Free Republic

Meet Brian Auten. The FBI analyst is hardly a household name, but whistleblowers who contacted the office of GOP senator Chuck Grassley say he was behind an August 2020 report that FBI officials used as part of a "scheme…to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation." Auten’s report also caused the FBI "to cease" investigative activity into the younger Biden, according to a letter Grassley sent the Justice Department and FBI. The whistleblower allegations are the latest evidence of politicization at the FBI. Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the allegations,...

Special counsel John Durham requested a federal court to issue 30 subpoenas for testimony in the trial against Igor Danchenko, British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s alleged main source for his discredited dossier. Danchenko was charged with five counts of making false statements to the FBI, which Durham says he made about the information he provided to Steele for the dossier. His trial is scheduled for October. The DOJ’s watchdog said FBI interviews with Danchenko “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting” and concluded Danchenko “contradicted the allegations of a ‘well-developed conspiracy’ in” Steele’s dossier. He has pleaded...

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors liked to splash the charity’s funds around, with her brother and child’s father both benefiting from handsome cash payments in return for various services. The tax documents reveal BLM paid a company owned by Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’ child, nearly $970,000 to help “produce live events” and provide other “creative services.” The co-founder’s brother, Paul Cullors, saw more than $840,000 of donated funds pass into his hands for providing security services to the foundation. All told the foundation is still worth tens of millions of dollars, after spending more than $37 million...

Emails obtained via an open records request provide a picture of the politics behind the players who formulated and fed the Alfa Bank theory via Michael Sussmann to the FBI.While Dagon may have been an expert in the data crunching, emails recently obtained by The Federalist from Georgia Tech reveal Dagon was something more—he was an anti-Trump, Russia-collusion conspiracy theorist.Dagon’s name first became connected with the Alfa Bank story when Special Counsel John Durham indicted Michael Sussmann two months ago, charging the Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer with lying to FBI General Counsel James Baker.What the Indictment Says about the Alfa...

Sussmann trial testimony confirms earlier CIA, FBI evidence that Hillary Clinton approved dirtying up Trump with unproven Russia allegations. In an era where the hunt for disinformation has become a political obsession, Hillary Clinton has mostly escaped having to answer what role she played in spreading the false Russia collusion narrative that gripped America for nearly three years. On Friday, that dodge ended with a most unlikely witness: her former campaign manager Robby Mook, who was supposed to be a witness helping the defense of her former campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann on a charge of lying to the FBI. Instead,...

Five associates of Hillary Clinton and her campaign are invoking their Fifth Amendment rights and refusing to cooperate with Special Counsel John H. Durham, according a filing in federal court revealed later Friday in Washington, DC. The revelation emerged in a motion filed by Durham to oppose the efforts of defendant Michael Sussmann and the Clinton campaign to withhold some documents from evidence by asserting attorney-client privilege. Sussmann is charged with lying to the FBI in 2016 when he informed the FBI about a fraudulent link between then-candidate Donald Trump and the Russian government via Alfa Bank. Sussmann allegedly presented...

The Federal Election Commission has fined Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign $8,000 and the Democratic National Committee $105,000 for obscuring their funding of the "Steele dossier," a 2016 opposition research report that sought to highlight alleged links between Donald Trump and Russia. The bipartisan election commission also dismissed a complaint against Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier that caused a firestorm of allegations and investigations that shook the early months of Trump's presidency. The campaign mislabeled Steele's work as "legal services" and "legal and compliance consulting" in campaign filings, the FEC concluded...... Steele's report concluded, based on anonymous sources, that...

On Feb. 3, long-time Trump associate Felix Sater filed a cross-complaint in a New York federal court. The complaint alleges that Russian and Kazakhstan-connected individuals and entities conducted “a shadow intelligence operation of Sater and Trump for the purpose of manufacturing information to harm Donald Trump politically,” including by providing Christopher Steele a PowerPoint presentation riddled with lies Steele later fed to the FBI. Sater’s cross suit comes nearly three years after the City of Almaty, Kazakhstan, and BTA Bank filed suit against Sater, two of the companies he owned, a former business associate, and that associate’s LLCs, in City...

It did not seem possible for the Steele dossier – the collection of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories funded by the Clinton campaign; hyped by the US media establishment; and tapped by the FBI for surveillance and investigative leads – to get more embarrassing for all of those involved. But the indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Steele's key source, Igor Danchenko, offers 39 pages of new evidence that Russiagate — after five years of failed innuendo, debunked “bombshells”, and humiliating revelations — has no rock bottom. Danchenko is accused of making false statements to the FBI about his role in...

Special Counsel John Durham’s indictment of researcher Igor Danchenko yesterday brought many powerful leftists into the spotlight. Impeachment witness Fiona Hill was involved in bringing the right people together. Christopher Steele has long been credited with creating his infamous dossier but may have only been a front to distance Hillary Clinton’s campaign from the whole mess. Now we know a primary ringleader in the creation and subsequent use of the dossier. Charles Dolan, Jr., a PR consultant for the Clinton campaign, is the person referred to as “PR Executive-1” in the indictment. Fox News host Jesse Waters, sitting in for...

