Free Republic

RussiaGate is now a complete dead letter — but ObamaGate is taking its place. Just how far did the then-president go to cripple his successor? It’s now clear the Obama-Comey FBI and Justice Department never had anything more substantial than the laughable fiction of the Steele dossier to justify the “counterintelligence” investigation of the Trump campaign. Yet incessant leaks from that supposedly confidential probe wound up consuming the Trump administration’s first months in office — followed by the Bob Mueller-led special counsel investigation that proved nearly the “total witch hunt” that President Trump dubbed it. Information released as the Justice...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General William Barr faced growing criticism from Democrats on Friday after the Justice Department said it had intensified its politically charged review of the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

s Trump won primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had alerted him to an intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign. The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish. Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC: that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an “inter-agency taskforce”) on the...

The fallout from the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is not over. We have Russia, leaks, and palace intrigue about former Obama administration officials laying the foundation to topple Flynn, who was knows for being staunchly opposed to the Iran nuclear deal. Guy wrote a post about the allegations. Frankly, Flynn misled the vice president, which alone is an act that warrants him being shown the door. Multiple writers, namely Damon Linker at The Week and Eli Lake at Bloomberg have noted another sinister angle to this story, which is the number of leaks of highly sensitive information coming...

(CBS News) WASHINGTON - CBS News has learned that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) cut specific references to "al Qaeda" and "terrorism" from the unclassified talking points given to Amassador Susan Rice on the Benghazi consulate attack - with the agreement of the CIA and FBI. The White House or State Department did not make those changes. (snip) However, an intelligence source tells CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan the links to al Qaeda were deemed too "tenuous" to make public, because there was not strong confidence in the person providing the intelligence. CIA Director David Petraeus,...