Free Republic

GDP Fraud: Countries ruled by an authoritarian regime often cheat on their official GDP data, a new study shows. No surprise, really. But how do we know this? Well, it's all about the light.XWhat do we mean? A new working paper by Luis R. Martinez of the University of Chicago with the amusing title "How Much Should We Trust the Dictator's GDP Estimates?" explores the unusual, but direct, link between the amount of light produced by an economy — as captured and measured through nighttime satellite photographs — and its GDP.The surprising result: Martinez concludes that economies in authoritarian...

Attorneys for three Democratic National Committee hack victims urged a federal judge Thursday to allow a new investigation of possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia, alleging a "conspiracy" involving President Trump's associates. U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle considered the case on the first anniversary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which is looking into the same matter. The hearing, which took place in the same building where Mueller has witnesses testify to a grand jury, lasted nearly four hours, with the judge pressing each side on complicated jurisdictional and case law issues. The hearing began with about three dozen people...

Two months before the 2016 election, George Papadopoulos received a strange request for a meeting in London, one of several the young Trump adviser would be offered — and he would accept — during the presidential campaign. The meeting request, which has not been reported until now, came from Stefan Halper, a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6. Halper’s September 2016 outreach to Papadopoulos wasn’t his only contact with Trump campaign members. The 73-year-old professor, a veteran of three Republican administrations, met with two other campaign advisers, The Daily Caller...

In February I wrote that the Russiagate collusion-mongers were hurting America far worse than the sole group of Russians the special counsel indicted. The rationale was that in effectively waging a mass disinformation, lawfare, and political campaign against a sitting president, collusion-mongers had already done more damage to our government and society than anything Vladimir Putin could have cooked up. This is true at a broader level as well. The political establishment that wishes to bring down the Trump presidency daily shows itself willing to eviscerate all norms, from corrupting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court and violating Department of...

Days after Carter Page’s high-profile trip to Moscow in July 2016, the Trump campaign adviser had his first encounter with Stefan Halper, a University of Cambridge professor with CIA and MI6 contacts. The conversation seemed innocent enough, Page tells The Daily Caller News Foundation. He recalls nothing of substance being discussed other than Halper’s passing mention that he knew then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. But the interaction was one of many that the pair would have over the next 14 months, through a period of time when Page was under the watchful eye of the U.S. government. Their relationship included a...

Amidst the screaming headlines about “massacre” and “war crimes” and unsettling pictures of Arab casualties, keep in mind the central question: When is it the right time to do the right thing? That’s the question President Trump faced when considering whether to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem. His three predecessors had used a loophole in the 1995 law requiring the move to give a consistent and increasingly cynical answer of, “Not now, maybe later.” That dodge lasted 22 years, until Trump cut through the nonsense last December with a statement of resounding moral clarity. Now, he said, is the...

Byline: IRANIAN Mullahs have violently cracked down on protesters who mounted a defiant stand against the oppressive regime. Anti-government marches in the city of Kazeroon against the Islamic fundamentalist regime ended in violence after Tehran forces reportedly killed two. Protesters took the streets over the governments plans to change the city’s boundaries, which aims to give more power to recently-elected MP Hossein Rezazadeh. Residents took to the streets in a bid to halt to move over the past few weeks, leading to stronger anti-government slogans and speeches to become more prominent. On Wednesday the government said it would shelve the...

...In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.

Methinks the Mika doth protest too much . . . Poor Mika Brzezinski. She absolutely, definitely, doesn’t want to discuss President Trump’s possible “cheap, disgusting affair” with Stormy Daniels or others. And neither does anyone else on the Morning Joe panel. Mika made that point twice today. But, sadly, she and her crew are forced—and believe me, they have to be dragged kicking and screaming!—to discuss Trump’s possible peccadilloes because the prez has made himself a potential Russian blackmail target.Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee say they have obtained documents that suggest Russia used the National Rifle Association (NRA) to help President Trump's 2016 campaign. The Democrats on Wednesday released a document outlining preliminary findings from their investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. It states that the Kremlin may have “used the NRA to secretly fund Mr. Trump’s campaign.” “The Committee has obtained a number of documents that suggest the Kremlin used the National Rifle Association as a means of accessing and assisting Mr. Trump and his campaign,” the document reads.

