Free Republic

Special Counsel John Durham’s final report faults the FBI for opening the Trump-Russia collusion investigation on baseless grounds and relying on Hillary Clinton-funded material to pursue it, all while ignoring a warning that Clinton was plotting to frame Trump as a Russian asset. Yet Durham does not address the Clinton campaign’s equally central tie to Russiagate’s other foundational allegation: that Russia interfered in the 2016 election by hacking Democratic party servers and releasing the material through Wikileaks to help elect Trump. Durham’s silence on the Clinton team’s role in generating this unproven claim comes despite his unearthing of evidence that...

The Durham report marked the final chapter of a dramatic saga that began nearly seven years ago: the inception of Russiagate, and the launch of media careers of federal officials wrapped up in pushing the dubious collusion narrative. Launched by the FBI in July 2016 as Crossfire Hurricane, the Robert Mueller investigation looked into whether there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin's election interference operations. The media followed every aspect of the probe with glee. The controversy plagued Donald Trump's presidency as The New York Times and The Washington Post published bombshell after bombshell, often based...

The special counsel’s report provides the summary Americans need to understand the breadth of the malfeasance.. Special Counsel John Durham released his long-awaited report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation Monday. While the 306-page report includes some new details of the Russia-collusion hoax, the Clinton campaign’s role in the plot, and the FBI and intelligence agencies’ misconduct, much of the content merely rehashes what conservative media have reported for the last five years. Still, our country needed a public record of the events that represent one of the biggest political scandals in American history, and on that front Durham delivered. FBI’s...

The report further highlights that Brennan specifically informed the group of then-candidate Hillary Clinton's approval of a plan to paint Trump as being in league with Moscow. Joe Biden was made aware of the Clinton campaign's plans to insinuate a relationship between the Russian government and the Trump campaign while serving as vice president, the Durham report revealed. Special Counsel John Durham on Monday published a 300+ page report on the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, representing the end of a years-long investigation. Included in the report are the details of a White House briefing on Aug. 3, 2016,...

The Obama administration possessed no real evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with Russian government officials when it launched its investigation into the Trump campaign leading up to the 2016 election, according to a new bombshell report. On Monday, Special Counsel John Durham released the findings of his years-long investigation into the origins of the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign in the months before, during, and after the 2016 presidential contest. Despite the agency’s claims that the inquiry — commonly referred to as Crossfire Hurricane — was predicated on the belief that Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russian officials...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A special prosecutor has ended his four-year investigation into possible FBI misconduct in its probe of ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign with withering criticism of the bureau but a meager court record that fell far short of the former president’s prediction he would uncover the “crime of the century.” The report Monday from special counsel John Durham represents the long-awaited culmination of an investigation that Trump and allies had claimed would expose massive wrongdoing by law enforcement and intelligence officials. Instead, Durham’s investigation delivered underwhelming results, with prosecutors securing a guilty plea from a...

Special Counsel John Durham released his final report Monday after more than three years investigating the Russia collusion probe, declaring the FBI has no verified intelligence or evidence when it opened up the Crossfire Hurricane probe of President Donald Trump's campaign in the summer of 2016."Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation," Durham wrote in a 300-plus page report sent to Congress and others and obtained by Just the News. DO was slated to make the report public later...

[more context in following thread] Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy MORE: BuzzFeed boss @peretti just sent out a note to staff, announcing the shuttering of BuzzFeed News is part of layoffs where 15% of staffers are being cut across the company. Peretti says, "For BuzzFeed News, we have begun discussions with the News Guild about these actions."

The curious case of Ray Epps stands as the most conspicuous and damning thorn in the side of the Regime’s official narrative of the January 6 Fedsurrection. It is fair to say if it hadn’t been for the intrepid reporting of Tucker Carlson and Revolver News (if the reader will permit a bit of self-contragulation) the burning questions surrounding Epps’ involvement in January 6 would not have received the national attention that they deserve. According to the transcript of the January 6th Committee’s interrogation of Epps, Epps himself singles out Revolver News along with representatives Massie, Gaetz, and others as...

Judge Declares FBI’s Search for Peter Strzok Records Inadequate Judicial Watch Sues for Key Anti-Trump Coup Doc Judicial Watch Files Ethics Complaint Against Congressman Adam Schiff Clinton Email Scandal Witness Testimony Begins Judicial Watch is #1 on FOIA! Judge Declares FBI’s Search for Peter Strzok Records Inadequate A petulant child or employee will perform a task halfway and wait to see if he can get away with it. Such seems to be the strategy of the entire Deep State bureaucracy. The FBI is particularly good at this, and we are particularly good at calling them on it. Luckily for...

