Free Republic

With no firm conclusions yet on whether President Donald Trump’s campaign may have coordinated with Russia, the Senate intelligence committee could delay answering that question and issue more bipartisan recommendations early next year on protecting future elections from foreign tampering. Recommendations on how to counter the threat from attempted election hackers could be the first written product from congressional committees examining Russian interference into the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House. An early bipartisan report could be an attempt to boost confidence in the panel’s probe, as lawmakers worry that other issues could be lost if they...

Russian President Vladi­mir Putin on Thursday said that he doubted President Trump would be able to improve relations between their two countries because Trump was being held back by his political opposition. Trump undoubtedly has had some successes as president, including a booming U.S. stock market, Putin said. But, he asserted, reports about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election were being invented to create questions about his U.S. counterpart’s legitimacy. “There are things that he would want to do but hasn’t been able to so far, like reforming health care or other goals. For instance, he spoke about...

A pair of U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor stealth fighters fired flares to chase two Russian Su-25 fighter jets out of restricted airspace over Syria on Wednesday, a Pentagon official confirmed Thursday. The aerial encounter occurred when the Russian jets strayed into airspace east of the Euphrates River, putting them on the wrong side of a "deconfliction zone" established between Moscow and Washington to avoid confrontation in the skies over Syria. The Russian jets immediately left the area after the intercept and warning flares from the F-22s, an official confirmed to the Washington Examiner. The Pentagon could not provide an...

MOSCOW, Dec 14 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin warned on Thursday that some of his opponents would destabilise Russia and usher in chaos if they were elected in a presidential election next year, but promised genuine political competition. Putin, who is running for re-election in March, was answering a question at his annual news conference about opposition leader Alexei Navalny who looks unlikely to be allowed to contest the election due to what Navalny says is a trumped up criminal case. The question was put to him to Ksenia Sobchak, a television personality who has said she plans to run...

The Hamas terrorist organization declared on Wednesday that “Al-Quds [in its entirety] is the eternal capital of Palestine, not its eastern or western part, and is an Arabic Islamic city.” The statement, released in honor of the 30th anniversary of the founding of Hamas, is in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel will not cancel the right of the Palestinian national and religious people to the city, and Al-Quds will remain an Arab Islamic state, Hamas stressed. The terrorist group further stressed that...

Pentagon to boost U.S. weapons under nuclear posture review Russia is aggressively building up its nuclear forces and is expected to deploy a total force of 8,000 warheads by 2026 along with modernizing deep underground bunkers, according to Pentagon officials. The 8,000 warheads will include both large strategic warheads and thousands of new low-yield and very low-yield warheads to circumvent arms treaty limits and support Moscow's new doctrine of using nuclear arms early in any conflict. In addition to expanding its warheads, Russia also is fortifying underground facilities for command and control during a nuclear conflict. One official said the...

Breaking with years of courting the U.S., Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Wednesday for the United Nations to replace Washington as a Mideast mediator and suggested he might not cooperate with the Trump administration’s much-anticipated effort to hammer out an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. At a summit in Turkey, Arab and Muslim leaders “rejected and condemned” President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — the trigger for Abbas’ sharp policy pivot — but stopped short of backing his more combative approach toward Washington. A possible Palestinian refusal to engage with the U.S. and growing backlash against Trump’s shift on...

US State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said, “We will continue to work through all our partners to try to stabilize the country.” Spokesperson Nauert commented on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement that Russian soldiers will be pulled out of Syria and said, “If Russia chooses to pull out, certainly, that is its choice to do so, but we continue to work through all our partners to try to stabilize the country.” US State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert answered questions about Syria in the daily press briefing. Nauert said the following on the question about Russian President Putin’s announcement that Russian...

The Afghan refugee, who is now on trial for the rape and murder of the medical student Maria Ladenburger in October 2016, is older than previously thought. Hussein Khavari entered Germany in November 2015 without identity papers. He told authorities that he was born in 1999 in Afghanistan and that his father was killed during the war. But it now appears that his father is still alive. According to German media his father said his son was born in 1984 and that he is 33-years-old. The Local Germany says about it: “Prosecutors were able to track down Hussein K.’s father...

The leaders of 57 Muslim nations have called on the world to recognise "the State of Palestine and East Jerusalem as its occupied capital". An Organisation of Islamic Co-operation communique declares US President Donald Trump's decision to recognise the city as Israel's capital as "null and void". It also says the move has signalled Washington's withdrawal from its role in the Middle East peace process. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas earlier said the UN should take over. In a speech to the OIC summit in Istanbul, Mr Abbas said it would be "unacceptable" for the US to be the mediator "since...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was among the targets of an investigation in Turkey into suspected bribery and money laundering in connection with a scheme to help Iran evade sanctions, a former Istanbul police officer has testified. The officer, Huseyin Korkmaz, told a New York court on December 11 that the Turkish investigation that he led in 2012-2013 initially focused on Turkish-Iranian businessman Reza Zarrab, who U.S. prosecutors have said was the mastermind behind the Iran sanctions evasion scheme, but later grew to include dozens of others. He called Erdogan the "No. 1" target in a group that also included...

