Free Republic

CIA China Ops Wiped Out By 'Botched; Spy Contact System: Investigation results show indicted spy Jerry Chun Shing Lee was not the CIA's only security breach. Sloppy coding led to a back door hole in the messaging system, used by the Chinese to 'wipe out' our entire spy network. Suddenly, in late 2010, undercover agents in China were being rounded up and hauled off for interrogation. Under Barack Obama's administration, the Central Intelligence Agency suffered what intelligence officers are calling one of the worst disasters in decades. Suddenly, in late 2010, undercover agents in China were being rounded up and...

Democratic congressional Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defended banning press from a public town hall this week, saying the move was meant to protect residents of vulnerable communities. Ocasio-Cortez on Friday responded to a tweet from Washington Post reporter Seung Min Kim, who wrote that the candidate “is in for a rough time on Capitol Hill -- where reporters roam freely at all hours of the day and night -- if this is her attitude toward the press.” The reporter also tweeted that the campaign should have made the event private, rather than making it public and stopping the press from attending.

Less than a week after making a stink about freedom of the press, President Trump and 'enemies of the people, CNN and apparently other news outlets have decided to get into the harassment business given that reporting news is just not good enough for them. Seriously, they tried to do this: In a motion filed in federal court on Thursday, CNN and several other media outlets requested that the court release the names and home addresses of all jurors in the Paul Manafort fraud case. Jurors haven not yet rendered a verdict on any of the 18 charges against...

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer: We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain? We tried propriety – has...

The situation on the Korean Peninsula is flowing quite fast. On August 13, there were high-level talks between the two Koreas and a third inter-Korean summit, to be held in September in Pyongyang, was recently announced. President Moon Jae-in made the point in his message for the 73rd Korean National Liberation Day that Korea will take another step toward the declaration of the end of the Korean War and a peace treaty. Since this year's inter-Korean summit and the U.S.-North Korea summit are historically significant as the beginning of the Korean Peninsula's peace, Moon emphasized focusing on peace on the...

The new leader of Democrats in the Senate says Donald Trump is being "really dumb" for picking a fight with intelligence officials, suggesting they have ways to strike back, after the president-elect speculated Tuesday that his "so-called" briefing about Russian cyberattacks had been delayed in order to build a case. "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer Tuesday evening on MSNBC after host Rachel Maddow informed him that intelligence sources told NBC news that the briefing had not been...

Judicial Watching is calling for a re-opening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails after finding more classified information on the former Secretary of State's non-"state.gov" email system. On Thursday, the watchdog revealed that it had received two batches, 184 pages and 45 pages, of newly uncovered emails belonging to Hillary Clinton from the U.S. Department of State sent and received over her unsecured server. The emails were uncovered by a FOIA lawsuit filed on May 6, 2015, after the State Department failed to respond to a March 4, 2015 FOIA request seeking all emails sent or received by Clinton...

Brooks continued, “A lot of us don’t have security clearances. It doesn’t seem to be a problem in life. The reason they keep people on security clearance after their time in office is so they can offer advice. And I think, frankly, it’s a little of a vanity thing, that people get to say, I still have my security clearance. And so, when it’s taken away — but John Brennan wasn’t giving the Trump administration advice anyway. And so the idea they have to live without security clearance after they’ve been out of office doesn’t strike me as one of...

WASHINGTON — The White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, has cooperated extensively in the special counsel investigation, sharing detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice, including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others briefed on the matter. In at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled 30 hours over the past nine months, Mr. McGahn described the president’s furor toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged Mr. McGahn to respond...

**SNIP** Similarly, a DHS document published in April noted the value of granting security clearances to those who own and operative private companies tied to the nation's critical infrastructure, including power companies, chemical plants, water utility firms and phone companies. "With clearances, these owners, operators, and representatives can access classified information to make more informed decisions," the DHS document said. The U.S. government also grants security clearance to private-sector security operatives protecting U.S. interests overseas, to senior bank officials looking to protect Americans’ savings accounts from foreign hackers, and to high-level officials at hotel chains who spend every day trying...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller recommended in a court filing on Friday that a judge sentence former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos to up to six months in prison for lying to federal agents investigating whether Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October to lying to FBI agents and is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 7. According to Mueller’s sentencing memorandum to the judge, Papadopoulos lied about his contacts with people who claimed to have ties to top Russian officials, including his meeting with a professor who said Russia had “dirt” on Democratic presidential...

