Free Republic

Court documents recently filed by the government further rock the credibility of Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller because they show that as FBI Director Mueller he worked to cover up the connection between a Florida Saudi family and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The documents reveal that Mueller was likely involved in publicly releasing deceptive official agency statements about a secret investigation of the Saudis, who lived in Sarasota, with ties to the hijackers. A Florida journalism nonprofit uncovered the existence of the secret FBI investigation that was also kept from Congress. Under Mueller’s leadership, the FBI tried to discredit the...

Independent journalist Matt Kennard has published a number of documents starkly revealing the degree to which The Guardian has been compromised by British security services, and the impact this relationship has on its reporting of key issues. The newspaper has long sought to present itself - to readers and advertisers alike - as Britain’s foremost ‘anti-establishment’ outlet, and took a leading role in reporting on the mass WikiLeaks cable dump in 2010, and the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, garnering widespread praise and several prestigious journalism awards in the process. In the latter case, the The Guardian’s dissident credentials were...

Convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s friend, former partner and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, was reportedly “very close” to Bill Clinton, who recently went on the record through a spokesman to say he “knows nothing” about Epstein’s crimes. A Politico report from Sunday about the Maxwell-Clinton connection cited a number of anonymous individuals. One of those said to be familiar with the situation claimed that the British socialite Maxwell was not only “incredibly close” to Chelsea Clinton, but also “had her own relationship with Bill Clinton and was very close to him”: Maxwell first grew close with the Clintons after Bill Clinton...

The FBI is asking for help finding leads on a Rio Grande Valley Marine kidnapped at gunpoint in Mexico, the agency said Monday. Armando Torres III, 25, crossed over the Progreso International Bridge on May 14 to visit his father on a ranch near Los Indios, according to an agency news release. There, investigators believe armed intruders took Torres, his father Armando Torres II and uncle Salvador Torres shortly after they arrived. The younger Torres’ sister Cristina Torres, 24, who lives in Virginia, said she got a call from her cousin minutes after the gunmen raced away. “She saw a...

In the early days of the Trump administration, a memo of uncertain origin circulated at the highest levels of the White House laying out a conspiracy theory about "coordinated attacks" on President Trump's foreign policy agenda from a group of former Obama administration officials, according to a memo obtained by The New Yorker's Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow. The memo, which "reads like a U.S. military-intelligence officer's analysis of a foreign-insurgent network," they wrote, posited that "the communications infrastructure ... used to sell ObamaCare and the Iran Deal to the public ('Echo Chamber') has been shifted from the White House...

Just over a year ago, French President Emmanuel Macron came to the United States to import two different species to Washington. One was a French oak tree and the other was a crackdown on free speech. Ironically, soon after the tree was planted, officials quickly dug it up to send it to quarantine. However, the more dangerous species was his acorn of speech controls, a proposal that resulted in rapturous applause from our clueless politicians. Ultimately, the tree died and the acorn has not fared much better. While our politicians may applaud Macron like village idiots, most Americans are hardcore...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. federal court documents show Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández and some of his closest advisers were among the targets of a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation.</p> <p>A document filed by prosecutors on Tuesday in the Southern District of New York mentions Hernández as part of a group of individuals investigated by the DEA since about 2013 for participating “in large-scale drug-trafficking and money laundering activities relating to the importation of cocaine into the United States”.</p>

The veteran FBI agent and a local sheriff’s deputy took no chances when they got a credible tip about a potential terrorist. In a joint operation, they ran his name through a maze of federal criminal and terrorism databases and scrutinized his telephone records for suspicious contacts. Without a warrant, they couldn’t read his emails or listen to his calls. But they watched him from unmarked vehicles to track his daily routine and to see whom he met. They deployed two confidential informants more than a dozen times to secretly record his conversations. They interviewed him twice and convinced him...

In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence. But hundreds of pages of government documents — which Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters. Why special counsel Robert Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from their report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny. The incomplete portrayal...

President Trump was “thrilled” that his campaign acquired Northern Virginia office space at “bargain basement” rates, a campaign official told the Washington Examiner in an interview in the plush 14th floor offices overlooking the Potomac River from Arlington, Va. But campaign finance specialists say the "steal" could violate election law, which views below-market rates for rent as an illegal in-kind campaign donation. The deal was presented as a story of real estate prowess that was a fitting reflection of the man who authored The Art of the Deal. Campaign manager Brad Parscale took advantage of a long-term lease inked in...

British publicist Rob Goldstone in an interview published Monday said that members of the Trump campaign who attended a meeting he facilitated between them and a Russian lawyer should have known the gathering was improper. "People have said to me, 'Shouldn't I have known?' Well, shouldn't they have known? I know nothing about politics, I set up a meeting. Shouldn't they have known?" Goldstone told NBC News. When asked whether he regrets his role in the meeting, Goldstone said he did and wished he had not set it up. “I regret not listening to the little voice in my head,”...

