Free Republic

EXCLUSIVE: Security at the State Department's Benghazi compound was so dire that another contractor was brought in to clean up the mess just two weeks before the 2012 terror attack – and was later pressured to keep quiet by a government bureaucrat under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to two men from the American security company.    Brad Owens and Jerry Torres, of Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions, say they faced pressure to stay silent and get on the same page with the State Department with regard to the security lapses that led to the deaths of four Americans. They spoke...

MADBURY, N.H. — The Kremlin hacked our presidential election, is waging a cyberwar against our NATO allies and is probing opportunities to use similar tactics against democracies worldwide. Why then are federal agencies, local and state governments and millions of Americans unwittingly inviting this threat into their cyber networks and secure spaces? That threat is posed by antivirus and security software products created by Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based company with extensive ties to Russian intelligence. To close this alarming national security vulnerability, I am advancing bipartisan legislation to prohibit the federal government from using Kaspersky Lab software. Kaspersky Lab insists...

A Judge Forces the State Department to Open Up on Clinton Emails Retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Sues Justice Department for Clinton Investigation Documents A Judge Forces the State Department to Open Up on Clinton Emails Way too slowly, but surely, the government is revealing, under our pressure, what it knows about Hillary Clinton’s scandalous misuse of email. This week United States District Judge James E. Boasberg ruled that the Department of State must make public a FBI declaration detailing its efforts to retrieve the former secretary of state’s government emails ( Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Rex Tillerson (No....

Kurt Smolek, a Diplomatic Security special agent with the State Department and Dayton Police Academy graduate, was found dead in the Potomac River on Wednesday and the cause is listed as undetermined pending an autopsy. We're hearing tonight that Smolek, 45, is a 1998 academy graduate and one of his assignments as a special agent was as a member of Condoleezza Rice's security team. According to DC Metro police, Smolek was last seen Monday, Aug. 28, in the 600 block of Water Street, Southwest, about 10 p.m. A missing persons bulletin described hims as white with graying brown hair, brown...

Most of the United States’ special envoys will be abolished and their responsibilities reassigned as part of the State Department overhaul, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Congress on Monday, including envoys for climate change and the Iran deal. Special envoys for Afghanistan-Pakistan, disability rights and closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center will be eliminated under the plan. But President Donald Trump’s administration plans to keep envoys for religious freedom, fighting anti-Semitism and LGBT rights, despite speculation from critics that it would seek to downgrade those priorities. Lawmakers of both parties, think tanks and even the diplomats’ association have long...

Like millions of Americans, I watched President Donald Trump’s speech from my living room on August 21, 2017. It is the third time an American president has addressed our nation on Afghanistan, now the longest war in American history. To those of us familiar with the region, the speech was business as usual, with a few notable changes. But for those Americans with loved ones in Pakistan, the president’s speech was a plainspoken warning – fall in line Pakistan, or face the consequences. Taking the speech to its furthest extrapolation, without change, Pakistan will soon face US sanctions. Certainly for...

A science envoy for the Department of State sent a resignation letter to President Donald Trump on Wednesday with a not-so-subtle secret message: “IMPEACH.” Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, told Trump in a letter dated Wednesday that his decision to quit his State Department post is “in response to your attacks on core values of the United States.” As one example, he cited Trump’s reaction to the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, calling the response “consistent with a broader pattern of behavior that enables sexism and racism.” But it’s Kammen’s acrostic — the...

The swamp is overflowing. It's on the garden path. It's in the lawn. It's on the front stairs. It's in the foyer. It's certainly in Foggy Bottom. The State Department hosted this month leaders from the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, which represents a number of organizations including American Muslims for Palestine, or AMP, an organization that promotes "extreme anti-Israel views" and "anti-Zionist" propaganda, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Israel hate groups.

President Trump is in front of the rhetorical brinkmanship with North Korea, but it’s Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson who has the tough behind-the-scenes role of managing fallout from the administration’s first genuine international crisis, sparked by reports that Pyongyang may now have a nuclear bomb small enough to fit on a missile that could hit the U.S. mainland. The standoff is a defining moment for America’s top diplomat six months into his tenure at Foggy Bottom. Meanwhile, many key leadership posts — including ambassador to South Korea — remain unfilled, fears of budget cuts and reorganizations are high,...

Judicial Watch Victory: Court Orders State to Search Benghazi Emails of Clinton Advisors Judicial Watch / Allied Educational Foundation Stand for Rule of Law on Gerrymandering Judicial Watch Goes to Supreme Court to Protect Clean Elections Judicial Watch Victory: Court Orders State to Search Benghazi Emails of Clinton Advisors Your Judicial Watch had a major court victory this week in our effort to get accountability in the Obama/Clinton Benghazi scandal. This week, D.C. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta ordered the State Department “to search the state.gov e-mail accounts of Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Jacob Sullivan,” former aides...

