Free Republic

Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan is coming to Washington, DC, on May 16 loaded for bear.  He has an ambitious agenda and apparently feels he can achieve it all because he holds “trump” cards against the President of the United States. Erdogan and his proxies have publicly said they want to convince the United States to jettison its budding alliance with the Syrian Democratic Union (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Kurdish group that has become the tip of the spear in the fight against ISIS in Syria. On this point, they will encounter resistance...

When the Obama EPA is not spying on cattle and pork ranches with drones, they’re illegally releasing information on livestock producers to far left extremist groups. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Pork Producers are furious after the Obama Environmental Protection Agency illegally gave information on livestock farmers to extremist animal rights groups. Farm Futures reported: NCBA and the National Pork Producers Council are both furious with EPA for handing extremist groups illegally gathered data on farmers who operate confined animal feeding operations. NCBA said early this week it was notified by the EPA that the agency had...

The secretive head of the agency’s National Clandestine Service is retiring amid reports of infighting over a reorganization of the intelligence service. The director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the storied home of the agency’s most secretive intelligence operations, has announced that he plans to retire, The Daily Beast has learned. CIA spokesman Dean Boyd confirmed that the director announced his retirement “after a long and distinguished career at CIA. We thank him for this profound and lasting contributions to both CIA and to our nation’s security.”

A federal judge in Maine on Friday barred the Trump administration from enforcing sanctions on two U.S. citizens and human rights advocates who work with the International Criminal Court (ICC).On April 11, Matthew Smith and Akila Radhakrishnan, a human rights nonprofit leader and lawyer, respectively, filed a 39-page lawsuit against President Donald Trump and several other members of his administration over an executive order that imposes sanctions on the ICC, prohibits certain interactions with designated ICC officials, and threatens both civil and criminal penalties for any such violations.The lawsuit was premised on the idea that the sanctions "violate their First...

One lesson from the ongoing scandal is that it lifted the curtain of foreign governments’ covert influence campaigns in the United States. Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop revealed much information, including Hunter’s shady business dealings in Ukraine and China, raising questions about the extent to which President Biden was involved in his son’s business activities. This ongoing scandal lifted the curtain of foreign governments’ covert influence campaigns in the United States. No government has conducted such influence campaigns more effectively than Communist China. To understand China’s influence campaigns on foreign soil, one has to get familiar with a secretive Chinese government...

Anxious FBI chiefs are trawling through 'numerous' top-level investigations spanning 22 years for fear they were compromised by convicted bureau spook Charles McGonigal, DailyMail.com can reveal. The forensic clean-up operation ranges over the entire time the philandering former head of counterintelligence in New York worked for the agency. McGonigal, 55, has already been sentenced to four years and two months in prison for taking money and conspiring with a sanctioned Russian oligarch who is a crony of despot President Vladimir Putin. But the full possible repercussions of his treachery are outlined in a sentencing memorandum by the US government for...

Could Barack Obama have orchestrated the “Russia hoax” – what Donald Trump has called “the crime of the century”? A closer look at Obama’s political rise in Chicago and his governing style in Washington suggests it’s far from implausible, and even likely. While the mainstream media has long celebrated Obama for his eloquence, historic symbolism, and aspirational rhetoric about “hope and change,” his career tells a completely different story. Beneath the polished image lies a consistent pattern of ruthless tactics and deceptive narratives straight from the Chicago machine playbook. “The Chicago Way” refers to a hardball and often corrupt style...

Here is the Russian Collusion "A" Team who coordinated Brennan, Hillary, and the CIA. Michael Joseph Morell is a former American intelligence analyst. He served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency as well as its acting director twice, first in 2011 and then from 2012 to 2013. From July 1, 2011, to September 6, 2011, he served his first stint as acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, replacing Leon Panetta who was named as Secretary of Defense. On November 9, 2012, Morell once again became acting director after the resignation of David Petraeus, following a sex...

Retired Marine Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright has reportedly lost his security clearance as an investigation into his involvement in national security leaks continues, Foreign Policy reports. Cartwright, a retired four-star general who served for 40 years and last served on the Joint Chiefs, has been the subject of an ongoing investigation into an alleged leak of classified information of the "Stuxnet" virus that targeted and temporarily disabled Iran's nuclear facilities in 2010. The general's legal team has called that assertion "preposterous." Gordon Lubold of FP reports that multiple current and former administration sources said Cartwright lost his clearance earlier this...

Two spectacular al Qaeda prison breaks in Iraq, freeing over 500 of its members in two separate prisons simultaneously this week, demonstrate the group is back with a vengeance. Al Qaeda’s Iraq branch is also the moving force behind the jihadist success in Syria. The resurgence of al Qaeda in Iraq has sobering implications for what is likely to follow the drawdown of NATO forces in Afghanistan for the al Qaeda mother ship in Pakistan. The double jailbreaks at Abu Ghraib and Taji prisons were massive attacks. Suicide bombers, teams of attackers using mortars and small arms, and two dozen...