Buying fresh vegetables for children, heating an apartment, using Medicaid to manage diabetes. Those are all legal means of support provided by the government for low-income residents of the United States. But a new rule in the works from the Trump administration would make it difficult, if not impossible, for immigrants who use those benefits to obtain green cards. **SNIP** The administration’s plan is based on the more than 100-year-old law of “public charge,” later defined by government guidance in 1999: A person who is very likely to become “primarily dependent” on government services cannot become a legal permanent resident....

The two biggest shoes are yet to drop in the 2016 investigations. We still don’t know the origins and back story of the intercepted Russian intelligence document that was pivotal in James Comey’s unprecedented, ill-advised and possibly decisive (according to numerous Democratic and independent election analysts) interventions in the presidential race. Depending on what report you credit, the information was false, it was planted by the Russians, or it accurately indicated an illegal conspiracy to obstruct justice by the Clinton campaign and Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch. If it was a Russian fabrication, then Mr. Comey was spoofed by the...

The federal judge who had ordered the government to restart the Obama-era DACA deportation amnesty in full backed off his decision Friday and said the government does not, after all, have to begin accepting brand new applications. Judge John D. Bates acknowledged the legal mess that’s arisen around DACA and said he didn’t want to make it worse, so he issued a partial stay of his own ruling. That means that while illegal immigrant “Dreamers” who already have had DACA protections can apply for renewals, no brand new applicants can apply to start the process. Judge Bates also delayed part...

Before Election Day 2016 the "intelligentsia" – that self-appointed and self-important class of faux intellectuals, which believes itself superior to the average American and thereby entitled to tell the rest of us what to do, what to think and how to live – considered Donald Trump a joke. Hillary Clinton was, in all but name only, the next President of the United States. The election was a tedious formality. "The Donald" would soon be back hosting a reality TV show, and the status quo would remain intact. The members of the "intelligentsia" awoke the next day to disbelief. The unthinkable...

WASHINGTON — The White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, has cooperated extensively in the special counsel investigation, sharing detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice, including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others briefed on the matter. In at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled 30 hours over the past nine months, Mr. McGahn described the president’s furor toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged Mr. McGahn to respond...

Really, admiral! Apparently, you conveniently forgot to mention that Brennan voted for a communist for president, is rumored to have converted to Islam and reportedly had a prayer rug in his CIA office. Good fit for a CIA director, don’t you think? To make matters much worse, not just Edward Snowden but an NSA/CIA/FBI contractor whistleblower client I once represented revealed to a number of so-called government authorities that Brennan, along with James Clapper, were the primary persons who authorized and then carried out mass surveillance by the CIA and NSA, also with FBI involvement, against hundreds of millions of...

Gov. Andrew Cuomo's comment saying that America "was never that great" was disgraceful, former NYPD officer Dan Bongino said on Saturday. The New York governor made the remark as a rebuke of President Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan during a bill-signing event on Wednesday. “We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great,” he said.

Five More Classified Emails on Clinton’s Unsecure System Another Body Blow to Mueller’s Credibility ISIS Militant Released after FBI Intervention Surfaces in A Jail Five More Classified Emails on Clinton’s Unsecure System Do you think we’ve heard the end of Hillary Clinton’s email escapades? Don’t count on it. More than three years ago, on May 6, 2015, we sued the State Department (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00687)) after it failed to respond to our FOIA request seeking: All emails sent or received by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in her official capacity as...

Full headline: WHOA: Pentagon inspector general report says Russia, China may have ‘compromised’ U.S. missile detection satellites Penetration: The Obama era was particularly hard on the U.S. military, as the administration and Congress refused to pass real budgets which prevented the services from investing in high-tech systems, including those designed to protect our most vital assets. This was again evident after the Department of Defense Inspector General released a report this week saying some of our country’s most important satellites — those the Air Force uses to detect enemy ICBM launches — could be compromised by Russian and Chinese hackers.