Free Republic

WIN FOR PUTIN? Iran nuke deal fuels arms race, helps Russia, officials say [this was the title of the piece on the FoxNews home page] THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL and the negotiations leading up to it already are fueling an all-but-declared nuclear arms race in the Middle East, according to current and former government officials who say the situation also creates an opening for Russia to exert more influence in the region.

Putin was surprised at how easy Crimea went. Obama is nothing if not consistent when it comes to undermining allies and appeasing enemies. He kept on being flexible even as Russia was invading a potential NATO member. As Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces took over Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in early 2014, the interim Ukrainian government was debating whether or not to fight back against the "little green men" Russia had deployed. But the message from the Barack Obama administration was clear: avoid military confrontation with Moscow. That's easier to do when you aren't being invaded by Moscow. But nonetheless, McFaul...

Dmitry Medvedev dining in San Francisco tonight Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is on a friendly visit to the Bay Area before flying across the country to meet with President Barack Obama, and he comes in peace. Which must be why he brought along the flagship of the Russian Navy's Pacific Fleet, the nuclear-capable missile cruiser Varyag. Makes total sense. Medvedev will be dining with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Secretary of State George Schultz Tuesday night. On Wednesday, he'll be visiting technology companies including Twitter, Apple, Google and Cisco Systems, in part to promote an "innovation center" modeled on Silicon...

Clinton spoke on Saturday at OZY Fest in Central Park where she was interviewed by the digital magazine's investor Laurene Jobs. 'The great mystery is why the president has not spoken up for our country,' Clinton said. 'We saw that most clearly in this most recent meeting with Putin. We don't know what was said in the room with just the two of them.' She also implied that Trump was a patsy getting played by Putin. Clinton admitted she didn't get along with Putin when she was secretary of state. 'To be fair, hardly anyone who believes in freedom gets...

Former U.S. Army Special Forces member Jim Hanson said that the criticism President Trump is facing for meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin is hypocritical to what the Obama administration faced in 2012. Hanson, during an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” specifically called out former President Barack Obama's hot mic incident with then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the lax media reaction to it. Obama told Medvedev that after the 2012 election, he'd “have more flexibility.”

Nobody watching President Barack Obama talking to President Dmitry Medvedev to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and addressing a university audience could have failed to notice that Moscow was not a pre-Presidential election Berlin audience. The first was courteous, the second displayed no emotion and the third was cool. No chemistry there; added to which his visit was overshadowed by Michael Jackson's funeral. The main achievement was a missile deal that favoured Moscow, which did not go down well with his political opponents at home and has yet to receive the Senate's fiat. But there was also agreement reached to allow...

FULL TITLE: Bipartisan Senate Report: Obama Failed to Secure U.S. Election Systems, Trump Admin Making Progress A bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee documents how the Obama administration did not take effective action as Russia worked to target the U.S. election process. The same report shows that, under the Trump administration, U.S. agencies have made significant progress in working to secure election systems while vulnerabilities still remain. Not only were states confused by briefings on election threats by Obama-era agencies, the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama didn’t even tell states that a nation-state actor may have been...

Since Obama has raised the alarm about alleged Russian espionage activity, it’s appropriate to shine a spotlight on his own administration’s connections to Soviet-era spy rings and terrorist networks. Obama and two of his key advisors, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, were raised by families with members who are known either to have been in contact with Soviet agents or to have belonged to the Communist Party (CP) at a time when the CP was controlled by the Soviet Union. Associates of Obama’s campaign team and Jarrett’s family interacted with agents linked to the famous pair of spy rings known...

The Senate Finance Committee is probing meetings reportedly held in 2015 between two of former President Barack Obama’s top economic officials and Maria Butina, a Russian national who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to covertly influence U.S. foreign policy, the panel said Friday. Committee leadership published letters sent to the current heads of the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve raising concerns over reports that Ms. Butina, a 30-year-old gun-rights activist, met with officials from the agencies during the Obama administration. **SNIP** Reuters first reported last year that Ms. Butina and Alexander Torshin, a former top official for the Russian...

WASHINGTON — The Obama White House’s chief cyber official testified Wednesday that proposals he was developing to counter Russia’s attack on the U.S. presidential election were put on a “back burner” after he was ordered to “stand down” his efforts in the summer of 2016. The comments by Michael Daniel, who served as White House “cyber security coordinator” between 2012 and January of last year, provided his first public confirmation of a much-discussed passage in the book, “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump,” co-written by this reporter and David Corn,...