Shortened title. Full tile: Freedom Caucus Chairman Sends Letter to Trump Requesting He Use Powers to Release ALL Docs on FISA Abuse and Unredacted Rosenstein Memo Freedom caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC) sent President Trump a letter Wednesday afternoon requesting he use his Presidential powers to instruct AG Sessions to declassify and release ALL FISA abuse documents and the unredacted Rosenstein memo detailing Mueller’s scope. We have reached the one year anniversary of the Mueller witch hunt and these GOP lawmakers have had enough of the stonewalling from the DOJ and FBI.

Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, the F.B.I. dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark. Their assignment, which has not been previously reported, was to meet the Australian ambassador, who had evidence that one of Donald J. Trump’s advisers knew in advance about Russian election meddling. After tense deliberations between Washington and Canberra, top Australian officials broke with diplomatic protocol and allowed the ambassador, Alexander Downer, to sit for an F.B.I....

The Senate Intelligence Committee has determined that the intelligence community was correct in assessing that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election with the aim of helping then-candidate Donald Trump, contradicting findings House Republicans reached last month. “Our staff concluded that the [intelligence community’s] conclusions were accurate and on point,” the panel’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), said Wednesday in a joint statement with Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), its chairman. “The Russian effort was extensive, sophisticated, and ordered by President Putin himself for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton,” Warner continued.

A Hamas official on Wednesday acknowledged that 50 of the 62 Palestinians reported killed during Gaza border riots on Monday and Tuesday were members of the Islamist terrorist group, bringing the total number of known members of terror groups among the fatalities up to 53. “In the last rounds of confrontations, if 62 people were martyred, 50 of them were Hamas,” said Hamas official Salah Bardawil in a television interview. The Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad had said on Tuesday that three members of its Saraya al-Quds military wing were killed by Israeli forces in Khan Younis. The Israeli military shared...

MSNBC reporter Andrea Mitchell said it was "appalling" that the U.S. moved its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem without obtaining any concessions from Israel. Mitchell expressed astonishment at the Trump administration placing the blame for violence solely on Hamas, who instigated riots along the border in Gaza. White House principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah on Monday did not call for Israel to soften its response to the riots, leading Mitchell to decry the administration’s support for Israel. "I've never seen anything like that," Mitchell said. "Even the strongest supporters of Israel in administrations Republican and Democratic would at that point...

NBC White House correspondent Peter Alexander asked the White House Monday if it believed Israel should "kill at will" during questions about violence at the Gaza Strip. White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said responsibility for the violence along the border fence "rests squarely with Hamas," the militant terrorist organization that governs the Palestinian territory. Mass protests have broken out again in response to the moving of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recently recognized by the U.S. as Israel's capital. Alexander quoted French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who issued a statement Monday calling on Israel to use proportionate...

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley slammed the United Nations on Tuesday for pushing an investigation into the measures Israel took to secure its border during violent clashes with Hamas-backed insurgents earlier this week. After she concluded her speech, she walked out of the chamber when a Palestinian representative began to speak.

Ukraine, which along with most of the international community has not recognized Russia's annexation of Crimea, condemns the projectKERCH – President Vladimir Putin drew condemnation from the US, Europe and Ukraine on Tuesday, May 15, after he opened a new bridge linking mainland Russia and Moscow-annexed Crimea by driving a truck across it to the peninsula. Putin dressed in jeans and a casual jacket was shown by Russian state television behind the wheel of a construction truck to drive 19 kilometers (12 miles) across the bridge, which links the Taman peninsula in southern Russia to Ukraine's Crimea, which was annexed...

Real Clear Investigations has a story up today which sheds some light on Former CIA Director John Brennan and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which he helped produce. Specifically, it reveals that Brennan’s claims that the dossier was not used in the creation of the ICA appear to be false. Also, Brennan hand-selected the authors of the assessment including anti-Trump partisan Peter Strzok. In case you’ve forgotten some of the details, the January 2017 ICA reached this conclusion about the goals of Russian interference in the 2016 election:

Major media outlets on both sides of America’s political divide ran denunciations of Russian President Vladimir Putin last weekend. These include a lengthy extract in the Wall Street Journal from the memoirs of Sen. John McCain, calling Putin “an evil man ... intent on evil deeds” who “means to defeat the West.” Meanwhile, Washington Post foreign policy pundit Jackson Diehl praised a delegation of Putin’s opponents, asserting that Russia “is a place where discontent is growing, the desire for civil rights is tangible and the prospect of democratic change is, in the longer term, real.” The Washington-based Foundation for Defense...