Israeli army has denied carrying out a strike in Gaza on Tuesday that killed two members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Beit Lahia in the northern part of the Hamas-run enclave. According to Palestinian Maan News agency, sources close to Islamic Jihad said that the two men — 25 year old Hussein Ghazi Hussein Nasrallah and 29 year old Mustafa Sultan — were part of the group’s armed wing Saraya al-Quds and had been working for its northern brigade’s engineering unit. The group later posted a statement on its website saying that the two men were on a “jihadist...

President Donald Trump signed a military spending bill on Tuesday, promising a “strong military” with the best equipment during his presidency. “We need our military, its got to be ‘perfecto,’” Trump said, urging Congress to remove military sequester caps and pass a clean funding bill for the government next year. Trump called the military funding bill a “momentous“ occasion and a great step in funding the “greatest fighting force in the history of the world.” He said that the bill increased the size of the armed forces budget for the first time in seven years, and included the largest military...

A wealthy ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has placed a bounty on the heads of two former U.S. military and intelligence officials as part of what U.S. officials told the Washington Free Beacon is an effort by the Turkish government to threaten and intimidate Americans who they believe are working to undermine Erdogan. A bounty of three million Turkish lira, or nearly $800,000, was placed on the heads of former Pentagon official Michael Rubin and former top CIA official Graham Fuller for what Erdogan's allies claim is their role in a 2016 failed coup that nearly toppled Erdogan's...

Newspapermen were rarely whiners. Whining became fashionable only after “journalists” overran newsrooms. The best newspapermen, so the folk wisdom went, were Southerners, Jews and the Irish. Southerners loved the words and the occasions to tell stories, the Jews for the opportunity to do public good, and the Irish for the bottle frequently slipped into the bottom desk drawer by boosters, lobbyists, public-relations flacks and others up to no particular good. Such an irreverent formulation was enough to offend everybody, but in the old days no one took offense because everybody knew that nobody would particularly care if anybody did. What...

Full Title: Here’s How Trump’s Pledge To Move The U.S. Embassy To Jerusalem Changes The Palestinian-Israel ‘Peace Process’ President Trump’s decision to have the United States recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was not taken in a vacuum. It was another step in changing the moribund Palestinian-Israel “peace process” into something else. What else is not clear, but the intention and the antecedents are. The intention is to disabuse the Palestinians of the notion that the U.S. is neutral between them and our democratic, pro-Western, tolerant, free-market ally Israel. Clarity will actually make the U.S. an honest broker in...

Shortened title. Full title: Fusion GPS dossier cabal was using spy tradecraft to evade leaving electronic footprints for NSA surveillance I suspect that we are in the process of uncovering the worst political scandal in American history, in which the most fearsome tool of federal government spying was turned against the Trump campaign.  A cabal manipulated events behind the scenes to subvert the legal safeguards that are supposed to prevent such an abuse.

A new report ties Fusion GPS to a flawed (but sensational) story claiming nefarious ties between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, which Hillary Clinton’s campaign immediately used to attack Republican nominee Donald Trump a week before the 2016 election. On October 31, 2016, Slate’s Franklin Foer wrote a story alleging secret communications between Trump’s company and Russian bank Alfa. Foer’s story cited a group of computer scientists who claimed to have proof of server pings between Alfa’s server and a Trump hotel server. Foer’s piece argued that the server pings represented a secret line of communication between Trump...

blah, blah, blah ... "The executive at Vkontakte, or VK, Russia’s equivalent to Facebook, emailed Donald Trump Jr. and social media director Dan Scavino in January and again in November of last year, offering to help promote Trump’s campaign to its nearly 100 million users, according to people familiar with the messages...." Looks like Nellie Ohr was looking for Russian Social Media Users in 2014:

The Royal Norwegian Navy has been around, in one form or another, for over a millennium. Though once a loose conscription of seafaring coastal communities, the Royal Norwegian Navy has, for the last 200 years, been an organized force responsible for the defense of the Nordic country’s deceptively long coast. During the Cold War, the Norwegian Navy turned to fast patrol boats armed with guided missiles and torpedoes. Most of these vessels were armed with the “Penguin” anti-ship missile, which had a range of roughly 34 miles and used infra-red homing for deadly precision. Additionally, some of the Norweigan patrol...