Prison in his back pocket. For some mysterious reason that isn't yet apparent, Tucker has held back that interview.… Think "Crowdstrike Report on the Russian Hackers Who Supposedly Hacked The DNC Server and Stole The DNC Emails". Roll it around in your brain. Ponder at depth the various angles. About the fake Crowdstrike report. Think, ponder and reflect on these plot points: 1. Russian hackers didn't take the DNC emails 2. Crowdstrike...

Special Counsel John Durham’s final report faults the FBI for opening the Trump-Russia collusion investigation on baseless grounds and relying on Hillary Clinton-funded material to pursue it, all while ignoring a warning that Clinton was plotting to frame Trump as a Russian asset. Yet Durham does not address the Clinton campaign’s equally central tie to Russiagate’s other foundational allegation: that Russia interfered in the 2016 election by hacking Democratic party servers and releasing the material through Wikileaks to help elect Trump. Durham’s silence on the Clinton team’s role in generating this unproven claim comes despite his unearthing of evidence that...

"New Seth Rich documents, fresh off the grill!” attorney Ty Clevenger tweeted Friday night. “FBI filed a new motion about CrowdStrike records. I’ve only given it a cursory review, but we have at least one bombshell.” Clevenger, a self-described, “Ex-cop, ex-journalist, disgruntled lawyer, muckraking blogger (http://LawFlog.com), and cheerful optimist,” was not exaggerating. The revelation that the Democrat-friendly cyber security firm CrowdStrike was the second party in possession of the laptop owned by the murdered DNC data analyst Seth Rich is a bombshell indeed. By way of background, in April 2016, the DNC learned that its computers had been hacked. Reportedly,...

Corporations and utopians are offering authoritarian solutions to crises only democracy and free markets can solve Deloitte is the largest “professional services network” in the world. Headquartered in London, it is also one of the big four global accounting companies, offering audit, consulting, risk advisory, tax and legal services to corporate clients. With a third of a million professionals operating on those fronts worldwide, and as the third-largest privately owned company in the US, Deloitte is a behemoth with numerous and far-reaching tentacles. In short: it is an entity we should all know about, not least because such enterprises no...

Carefully vetting every single piece of user-generated content (UGC) before it’s allowed to be posted to a website is a daunting task. But China is clearly up for the challenge. The country’s so-called Cyberspace Administration has released a new policy that requires all comments on websites to be approved before they’re published. The new rules were outlined in a document published last week entitled: ‘Provisions on the Administration of Internet Thread Commenting Services’. It will mean any company or individual that runs a website where people can post comments will need to hire ‘a review and editing team suitable for...

Today in the Michael Sussmann trial, we received additional information regarding the FBI leadership’s involvement in the opening – and execution – of the Alfa Bank/Trump investigation. This included FBI Headquarters not approving an FBI agent’s repeated requests to interview the sources of the Alfa Bank “materials.” But first we’ll start with the examination of Trisha Anderson. Anderson is currently the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. Back in 2016, she was an FBI deputy general counsel and reported directly to then-FBI general counsel James Baker. The purpose of her testimony was to prove-up her notes...

Documents obtained by The Federalist raise concerns about the validity of CrowdStrike’s analysis of the DNC hack. The Georgia Tech cyber security experts ensnared in the Alfa Bank hoax conducted a retrospective analysis of the Democratic National Committee hack, according to the Department of Defense. While the results of that analysis have yet to be made public, internal documents obtained by The Federalist reveal that Georgia Tech’s computer scientists believed CrowdStrike’s approach to investigating computer intrusions relied on the use of easily “spoofed/impersonated” signals of traffic. In June 2016, about one month before WikiLeaks released a trove of internal communiques...

My late Friday night involved hitting refresh on PACER every so often, incurring the $0.10 charge for each search result as I waited on Special Counsel John Durham’s latest filing in the Michael Sussmann case. (Exciting, I know.) The motion exceeded expectations, discussing CIA conclusions that Sussmann was providing implausible data to federal authorities, providing CIA notes regarding their meeting with Sussmann, and confirmation that they essentially spied on President-Elect Trump. The motion can be found here. It was filed as part of the government’s efforts to convince the court that the evidence it seeks to admit in Sussmann’s trial...

Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta was interviewed by none other than Special Counsel John Durham! A new batch of court filings that were brought to the public’s attention by Technofrog reveals Special Counsel John Durham interviewed Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta along with several other members of the Clinton campaign. Podesta claims to have no part in the Clinton Russian Collusion case but Durham believes otherwise hence why Podesta was interviewed. As of now the content of the interview have yet to be released but that could change as the investigation continues to thicken. ~~~~~~~ https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog/status/1511888439444185094? New filing...

Today, Special Counsel John Durham provided a “discovery Update” to the court in the Michael Sussmann case. In this filing, available here, he disclosed that his team has obtained a tremendous amount of information ranging from a variety of sources – including Perkins Coie, the Hillary Clinton Campaign, and former DNC/Clinton lawyer Mark Elias.While Sussmann has been charged with giving false statements to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker regarding the Alfa Bank/Trump Organization hoax (background here), Durham notes that the “Government also maintains an active, ongoing criminal investigation of” Sussmann’s conduct. In other words, Sussmann’s criminal conduct likely is not...

Former FBI General Counsel James Baker will likely be called to testify in the case against former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann, who is charged with lying to advance the bureau’s Trump-Russia collusion probe.... ...Andrew deFilippis, an assistant counsel for Special Counsel John Durham, said during a virtual status conference Tuesday that they are planning to call Mr. Baker as a witness during the trial which could begin next spring, The Washington Examiner reported....

Evidence grows that the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC server in 2016 was an inside job. This is the fifth in a series of articles analyzing the 27 page federal grand jury indictment charging lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a false statement to the FBI. As stated in the fourth article, when the FBI learned of the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee’s (“DNC”) emails, it asked to examine the server. In fact, at the same time as the alleged DNC hack, there were similar reports regarding the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (“DCCC”) server as well as DNC...

Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 presidential election was largely predicated on Russian intelligence having hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers. Russia’s guilt is such an article of faith among our political class, that a Republican-controlled Congress imposed sanctions and President Trump signed on, substantially worsening relations with an important and potentially dangerous nation. Since those sanctions were imposed, Mueller has issued a report confirming the Russian espionage they were enacted to punish, which the Washington establishment has treated like a sacred document Outside the Acela Corridor, however, one finds more skepticism. A lot of ordinary folks just can’t stop...

In his controversial new book on the 2020 election, Battle For The Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump. Edward-Isaac Dovere repeats a canard that has become something of a staple of Democratic mythology. According to Dovere, in November 2020, then-president Barack Obama had a hard time making sense out of Hillary Clinton's loss "to a man he thought of as a moronic carnival barker." Dovere traced Obama's grudge against Donald Trump to the birth certificate issue. Obama, writes Dovere, "would never forgive [Trump] for turning a fringe obsession with his birth certificate into an issue he'd had...

"This release includes bug fixes, increased stability and performance improvements." The routine software update may be one of the most familiar and least understood parts of our digital lives. A pop-up window announces its arrival and all that is required of us is to plug everything in before bed. The next morning, rather like the shoemaker and the elves, our software is magically transformed. Last spring, a Texas-based company called SolarWinds made one such software update available to its customers. It was supposed to provide the regular fare — bug fixes, performance enhancements — to the company's popular network management...

The House Intelligence Committee's Kash Patel said senior intelligence officials 'continuously impeded' their release – usually by slow-walking their reviews of the material.After four years of railing against “deep state” actors who, he said, tried to undermine his presidency, Donald Trump relented to U.S. intelligence leaders in his final days in office, allowing them to block the release of critical material in the Russia investigation, according to a former senior congressional investigator who later joined the Trump administration.Kash Patel, whose work on the House Intelligence Committee helped unearth U.S. intelligence malpractice during the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe, said he does...

The group behind the suspected Russian attack into U.S. government agencies and private companies was able to hack into Microsoft's internal systems and access some of the company's source code, the tech giant said in a blog post on Thursday. Microsoft had previously said it was among thousands of companies that discovered malware on its systems after downloading a routine software update from the company SolarWinds containing a possible "backdoor" for hackers to gain access to sensitive company data. But the admission on Thursday is the first time Microsoft acknowledged that the attackers had successfully broken into the company's systems...

President Trump offered Julian Assange a deal if he were to disclose his source of the DNC emails released before the 2016 election. ..... Snip..... Today it was reported in a British Court that the President of the US attempted to get this information from Assange. The Daily Mail reports:

Clinesmith was officially working for Mueller, not McCabe or Comey when he forged that document to spy on Carter Page. And Muller's job was always covering up the fake Russian hack of the DNC and frame-up of Julian Assange as a Russian asset.