Special Counsel John Durham is revealing new smoking gun evidence, a text message that shows a Clinton campaign lawyer lied to the FBI, while putting the courts on notice he is prepared to show the effort to smear Donald Trump with now-disproven Russia collusion allegations was a “conspiracy.” In a bombshell court filing late Monday night, Durham for the first time suggested Hillary Clinton’s campaign, her researchers and others formed a “joint venture or conspiracy” for the purpose of weaving the collusion story to harm Trump’s election chances and then the start of his presidency. “These parties acted as ‘joint...

Ray Epps’s new attorney, who is demanding on behalf of his client a public apology from Tucker Carlson under threat of a defamation lawsuit, is the director of a radical anti-Trump organization, a close associate of Media Matters Democrat attack dog David Brock and a former employee of Perkins Coie, the lawfare firm behind Russiagate and the Steele dossier.Ray Epps, right, conducting an improv interview. / IMAGE: RT via YouTube.Epps’s attorney, Michael Teter, sent a letter on Thursday to Carlson, demanding the Fox News host retract what Teter called “false and defamatory statements” that Epps was a J6 government plant."Letters...

Watch out, Adam Schiff, Alexander Vinman, Fiona Hill and assorted other Russia/Ukraine hoaxers. Kash Patel is coming for you in a courtroom in Virginia. The former Russiagate investigator for the House Intelligence Committee has filed a $23 million defamation action against Politico for falsely claiming he misrepresented himself as a Ukraine expert and fed lies to Donald Trump about Ukraine — which ultimately led to the then-president’s impeachment. Patel’s suit contends that Politico knew that Schiff, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was “a wholly unreliable source,” a “congenital liar and inveterate leaker [and] a demagogue with an axe...

Nearly four years after the now-discredited Russia collusion probe was formally closed, the Justice Department has released heavily redacted memos showing the FBI initially considered resolving concerns about Moscow targeting Donald Trump's campaign by simply giving the GOP presidential nominee a defensive briefing back in 2016. The information was contained in a new release of documents in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative group Citizens United, which sought the interviews conducted by the Justice Department inspector general of key players involved in the Russia probe, including former DOJ official Bruce Ohr's wife and former Obama Attorney...

Journalist and author Matt Taibbi noted the U.S. government’s role in creating a “new cottage industry” of “disinformation labs” ostensibly combatting fraudulent online propaganda in the interest of national security in his latest Twitter Files report published Thursday. The “Twitter Files #17” thread focuses on the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a subsidiary of the State Department, and its claimed objective to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.” The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab...

Special Counsel John Durham, leading a multi-year probe of how U.S. intelligence officials conducted the Russia investigation, has yet to issue his final report. But according to the New York Times, Durham has already come up empty.

Let’s award 3.14159 stars to Elon Musk for firing Twitter’s lawyer, James Baker, Tuesday. But there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered about the role of Baker, the FBI’s former Russiagate protagonist, in — not one, but two — censorship scandals. First, having been parachuted into Twitter conveniently five months before the 2020 election as deputy general counsel and vice president, Baker played an instrumental role in the censorship of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020. Second, Baker was involved in the potential suppression of material that Musk ordered released from Twitter’s...

Below is my column in the Hill on the first hearings this week to be held by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It could be one of the most consequential investigations for free speech in decades if it pulls back the curtain on government censorship programs. After the historic release of the Twitter Files by Elon Musk, questions remain on any similar coordination with other social media companies with federal agencies like the FBI to target views considered “disinformation” or “misinformation.” Here is the column: This coming week a new House select subcommittee will hold...

Without much fanfare, earlier this week Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer-Prize winning former New York Times investigative reporter, dropped a thorough and damning four-part article dissecting the media’s obsessive reporting on Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. Even more surprising, Gerth’s report, “The press versus the president,” appeared at the in-house organ of America’s most prestigious journalism school, Columbia Journalism Review, which has long been regarded as something of an unofficial ombudsman for the media industry. If CJR is finally comfortable admitting that the media’s Russiagate reporting was so scandalously bad that it damns the entire industry, that seems like a...

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork ... Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as...