ABC News White House Correspondent Tara Palmeri revealed that Alec Baldwin once told her "I hope you choke to death" when she was on assignment for the New York Post, according to a Friday afternoon tweet. Palmeri's tweet came after the actor's arrest and charge for misdemeanor assault in a fight over a parking spot. Alec Baldwin also told me "I hope you choke to death" when I was on assignment, staking out his house," Palmeri wrote of an incident that she said happened in 2013 when she was a reporter for the Post. Palmeri alleged that Baldwin also grabbed...

An elite group of unmanned aerial systems operators, support and maintenance staff will now call Fort Huachuca their home after an activation ceremony Tuesday morning. A brief ceremony held in Hanger 1 at Libby Army Air Field celebrated the official transfer of Echo Company, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, to this Southern Arizona post for the next two years. The company consists of 150 hand-picked soldiers and 12 UAS vehicles, which will train for eventual deployment to Afghanistan sometime early next year. “This is a key day in our history,” Col. John Evans, Jr., Regiment Commander, told an audience of...

Syrians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta say Saudi Arabia provided chemical weapons for an Al-Qaeda linked terrorist group which they blame for the August 21 chemical attack in the region, a Mint Press News report says. The article co-authored by a veteran AP reporter, said interviews with doctors, residents, anti-government forces and their families in Ghouta suggest the terrorists in question received chemical weapons via Saudi spymaster Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud. The report quoted the father of a militant as saying that his son and 12 others were killed inside a tunnel used...

A former United States Air Force counterintelligence agent was charged with espionage after she defected to Iran and helped it target her former colleagues, the authorities said. In an extraordinarily detailed indictment made public on Wednesday, prosecutors disclosed that Monica Elfriede Witt, 39, gave the Iranians the code name and mission of a secret Pentagon program involving American intelligence operations. According to the indictment, she was working with members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The elite paramilitary group is known to carry out terrorist operations around the globe and has been sanctioned by the American government.

A Colorado man who founded and directed an orphanage in Haiti has been sentenced to 210 years in prison for sexually abusing children there. Michael Karl Geilenfeld, 73, founded the St. Joseph’s Home for Boys in 1985, which housed orphaned, impoverished, and vulnerable children in Haiti. In the over two decades that Geilenfeld operated the orphanage, the Department of Justice said that he "repeatedly traveled from the United States to Haiti, where he sexually abused the boys entrusted to his care." The children also suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of Geilenfeld. A federal jury convicted Geilenfeld in...

Senior military analyst Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney spoke to Arutz Sheva on Tuesday, warning that rising Russian and Iranian influence, coupled with America’s waning Middle East presence, has put the US in the most dangerous situation it has been in since the 1930s just prior to World War II. … The General urged the world to wake up to the Iranian nuclear threat, which he fears may be allowed a free hand following deals in the ongoing Geneva conference. Aside from the Iranian danger, McInerney noted that spreading Russian influence poses a serious threat. In particular, McInerney highlighted the...

A veteran Washington D.C. investigative journalist says the Department of Homeland Security confiscated a stack of her confidential files during a raid of her home in August — leading her to fear that a number of her sources inside the federal government have now been exposed. In an interview with The Daily Caller, journalist Audrey Hudson revealed that the Department of Homeland Security and Maryland State Police were involved in a predawn raid of her Shady Side, Md. home on Aug. 6. Hudson is a former Washington Times reporter and current freelance reporter. A search warrant obtained by TheDC indicates...

It’s been over a year and a half since Obama left office, but it still bothers me hearing him speak. Between his trying to take credit for the Trump economy and his claim that he, unlike Trump, didn’t “threaten the freedom of the press,” it's hard not to get angry when he speaks because virtually everything he says is a lie. His trying to take credit for Trump's economy was pathetic, but his claim that he was not an enemy of the free press deserves to be called out. “It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say that we don’t...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he kept his promise from the beginning of Israel’s conflict against Iran that Iran’s nuclear facilities would be destroyed. In a Hebrew video statement to the Israeli public following the US strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Netanyahu says the American operation was conducted in “full coordination” with the IDF. Netanyahu says the US finished the job against Iran’s nuclear sites that was started by the IDF on June 13. “At the beginning of the operation, I promised you that Iran’s nuclear facilities would be destroyed, one way or another. This promise was kept,” Netanyahu says....

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is being mocked mercilessly over a slew of bizarre social media posts that resurfaced as the Israel-Iran war broke out — including his musings about treating a woman right and even being “naughty&playful” as a school kid. The odd posts date back at least a decade and are in stark contrast to the anti-Israel and war rhetoric that now fills the social media feed of the 86-year-old leader and most senior cleric in the extremist Islamic Republic. In one from 2013, Khamenei recalled his awkward school days. “I went 2school w/a cloak since1st days;it...