Free Republic

US records show Starmer met with Attorney General Eric Holder and a host of American and British national security officials in Washington in 2011, when he was in charge of Julian Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden. Starmer was in Washington three times while in charge of Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden. Starmer led five-person British delegation that met with Holder for 45 minutes in Washington in November 2011. Delegation included the UK liaison prosecutor to the US, who dealt with extradition. Meeting was also attended by head of US Department of Justice’s national security division. CPS refuses to clarify to...

Hunter Biden's top business partner had met with then-vice resident Joe Biden in one of 19 visits he made to the White House between 2009 and 2015, according to visitor logs from the Obama administration. Eric Schwerin, former president of Hunter's now-dissolved firm Rosemont Seneca, met with Biden on November 17, 2010, just as Hunter was striking multi-million dollar deals abroad, the New York Post reported. The logs revealed that Schwerin made a total of 19 visits to the White House during Biden's vice presidency, with nine of those visits including meetings with Biden, members of his staff and members...

Just three weeks after getting a shellacking in the midterm elections, President Obama got a fat lip. The president played basketball yesterday with some friends in the gym of the Fort McNair Army Base, and reportedly took an elbow in the mouth from an opposing player who went up for a shot. It took 12 stitches to close The First Fat Lip, if you please. I'm not sure that Joe Frazier needed 12 stitches after the Thrilla in Manila, though the White House stressed that a smaller filament was used, which increases the number of stitches, but leaves a smaller...

A picture is worth a thousand stitches...

Wikileaks is about to drop its biggest-ever bombshell – some 2.7-million confidential diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world – and, although US credibility is likely to take the worst hit, much of the collateral damage may end up in Moscow. "Among the countries whose politicians feature in the reports are Russia, Afghanistan, and former Soviet republics in Central Asia. But other reports also detail potentially embarrassing allegations reported to Washington from US diplomats in other regions, including East Asia and Europe," Reuters reported Thursday, noting that this huge document dump is expected as early as next week. Dispatches...

In November 2010, former president Bill Clinton and then- Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. traveled to Zurich to lobby soccer’s world governing body in support of the U.S. bid to host the 2022 World Cup. Soccer’s popularity was rising in the United States, and a successful bid would bring the most watched sporting event in the world back to the country for the first time in nearly three decades. The Americans were not successful. Instead, Qatar — a small, wealthy emirate on the Persian Gulf — became the first Arab country to be awarded the event. Almost immediately, the...

The Law Firm of Puckett & Faraj, PC, is preparing the defense of LTC Lakin for trial currently scheduled for December 14, 2010 at Fort Meade, MD. LTC Lakin is being charged with missing movement, disobeying orders to report to a new unit, disobeying orders to report to his brigade commander and dereliction of duty. His previous civilian attorney complicated his case and is partially responsible for two of these charges by advising LTC Lakin to refuse to report to his superior officer. The defense team is now working to minimize the damage caused by this inappropriate legal advice and...

(CRIMINAL EVENT) KIDNAPPING RPT B CO 1-501 PIR : 0 INJ/DAM This apparently was one of the documents compliments of Bradly Manning's leaking. The timeline fits. Assigned in 2009 to an Army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, Manning had access to classified databases. In early 2010 she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and confided this to Adrian Lamo, an online acquaintance. Lamo informed Army Counterintelligence, and Manning was arrested in May that same year. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables; and 500,000...

The $2 million cashier's check was drawn at a St. George bank Nov. 5, 2010. From there, it was sent by FedEx to a Los Angeles attorney who represented Ireland-based Full Tilt Poker. Made out to "Mail Media LTD" — a Full Tilt-owned entity used to launder online-gambling funds — the millions then were deposited at Basler Kantonalbank in Switzerland, where Mail Media had an account. And from there, Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings is investigating whether it went into a Marshall Islands account in the name of Searchlight Holding Inc. to benefit, or even bribe, Harry Reid, the once-powerful...

Attorney General Holder heads to Zurich, Switzerland tomorrow to lobby to bring the World Cup to the U.S. in 2022.Justice Dept. says Holder is making the trip to Zurich at the request of Pres. Obama to show US commitment to host World Cup in 2022. Pres. Obama lost U.S. effort in '09 to host 2016 Summer Olympics. WH hopes Holder's mission to Zurich doesn't end up a Swiss miss.Perhaps we'll find out more about the World Cup mission from Holder's cables in the next WikiLeaks document disclosures.