A leaked memo appears to undermine significant details in a new book from a witness to the embassy attacks. But its alleged author tells The Daily Beast he didn't write it. The debate over the Obama administration’s actions before and after the attack on the U.S. mission was reignited following an Oct. 27 60 Minutes report featuring an interview with Morgan Jones Controversy over Jones’s interview and book reached a high pitch on Oct. 31 when The Washington Post published details of an incident report allegedly written by Jones that contradicts the account in his book and reveals his real...

Justice Department Blacks Out Talking Points on Lynch-Clinton Tarmac Meeting Abedin Emails Contained Classified Information and Reveal Pay to Play Judicial Watch Warns California on Dirty Voting Rolls Justice Department Blacks Out Talking Points on Lynch-Clinton Tarmac Meeting We have begun to see how the Trump administration responds over time to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) queries, especially our requests regarding shady dealings in the Obama administration. We aren’t encouraged. One must wonder if Obama holdovers at the Department of Justice (DOJ) are still calling the shots, or whether President Trump’s appointees simply don’t care about battling government corruption...

The case was over the abduction of Dong-Shik, a South Korean who was a permanent resident of the US and had spent seven years providing aid and proselytizing to North Korean defectors. An Israeli NGO announced on Monday that a US federal court in Washington, DC has granted it a historic $330 million default award judgment against North Korea in a civil damages trial for wrongful death, torture and kidnapping. The judgment, only announced Monday, but written on April 9, included $15 million dollars each to the son and brother of Reverend Dong Shik Kim, presumed dead, as well as...

The Cold War between the president and secretary of state became obvious from the latest State Department annual report on the global terrorism situation, which blames Israeli security policies for stalling the peace process and claims that the Palestinian leadership rarely incites terror attacks. This, in spite of Trump’s repeated statements of support for Israel. In the 2016 State Department Country Report on Terrorism, State clearly took the position of the Palestinian Authority against Israel. That was particularly evident in citing changes on the Temple Mount as incitement of terror, clearly referring to Israel’s recent erecting metal detectors at the...

The State Department under Secretary Rex Tillerson has been locked in a growing power struggle with the White House that has angered officials in the West Wing and sparked claims that the Trump administration's top diplomatic organ is now in "open war" with the White House on a range of critical issues, including the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, Iran, the crisis with Qatar, and other matters, according to multiple sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon about the situation. The State Department is said to be in a state of "massive dysfunction," with top officials working under Tillerson ignoring White House...

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has told friends he thinks he will be lucky to last a year leading the State Department, according to a new report. Foreign policy leaders, including Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, have been clashing with West Wing insiders, such as adviser Sebastian Gorka and chief strategist Steve Bannon, over foreign policy outlook and strategy, Reuters reports: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has told friends he will be lucky to last a year in his job, according to a friend, while two officials said national security adviser H.R. McMaster was frustrated by what he...

The State Department is has long been compromised — State Department careerists work for the countries they are assigned to, not to America, and that’s the problem. The State Department is the problem. We need patriots and freedom lovers in state craft, not Muslim Brotherhood lackeys. President Trump is attempting to overhaul the State Department and leave his “America First” stamp on the cumbersome bureaucracy — a move that is reportedly making former officials very nervous. Trump’s war on the State Department The Hill, July 2017: President Trump is seeking to radically remodel the State Department in an unprecedented way,...

When Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik massacred 14 people in San Bernardino, California in 2015, newly retired Department of Homeland Security Officer Philip Haney was horrified to discover that a major case he spent years developing might have helped prevent the attack had it not been shut down by a branch of his own agency and Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Now, in his ongoing effort to help prevent future attacks by uncovering how the government quashed his case, three federal agencies either have flatly denied they have any communications or records related to the case, known as the Tablighi Jamaat Initiative, or...

Judicial Watch released 448 pages of documents Friday showing further incidences of Huma Abedin, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff in the State Department, allocating special treatment to Clinton Foundation donors while Clinton served as Secretary of State. ... The latest batch of documents released Friday arrived long after the conservative legal watchdog organization filed its lawsuit in May 2015 requesting "all emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-state.gov" email address." The 448 pages...

Obama Advisor Susan Rice’s Unmasking Material is at the Obama Library Judicial Watch Sues for Obama Family Travel and Secret Service Costs President Trump: Please End the Obstruction on Benghazi Cover-up Documents Supreme Court to Hear Big Case Against Proposed Wisconsin Redistricting Obama Advisor Susan Rice’s Unmasking Material is at the Obama Library Your Judicial Watch performed a massive public service this week. We exposed how key Obama spying scandal documents, including the infamous Susan Rice unmasking records, were moved to the Obama Presidential Library. The National Security Council (NSC) informed us by letter on May 23, 2017, that...