The nation argued for five years over the infamous “Steele dossier,” the document on which the Federal Bureau of Investigation relied to investigate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. It should have been called the Clinton dossier. Special counsel John Durham this week obtained an indictment of Igor Danchenko, a Russian who provided information for the dossier. ---SNIP--- Never forget the original claim. According to the FBI, Democrats and the media, Mr. Trump harbored secret and nefarious ties with Russia. We knew that because—as Mother Jones explained in a 2016 article that became the reigning story line— Christopher Steele was a “credible...

Special counsel John Durham is reportedly scrutinizing British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s main source for his discredited dossier, using a subpoena to obtain documents from the Brookings Institution related to its employment of Igor Danchenko, a researcher who visited Russia in 2016 as he worked for the ex-MI6 agent. The New York Times reported on Monday, citing “people familiar with the investigation," that Durham “has keyed in on the FBI’s handling of a notorious dossier of political opposition research both before and after the bureau started using it to obtain court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser." The outlet...

The following is a transcript of Todd’s morning radio commentary. Hello Americans. I’m Todd Starnes with news and commentary next.So now we know who was responsible for leaking the infamous dirty dossier that sparked the Russian collusion hoax. It was none other than the late Senator John McCain.Newly declassified text messages outlined the late Arizona lawmakers role in the sordid affair.In 2017 disgraced ex-FBI agent Strzok texted Lisa Page that journalist Carl Bernstein had gotten the dossier from McCain.“Carl Bernstein (yes that Carl) called [Office of Public Affairs], said he got a ‘dossier’ from McCain,’ Strzok texted Page, who quickly...

Marc Elias, the Democrat lawyer behind the Russia “dossier” in 2016, and a slew of lawsuits to expand vote-by-mail in the 2020 presidential election, is involved in seven lawsuits regarding the rules for the Georgia Senate runoff to be held Jan. 5. Elias’s website, Democracy Docket, is a clearinghouse of information for fellow Democrats on current election litigation around the country. He lists five cases of interest in the runoff, which pits incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler against Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively:

BREAKING: The primary sub-source for the Steele dossier was deemed a possible “national security threat” + the subject of 2009 FBI counter-intel probe. According to new records, those facts were known to Crossfire Hurricane team in December 2016

Clinesmith falsified documents and helped the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Team omit exonerating evidence about Carter Page on four separate FISA applications. The FBI was told Carter Page was a U.S. intelligence agency source months before the agency began keeping that information from the secret court that authorized spying on him and nearly a full year before the agency altered documents to claim otherwise. Federal charging documents against Kevin Clinesmith, the top FBI attorney who was expected to plead guilty today to altering documents, show that the FBI withheld in three separate spying applications the fact that Page had served as...

Court rules Steele's firm violated Britain's data privacy law by failing to aggressively check allegations in his dossier ================================================================================ British judge ruled Wednesday that Christopher Steele violated a data privacy law by failing to check the accuracy of information in his infamous dossier, ordering the former spy’s firm to pay damages to two businessmen he wrongly accused of making illicit payments in Russia. Justice Mark Warby of the High Court of England and Wales ordered Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, to pay a modest 18,000 English pounds – about $22,596 in American currency – each to Petr Aven and Mikhail...

An FBI agent's newly released testimony undercuts top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr's denial of a conflict of interest between his Trump-Russia efforts and his wife’s work for Fusion GPS, producer of the discredited Steele dossier. The agent, Michael Gaeta, told congressional probers that Ohr had pressed him to make sure the FBI was “doing something” with the dossier. According to Gaeta, Ohr pushed Steele's collection of memos alleging nefarious ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in part because Ohr’s wife Nellie worked for the same company that had hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele. Gaeta's testimony was released last...

On March 17 and 18, Christopher Steele testified in a British court where he revealed both 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice knew about his anti-Trump dossier research. According to a transcript obtained by Just the News, Steele told a British court he was hired by Fusion GPS through the Democratic National Committee (DNC) linked law firm Perkins Coie to work for the Clinton campaign. Steele said Fusion GPS owner Glenn Simpson tipped him to the DNC’s role in the anti-Trump dossier. “I presumed it was the Clinton campaign, and Glenn Simpson had...

The federal prosecutor investigating the origins of the Russia inquiry is examining testimony by the former C.I.A. director John Brennan and seeking his communications records. The federal prosecutor scrutinizing the Russia investigation has begun examining the role of the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan in how the intelligence community assessed Russia’s 2016 election interference, according to three people briefed on the inquiry. John H. Durham, the United States attorney leading the investigation, has requested Mr. Brennan’s emails, call logs and other documents from the C.I.A., according to a person briefed on his inquiry. He wants to learn what Mr....