South Korea's navy fired warning shots Wednesday to drive back a North Korean boat which was fishing illegally in southern waters amid high tension along the Yellow Sea border, military officials said. The boat retreated to its side about two hours and 40 minutes after it had intruded across the disputed border, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. A South Korean navy boat fired 10 warning shots from a machine gun after broadcasting three verbal warnings, it said. No one was reported hurt. The North's vessel appeared to have been unable to move for a time because...

South Korea will swiftly and strongly respond with force until North Korea surrenders if the communist state launches another assault, the South's new defence minister said Saturday. Kim Kwan-Jin issued the warning during his inauguration speech after President Lee Myung-Bak officially appointed the retired four-star general as the new defence chief following a parliamentary confirmation hearing Friday. Kim Kwan-Jin replaced Kim Tae-Young, who came under fire over the military's allegedly feeble response to North Korea's deadly shelling of South Korea's Yeonpyeong Island near the tense Yellow Sea border on November 23. "If North Korea launches another military attack on our...

North Korea on Tuesday denied any involvement in sinking the South Korean Navy corvette Cheonan based on what it claims was an internal investigation, the North's official Korean Central News Agency reported. The statement was issued by the top decision-making National Defense Commission. Earlier on May 28, the commission held a press conference for domestic and foreign journalists to rebut the findings of an international probe that put the blame squarely on the North. A South Korean security official said Pyongyang "apparently decided to refuse South Korea's repeated demands for an apology as a precondition for massive aid requested by...

Noteworthy in this short FNN Network News (Japanese) clip located at this page.Click on white triangle on the Japanese text page, after going to the link, to stream (on most systems, up for another day or so). Approximately one minute long clip, from Japanese evening news a few hours ago here in Tokyo.a) Footage of Pyongyang, North Korean TV female announcer spitting bile and filth towards innocent South Korea saying that they deserved the attacks because they started it and more would be on the way. b) Japanese and South Korean reporters today apparantly caught and cornered the envoy...

N.Korea Reinforces Coastal Artillery North Korea is reinforcing artillery bases along the west coast in the lead-up to the first anniversary of the shelling of Yeonpyeong island on Nov. 23. The coastal artillery base that indiscriminately fired at Yeonpyeong Island on Nov. 23, 2010 is on the stretch of coast that is now being reinforced. A South Korean government source on Thursday said intelligence forces have detected signs that the North is building new coastal artillery bases in Kaemori and on Jangsan cape across from the island. "It seems that they were either relocating the artillery base because last year's...

Late last week, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informed the White House of the likely fall-out from the WikiLeaks cable dump, the White House came back with a question: "What's our corrective action?" Clinton's undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, had a simple suggestion: pull the plug on SIPRNet, the classified DoD network that PFC Bradley Manning reportedly used to download the cables from State's inhouse classified database. "The White House said do it," says a senior administration official. The publication by WikiLeaks of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, many of them classified, is forcing an administration-wide intelligence retrenchment as...

Full title: Pagliano Emails Detail Attempts to Hack Clinton Unsecure Email Server 10 Times in Two Days in November 2010 – U.S. Secret Service Informed of Hacking Attempts Pagliano Warned Bill Clinton Aide Justin Cooper, ‘We’d Be Susceptible to Such an Attack’ (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released new State Department documents detailing repeated efforts to hack into the unsecure non-state.gov email system used by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in November 2010. The hacks are detailed in email exchanges between State Department IT official Brian Pagliano and Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper. The emails show the system...

Iran said on Monday an arms shipment sent from an Iranian port and discovered in Lagos was heading to a West African country and the "misunderstanding" had since been cleared up with the Nigerian authorities. "A private company which had sold conventional defence weapons to another country in West Africa had transferred the shipment via Nigeria which raised some doubts with relevant officials," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters.

The State Department this week deemed two more of former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s emails to contain classified information, releasing redacted versions Friday, just days before Election Day. The messages appear to contain U.S. government policy memos toward Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates, preparing Mrs. Clinton for phone calls with leaders of those two nations. Information gleaned from foreign governments, as well as U.S. information about other governments, is supposed to be considered classified from the start. In these instances, like nearly every other of the more than 2,500 messages now deemed classified, there were no markings at the time...

U.S. and Israeli diplomats agreed that the increasingly strained relationship between Turkey and Israel derives mostly from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hatred of the Jewish state, according to embassy cables posted by WikiLeaks.org. Israeli Ambassador to Turkey Gabby Levy described Erdogan as a “fundamentalist” who “hates us religiously” in a 2009 meeting with U.S. Ambassador James F. Jeffrey in Ankara, according to a cable sent from the U.S. embassy on Oct. 27 that year and released by WikiLeaks. “Our discussions with contacts both inside and outside of the Turkish government on Turkey’s deteriorating relations with Israel tend to confirm...