Shortened title. Full title: Obama’s Russian Ambassador McFaul (Who Putin Wants to Interview) Is Pictured with Russian Attorney Veselnitskaya Who Set up Donald Trump Jr. What was President Obama’s former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul up to? As a result of the meeting in Helsinki between President Trump and Russian President Putin the following was reported – Russian prosecutors have named the former US ambassador in Moscow as a person of interest in an investigation – and Michael McFaul appears to be quite unnerved. He seems to think Russian President Vladimir Putin is after him. The evidence seems to point...

The “complexity” of the case warrants excluding the speedy trial law and delaying the trial, Mueller argued in Tuesday’s court filing. .... Former federal prosecutor and National Review Contributing Editor Andrew C. McCarthy told TheDCNF it was too late for Mueller to claim that the complexity of the case warranted a delay. “Speedy trial rights belong to the defendant, and if the defendant pushes for a trial within the 70 days, the government has little cause to complain,” McCarthy said. “If the case was too complex, the government had the option of holding off on seeking an indictment until it...

A former undercover informant says he provided evidence to the FBI during President Obama’s first term that Russia was assisting Iran’s nuclear program even as billions in new U.S. business flowed to Moscow’s uranium industry. William Douglas Campbell told The Hill his evidence included that Russia was intercepting nonpublic copies of international inspection reports on Tehran’s nuclear program and sending equipment, advice and materials to a nuclear facility inside Iran. Campbell said Russian nuclear executives were extremely concerned that Moscow’s ongoing assistance to Iran might boomerang on them just as they were winning billions of dollars in new nuclear fuel...

In a textbook example of denial and projection, Trump foes in and out of government wove a sinister yarn meant to take him down. Barack Obama keeps a close watch on his emotions. “I loved Spock,” he wrote in February 2015 in a presidential statement eulogizing Leonard Nimoy. Growing up in Hawaii, the young man who would later be called “No-Drama Obama” felt a special affinity for the Vulcan first officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise. “Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy,” the eulogy continued. “Leonard was Spock. Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed.” It is the rare...

Friday on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin took a deeper look into how President Obama’s administration permitted Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election to go on unimpeded. Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, reportedly gave a “stand down” order on developing cyber-espionage countermeasures against the Russians because President Obama did not approve them. “That is the sickening irony, ladies and gentlemen,” Levin said. “That it was Obama and his people who refused to fight back against the Russians. It’s Obama and his people that turned intelligence agencies and law enforcement against the Republican nominee for president of...

Shortened title. Full title: Obama’s DHS Sec Says Administration Knew About Russian Hack, Waited To Tell Public For Fear Of Label As ‘Taking Sides’ Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said on MSNBC Monday morning that although the Obama administration knew of Russian hacking as early as summer of 2016, the administration did nothing initially out of concern for being labeled as “taking sides.”

There were many damning revelations in the Nunes memo released by a House Intelligence Committee vote. But the most damning of them all doesn’t raise questions about process, but about motive. The memo told us that the FISA application would not have happened without the Steele dossier. The document known as the Steele dossier was a work product of the Clinton campaign. Not only was Christopher Steele, the former British intel agent who purportedly produced the document, working for an organization hired by the Clinton campaign, but he shared a memo with the FBI from Cody Shearer, a Clinton operative,...

“Everything they’re accusing Trump of … Obama had done,” said Lee Smith of “Trump-Russia collusion” narratives pushed by Democrats and their news media allies. Smith, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, joined SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight for a Thursday interview with Breitbart News’s Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak to discuss his latest article, “The Media Stopped Reporting the Russia Collusion Story Because They Helped Create It.” Smith highlighted the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the New Yorker’s David Remnick as hypocritical news media figures in their criticisms of the Trump administration’s supposed appeasement of...

Obama vs. Trump: Who Really Colluded with Russia? Trump didn’t collude with Russia. Obama did. January 26, 2018 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. September 2009. Obama hadn’t even been in office for a whole year when he gave in to Moscow’s biggest demand by dropping the missile defense shield for Poland and the Czech Republic. During his campaign, he had enthusiastically backed the defensive program, declaring, “We have to send a clear signal that Poland and other countries in...

Corruption: Shortly after the Uranium One story broke, various news reports claimed that it was much ado about nothing. But a review of a huge cache of newly available documents shows that, if anything, it was worse than previously thought. The Hill broke the bombshell story last month, which summed up goes like this: While the Obama administration was approving the controversial 2010 sale of Uranium One to a state-owned Russian energy giant — which gave it control of one-fifth of U.S. uranium supplies — the FBI was actively investigating that company for extensive criminal activity designed to expand Russia's...