Free Republic

**SNIP** How Epstein entered Clinton’s orbit remains unclear. When the president released his initial statement on Epstein, he did not explain the multiple other trips he appears to have taken on the financier’s plane—including one flight to Westchester with Epstein, his alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell, and an “unnamed female.” Clinton also failed to mention the intimate 1995 fundraising dinner at the Palm Beach home of Revlon mogul Ron Perelman, where Clinton hobnobbed with the likes of Epstein, Don Johnson, and Jimmy Buffett. (Nearby, at Epstein’s own Palm Beach mansion, the money man allegedly abused hundreds of underage girls.) The two...

The "Tech Executive-1" in John Durham's indictment of a Democratic cybersecurity lawyer testified in a lawsuit that he had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights when asked to testify by the special counsel. Rodney Joffe, former senior vice president at Neustar, coordinated in 2016 with Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was indicted last year for allegedly concealing his clients, including Hillary Clinton's campaign and Joffe, from the FBI in September 2016 when he pushed debunked claims of a secret back channel between the Trump Organization and Russia's Alfa Bank. Alfa Bank filed a "John Doe" lawsuit and deposed Joffe in...

House lawmakers want the Trump administration to investigate reports that a wealthy foundation used an offshore shell company to give millions of dollars to environmental activists opposed to U.S. energy development. “If you connect the dots, it is clear that Russia is funding U.S. environmental groups in an effort to suppress our domestic oil and gas industry, specifically hydraulic fracking,” Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith said Friday. Smith and Texas Republican Rep. Randy Weber asked Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to investigate whether or not environmentalists were funneling money to U.S. environmental groups through a Bermuda-based shell company. Republicans are pitching...

The U.S. Secret Service (USSS) says it cannot locate years of records on communications regarding agents guarding Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden. Hunter Biden was a Secret Service protectee from Jan. 29, 2009, to July 8, 2014, and traveled extensively during that time, including to Russia, China, and India, a congressional investigation found. As part of the probe, which is ongoing, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have sought records from the Secret Service in their roles as the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Secret Service provided some 261 heavily redacted pages...

Wow! The Wall Street Journal in 2016: The Clinton Foundation, State and Kremlin Connections. Why did Hillary’s State Department urge U.S. investors to fund Russian research for military uses? A program overseen by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as part of the "reset" with Russia wound up enhancing Russia's military technology and funneling millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Both the U.S. Army and the FBI found that the program, intended to support Russia's version of Silicon Valley, was exploited to improve Russia's military capability. The FBI warned several American technology companies in 2014 that the city of...

[As background for this article, it would be helpful to read these previous posts: Palin's Choice: An Afterword, The saving grace of the republican imperative, Guaranteeing republican government-a little dialogue, Is Palin's lead a pitfall for the pro-life cause?, Sarah Palin-Personally pro-life, but...?, and Kentucky's Bill Johnson-a thoroughbred conservative for the U.S. Senate.] I was with Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Bill Johnson when the news came that Sarah Palin had endorsed one of Bill's opponents, Rand Paul, in the race for the Republican nomination. We were in the Student Center cafeteria taking time out for a little refreshment after...

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) appeared on Fox News’ “Hannity” this week to discuss the origins of the Steele dossier. He said it should really be called the “Simpson” dossier. Although Christopher Steele likely contributed “stories” to the dossier, and his years of experience in British intelligence lent credence to the document, Nunes believes that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson may actually have written the majority of it. In his book “Spygate,” journalist Dan Bongino makes the same case. He points out the striking similarities between articles Simpson and his wife, Mary Jacoby wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2007...

A U.S. intelligence report for the first time links China’s largest telecommunications company to Beijing’s KGB-like intelligence service and says the company recently received nearly a quarter-billion dollars from the Chinese government. The disclosures are a setback for Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.’s efforts to break into the U.S. telecommunications market. The company has been blocked from doing so three times by the U.S. government because of concerns about its links to the Chinese government. The report by the CIA-based Open Source Center states that Huawei’s chairwoman, Sun Yafang, worked for the Ministry of State Security (MSS) Communications Department before joining...

Today, the Justice Department unsealed charges in a significant national security cyber matter.  The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Washington (EDWA) and the National Security Division (NSD) have charged two Chinese hackers working with the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), including the Guangdong State Security Department (GSSD) of the MSS, with a sweeping global computer intrusion campaign.  In making this announcement, I’m joined here by Dave Bowdich, Deputy Director of the FBI, Bill Hyslop, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, and Raymond Duda, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Seattle Field...

resident Biden is tapping former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu to coordinate the implementation of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, the White House announced Sunday. “In this role, Landrieu will oversee the most significant and comprehensive investments in American infrastructure in generations - work that independent experts verify will create millions of high-paying, union jobs while boosting our economic competitiveness in the world, strengthening our supply chains, and acting against inflation for the long term,” the White House said in a news release. In Sunday’s announcement, the White House touted Landrieu’s work shepherding New Orleans through its recovery following...

