Free Republic

WASHINGTON — A Trump supporter who stormed the Capitol wearing a “Make Space Great Again” hat had two guns and 400 rounds of ammunition in his van when he was arrested Thursday near former President Barack Obama’s home, federal authorities said Friday. A federal prosecutor said in court Friday that Taylor Taranto, a 37-year-old man first identified by online sleuths in August 2021, also had a machete in the van he appeared to be living in. Taranto's van has been parked near the D.C. jail in recent weeks and he has appeared at protests in support of other Jan. 6...

On April 30, 2004 Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s book “The Politics of Truth” will be released. Wilson has been an opponent to the Iraq war, having proposed instead continued UN sanctions and inspections in a “containment” strategy. But his fame first derives from his well-known July 6, 2003 New York Times editorial piece “What I Didn’t Find in Africa”. Second, from the media exposure of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA employee connected to studying proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In media reports Wilson is usually introduced as the person who disproved President Bush’s State of the Union speech...

“House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) was the target of opposition research hits that a local newspaper, owned by a broader national chain, dutifully reprinted on behalf of Fusion GPS without disclosing to its readers the questionable source of the information.”

A Democratic effort is underway in at least 16 states to overturn restrictions on mail-in balloting and third-party ballot harvesting. A nationwide effort by Democrats is underway in at least 16 states to overturn restrictions on mail-in voting and third-party ballot harvesting. States where suits have been filed include the swing states of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The effort is being backed by the National Redistricting Foundation, a Democratic group headed by the Obama administration’s Attorney General Eric Holder. The suits appear to be funded by Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC. A Wall Street Journal headline from April read,...

A partnership Rudy Giuliani forged with a wealthy diamond-trading family from Israel helped his effort to expand his fledgling consulting business in Japan, and generated more than $600,000 in speaking fees for the Republican presidential candidate. The former New York mayor's previously undisclosed relationship with the Sage Capital Growth -- a medium-size private equity firm associated with the diamond-trading Steinmetz family of Israel -- shows how money came his way after he earned international acclaim leading the city through the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It offers a peek at Mr. Giuliani's closely held five-year-old consulting business, New York-based Giuliani...

Nine days after registering his presidential exploratory committee last November, Rudolph Giuliani appeared in Singapore to help a Las Vegas developer make a pitch for a $3.5 billion casino resort. Though the bid ultimately failed, and there was nothing illegal about the involvement, it drew Giuliani into a complex partnership with the family of a controversial Hong Kong billionaire who has ties to the regime of North Korea's Kim Jong Il and has been linked to international organized crime by the U.S. government. ... Giuliani's public involvement in the gaming bid began at a September 2006 news conference in Singapore...

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein reunited with a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer who worked with Fusion GPS and dossier author Christopher Steele to continue investigating the now-debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theory after President Donald Trump took office. **SNIP** Fusion GPS had hired Steele a year earlier on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC to investigate Trump’s possible links to Russia. Democrats paid Fusion GPS more than $1 million for that project. Fusion, which is based in Washington, D.C., paid Steele $170,000. A Washington-based attorney with links to Steele told the Daily Caller News Foundation in 2018 that Jones told him...

The FBI released 34 pages of notes, known as “302s,” of its 2016 and 2017 interviews with Bruce Ohr, the DOJ official who met with the British dossier author Christopher Steele and opposition research firm Fusion GPS’s Glen Simpson. Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, when they were hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Convention. The FBI was sued by the watchdog group Judicial Watch to comply with their requests for access to the notes via Freedom of Information Act. Read the documents below:

A while back, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from the investigation into President Trump's campaign's supposed collusion with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. The grounds for it? Sessions had shaken hands and made small talk with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, meaning, he had a conflict of interest. Sessions, being the honorable naif that he was, obliged. Well, now the shoe is on the other tootsie. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, who's vowed a kitchen-sink style investigation against President Trump, (now that no Russian collusion has been found) has been caught in photographs taken...