You will hear about the Trump associates, you will hear about the famous, but you won’t hear much about two of the largest beneficiaries from Russian State linked investment in the Paradise Papers. Could this be because between the two of them they control the entire market of social media? When the flood of documents first came out in 2013, it was, and is the second largest “document dump” in history. People have spent years poring over the details, some of which came to light today. It turns out that both Facebook and Twitter received hundreds of millions of dollars...

In 2013, Rosatom, backed by the Russian state, acquired a Canadian uranium mining company, now called Uranium One, which has assets in the U.S. Uranium is a key material for making nuclear weapons. Through the deal, Russia is able to own about 20 percent of U.S. uranium production capacity. However, Colin Chilcoat, an energy affairs specialist who has written extensively about Russia's energy deals, said that the company only extracts about 11 percent of uranium in the U.S. The deal also “doesn’t allow for that uranium to be exported at all,” Chilcoat told Fox News. “It’s not like it’s leaving the...

One thing that that has puzzled a lot of people since the selection of Pope Francis two years ago is how a left-leaning Pope could succeed two very serious conservative Popes—John Paul II and Benedict XVI—who you would have thought had stacked the ranks of the Cardinals with clergy that would perpetuate their theological and philosophical outlook. Was Benedict hounded out of office by some kind of internal Vatican scandal perhaps? Was there some ecclesiastical version of a coup?There’s no evidence that I’m aware of—until now. Three days ago the National Catholic Register ran a very curious article about...

Mohamud is appealing his 2013 conviction on grounds that he was entrapped by undercover federal agents posing as al-Qaida members and the warrantless surveillance of his foreign communications violated his constitutional rights. It marks the first time a federal appeals court is considering whether the National Security Agency’s foreign surveillance programs — the same ones that came under scrutiny after the Edward Snowden leaks a few years ago — violate the Fourth Amendment rights of criminal defendants. Stephen Sady, Mohamud’s public defender, and another attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union urged the court for a new trial on grounds...

The family of Stanford professor Zhang Shoucheng, a world-renowned physicist and venture capitalist, denied speculation on Chinese social media that his death was connected to tensions in US-China relations or the arrest of Huawei’s CFO in Canada on Saturday. Zhang, a tenured professor of physics at Stanford University, was internationally recognised for his work in quantum science. He was also the founding partner of Danhua Capital, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital fund investing mainly in early-stage technologies. Zhang died on Saturday, December 1, according to his family. He was 55. “There is no police investigation, and the authorities have no...

Intercepted conversations between representatives of the Iranian and Argentine governments point to a long pattern of secret negotiations to reach a deal in which Argentina would receive oil in exchange for shielding Iranian officials from charges that they orchestrated the bombing of a Jewish community center in 1994. The transcripts were made public by an Argentine judge on Tuesday night, as part of a 289-page criminal complaint written by Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor investigating the attack. Mr. Nisman was found dead in his luxury apartment on Sunday, the night before he was to present his findings to Congress. In...

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A chief strategist of Venezuela's government-backed cryptocurrency is a former U.S. congressional intern who once organized protests against the same socialist administration he's now helping to circumvent U.S. financial sanctions.Gabriel Jimenez, 27, was catapulted to something of tech stardom in Venezuela last month when he stood alongside President Nicolas Maduro and two Russian businessmen on national TV signing a contract to position the petro, as the fledgling currency is known, among international investors."It's a company founded and led by young Venezuelan geniuses, boys and girls of Venezuela, who have one of the most technologically advanced blockchain...

As he prepared for his presidential run over the last year or so, a hawkish Sen. Ted Cruz has said U.S. policy in the Middle East and elsewhere is a mess because of President Obama’s weakness — particularly his failure to enforce his own “red line” after the Syrian regime used chemical weapons. “A critical reason for Putin’s aggression has been President Obama’s weakness,” the senator said in a typical appearance, on ABC News last year. “You’d better believe that Putin sees that in Syria,” Cruz added. “Obama draws a red line and ignores the red line.” This takes quite...

A US Air Force officer has defected to Iran and shared information that could cause "serious damage" to America's national security, officials have revealed. The former Air Force intelligence specialist was charged with espionage and was accused of working for Iran, according to an unsealed federal indictment. The announcement arrived after Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers and other senior officials held a call with reporters to discuss what they called “a national security related action involving Iran”. Mr Demers was joined by US Attorney for Washington, Jessie Liu, FBI Executive Assistant Director for National Security Jay Tabb,...