A DEADLY terrorist weapon could be buried in the backyards of Darwin's northern suburbs, US scientists fear. US authorities say melioidosis - commonly known as Nightcliff Gardeners Disease - is a potential bioterror threat. The US Government believes the tropical disease, caused by soil-dwelling bacteria, could become the next anthrax-style bioterrorism threat.

This is one of a series of detailed accounts of bear attacks found with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by AmmoLand. On September 7, 2010, a pair of archery hunters were stalking moose in a remote part of Wyoming near Pinedale. A large boar grizzly bear attacked them. Fortunately, they were able to shoot the bear and stop the attack. In the morning, one of their guides had been scouting the area. He had seen two bull moose and what he thought was a large black bear. When he told the hunters about the moose and the bear, the...

DETROIT - President Joe Biden plans to take executive action Tuesday to ensure minorities, low-income Americans and others have better access to quality legal representation after services dwindled during the Trump administration. Biden will sign a memorandum directing the Department of Justice to restore key functions of the shuttered Access to Justice Office and to reestablish the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable. The plans are laid out in a presidential memo first shared with The Associated Press. The pandemic “has further exposed and exacerbated inequities in our justice system” as legal services were curtailed, Biden wrote. He added that...

The U.S. military is looking into an incident on Saturday in which it lost communications with 50 long-range nuclear-armed missiles based in the northern United States. The U.S. Air Force's new Global Strike Command lost communications with the missiles for about 45 minutes, and says it immediately dispatched troops to inspect the sites. The check determined there was no damage and no evidence of sabotage. A spokesman for the command says investigators believe a faulty circuit board at a control center was to blame. The spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel John Thomas, says experts found that the same type of part failed...

Make no mistake: Congressmen Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy are proud Republicans. But they believe the party had lost sight of the ideals it believes in, like economic freedom, limited government, the sanctity of life, and putting families first. This isn’t your grandfather’s Republican party. These Young Guns of the House GOP—Cantor (the leader), Ryan (the thinker), and McCarthy (the strategist)—are ready to take their belief in the principles that have made America great and translate it into solutions that will make the future even better, solutions that will create private sector jobs, maximize individual freedom, and establish...

Indonesian officials are monitoring the country's most active volcano after it erupted again Saturday morning, launching hot ash clouds high into the air, and sending lava spewing down the side of the mountain. Ash plumes shot more than 600 feet into the air as volcanic debris spilled down the slopes of Mount Merapi in Yogyakarta on the densely populated Indonesian island of Java, about 250 miles east of Jakarta. The volcano erupted hot clouds of ash at least eight times, and sent several pyroclastic flows down its slopes, according to the Indonesia's Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation. No...

As moratorium lifts, oversight is put in place to assess studies on eradicated cattle virus. Research is set to resume on the rinderpest virus, the cause of a deadly cattle disease that was declared eradicated in 2011 and has been off limits for study ever since. The moratorium — part of efforts to guard against accidental or intentional release of virus that could reintroduce the disease — was lifted on 10 July and replaced by a new international oversight system for such research. In its heyday, the disease — the only one other than smallpox to be eradicated from nature...

Chinese spies have targeted Belgian biological warfare and vaccine experts, Belgium's security service suspects. They are also targeting British pharmaceutical giant and vaccine-maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in Belgium and Belgian high-tech firms, Belgian intelligence fears. The suspicions were detailed in confidential Belgian reports dated from 2010 to 2016, seen by EUobserver. They were meant to alert Belgian authorities to the threat of Chinese military, scientific, and medical espionage. But the Belgian suspicions have no direct link to the current coronavirus pandemic, which started in China in December 2019 due to natural causes, according to the scientific consensus. And the reports, which...

We've fought in Afghanistan for 16 years now. Are we making progress? After 9/11, we invaded, overthrew the Taliban, killed Osama Bin Laden and -- stayed. Afghanistan is now America's longest war, ever. President Trump's solution? He'll send several thousand more soldiers. Erik Prince says he has a better idea -- fight terrorists with only 2,000 American Special Operations personnel, plus "a contractor force" of 6,000. Prince is the founder of Blackwater, the private military contractor. The military uses contractors to provide security, deliver mail, rescue soldiers and more. Private contractors often do jobs well, for much less than the...

During a 45-minute speech, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner claimed that in 2010 a former Obama administration official asked Argentina to “provide the Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear fuel” under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency. According to Kirchner, Gary Samone, who was the White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction at the time, visited Argentina in the hopes of convincing them to provide reactor fuel. When the Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs asked for the request in writing, they never heard from Samone again.