Reps. Darrell Issa and Matt Gaetz highlighted discrepancies between DOJ official Bruce Ohr’s Tuesday testimony before Congress and the testimony given by Lisa Page and Glenn Simpson. Ohr appeared before the House oversight and judiciary committee’s to face questions about his role in the FBI investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign. Ohr served as a conduit between salacious dossier author Christopher Steele and the FBI. The DOJ official’s wife also worked for the dossier commissioning firm Fusion GPS while the investigation proceeded. “In the first hour of testimony, and it’s either Bruce Ohr is lying or Glenn Simpson is lying,”...

THINNER GRUEL [Jonah Goldberg] Salon.com has a "defense" of Joe Wilson. For the most part, the piece is a dull, he-said she-said about the controversy so far, generally sympathetic to Wilson, with some sneaky bits hid in the dull prose in order to make them seem more reasonable. For example the author, Mary Jacoby, says "But no sale of uranium ever took place, Wilson reported, and that conclusion is not in dispute." That's true, but Bush never said Iraq purchased the uranium, he merely said Iraq sought it. Wilson said Iraq didn't and that his cryptic sweet-tea swilling conversations proved...

Full title: Rep. Matt Gaetz: Rod Rosenstein Won't Say When He Learned Nellie Ohr Worked For Fusion GPS; "Real Smoking Gun" GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz told FOX News host Jeanine Pirro on Friday that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein refuses to tell investigators when he found out Nellie Ohr was working with Fusion GPS. (snip) REP. MATT GAETZ: I want to make a point about what Gregg just said. Rod Rosenstein won’t tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS. So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues...

Judge orders Fusion GPS to disclose details of its dossier work. The opposition firm has avoided deposition in a dossier-related lawsuit against BuzzFeed. Lawyer for plaintiff says ruling “gave us everything that we had hoped for.” Representatives of Fusion GPS must answer a broad array of questions about the opposition research firm’s role in creating, investigating and disseminating the infamous Steele dossier, a federal judge ruled. U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro issued the decision Tuesday in a defamation lawsuit a Russian tech executive filed against BuzzFeed News, which published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017. The trial is scheduled...

In the wake of the revelation that an FBI informant lured George Papadopoulos to London during the 2016 campaign, the former Trump campaign adviser has grown skeptical of many of his contacts during and after the election, his wife says. Papadopoulos’ contacts with the FBI informant — a former University of Cambridge professor named Stefan Halper — have been widely reported over the past several weeks. The 30-year-old Chicago native’s interactions with Joseph Mifsud and Alexander Downer, two diplomats who are key to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election, are also well known. Simona Mangiante,...

...Isikoff and Corn suggest, without saying so explicitly, that the available circumstantial evidence makes the "golden showers" story very unlikely. Reconstructing Trump's time in Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant, Isikoff and Corn report that Trump stayed just one night in Moscow. (Trump did in fact stay in the Ritz Carlton presidential suite where Obama had been a few years earlier.) After arriving in Moscow, Trump attended a brief meeting at the hotel and then left for a day of meetings elsewhere. That night, an "exhausted" Trump went to a party at which he agreed to take part in...

The Fusion GPS news-for-hire scandal has not only led to the public identification of the source of the “Trump Dossier”—a for-profit company that provides opposition research to whoever could write big checks, which is staffed by four former Wall Street Journal reporters led by Glenn Simpson. The scandal has also lifted the lid off a sewer of corporate information warfare and opposition research that the flailing institutions of the mainstream press now regularly re-package as news, without ever saying where it came from—or who paid for it. While the idea that the products of paid opposition research are being main-lined...

The firm behind the salacious and unsubstantiated Trump dossier is refusing to to cooperate with the Senate Judiciary Committee's request to provide documentation or respond to questions sent from the committee in March about the clients who paid for the dossier that launched the investigation into the administration and its alleged Russian connections. The Republican Chairman of the committee, Senator Charles Grassley, warned Fusion GPS, the firm that compiled the dossier, in March about its obligation "to provide details on the history of the dossier" including the clients who paid for it. The committee also wanted information on Christopher Steele,...