Free Republic

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee communicated through phone calls and text messages last spring with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch in order to gain access to Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the salacious and unverified anti-Trump dossier. Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) texted back and forth with lobbyist Adam Waldman, who runs the Endeavor Group -- which has ties to (surprise!) Hillary Clinton -- while leading the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into President Trump's alleged ties to Russia with his Republican colleague North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr.In one text to the lobbyist, the senator expressed a desire...

The Department of Justice reportedly seized a New York Times reporter's phone and email records this year in an effort to probe the leaking of classified information, the first known instance of the DOJ going after a journalist's data under President Trump. The Times reported Thursday that the DOJ seized years' worth of records from journalist Ali Watkins's time as a reporter at BuzzFeed News and Politico before she joined The Times in 2017 as a federal law enforcement reporter, according to the report Thursday. Watkins was alerted by a prosecutor in February that the DOJ had years of records...

A former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee has been indicted and arrested on charges of making false statements to the FBI during an investigation into the leak of classified information, the Justice Department announced Thursday. As part of the investigation, law enforcement officials seized years worth of phone and email records of a New York Times reporter, Ali Watkins, who had previously been in a romantic relationship with the staffer, the newspaper reported Thursday evening. The Senate staffer, James A. Wolfe, was indicted on three counts of making false statements while he served as the committee’s director of...

Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was the primary target of a Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSIC) staffer indicted for lying about his contacts with reporters, according to an indictment released on Thursday. James Wolfe, the former director of security for the SSIC panel, was in contact with at least three reporters at around the time they published articles about Page, an energy consultant who is a central player in the investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. Wolfe, 57, is charged with lying to the FBI during a Dec. 15, 2017 interview about whether he...

"In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars."  U.S. government "Summary of Evidence" for an Iraqi member of al Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay, CubaFOR MANY, the debate over the former Iraqi regime's ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network ended a year ago with the release of the 9/11 Commission report. Media outlets seized on a carefully worded summary that the commission had found no evidence "indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or...

The sordid tale now making the rounds in the "mainstream" press of a rogue Pentagon intelligence operation has all the elements of an urban legend: heavy breathing, a secret basement office "down by the ramp" and government officials who form a hidden alliance based on long-ago ties to an obscure but influential university guru. Only the work of a few good men with the courage to face up to this "cabal" - and a few crusader-journalists to help them - can make the demons scatter and scare the dark ones into the light. Or so the story goes on those...

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact...