Free Republic

For years, world leaders have accused Russia of funding environmental groups in Europe to steer nations away from energy independence and strengthen Russia’s iron grip over the continent. As nations across the globe begin shunning Russian oil in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. leaders are also questioning how deep Russia’s ties go in the environmental community. "The Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe because they sic them on the energy projects that aren’t Russian," James Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign...

The Biden family and its business associates received millions of dollars from oligarchs in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine while Joe Biden was vice president, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee. With the new payments included, the committee says it has now identified more than $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates. Those foreign sources include not only the three aforementioned countries, but also China and Romania as well. Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer previously testified that then-Vice President Biden joined roughly 20 phone calls on speakerphone...

Hunter Biden helped the U.S. law firm that employed him secure a lucrative retainer with Burisma Holdings a decade ago, and its lawyers proceeded to draft a 58-page plan to try to extricate the controversial energy company from an ongoing criminal investigation in Ukraine that relied heavily on trying to influence his father’s administration in Washington, according to evidence gathered by the FBI. The “legal defense plan” memo by Boies Schiller & Flexner, obtained by Just the News, was part of a collection of 3.39 million pages of evidence that federal agents seized during the 2016 election as part of...

An email made public through the organization WikiLeaks suggests that a company controlled in part by the family of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons mastermind donated to the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative before a different company controlled by the same family was awarded a 35-year no-bid lease to Port Canaveral’s cargo container terminal.

The Qataris, and their ruling al-Thani family, are slavers, narcotics traffickers, and financiers of international terrorism. They also happen to be America’s closest ally under Obama. When analyzing the foreign policy interventions of the Obama administration with respect to the Middle East, it is hard to reconcile their respective approaches Libya (2011) and Iraq (2014). In 2011, Obama justified the military action to remove Muammar Gaddafi on the basis of anticipated genocide by the Gaddafi regime. Speaking at the National Defense University on March 28, 2011, Obama explained “I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves...

There are a few potentially important details surrounding the timeline leading to Bowe Bergdahl’s release that might deserve some discussion. Truth Revolt supplies some details on the timeline: This week’s [the week of Bergdahl’s release] secret diplomacy was not the first time the U.S. government had engaged the Taliban in an effort to negotiate a prisoner swap for the release of Bergdahl. In 2011, State Department officials held a series of meetings with Taliban leaders in Doha. In Congress, there was bipartisan opposition to any release of Guantanamo prisoners. After the negotiations were made public in early 2012 by Sen....

China has been taking advantage of a 'data void' in order to flood social media platforms with Chinese-backed conspiracy theories regarding the origins of Covid-19, which in turn affects algorithmic results from popular search engines such as Google and Bing, according to the Washington Post, citing a Tuesday report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD).The Chinese posts have almost exclusively focused on a theory that Covid-19 was created in a lab at Fort Detrick, home to the US Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) - which will ring a bell for anyone who read The Hot Zone,...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged a company cofounded by Paul Pelosi Jr. with fraud on Wednesday after learning that two convicted criminals were running the business. Paul Pelosi Jr., the son of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), was the president and chief operating officer of Natural Blue Resources Inc., an investment company he cofounded that focuses on “environmentally-friendly” ventures. The SEC charged four individuals with fraud, including former New Mexico Gov. Toney Anaya, and suspended trading in the company’s stock. Pelosi owned over 10 million shares in the company in 2009

A US government laboratory mistakenly mixed a common flu strain with a dangerous and deadly type of bird flu and shipped it to another lab, authorities said Friday. The latest news followed admissions of mishandled anthrax and forgotten smallpox vials at separate US government labs, and raised new concerns about the safety of dangerous agents which could be used as bioterror weapons. No one was endangered by the mixed flu strain, said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden, who nevertheless said he was "astonished" that protocols could have been violated in that way. "Everything we have looked...

After back-to-back potentially serious laboratory accidents, federal health officials announced on Friday that they had closed the flu and anthrax laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and have halted shipments of all infectious agents from the agency’s highest-security labs. The accidents, and the C.D.C.'s emphatic response to them, could have important implications for other laboratories around the world engaged in research into dangerous viruses and bacteria. If the C.D.C — which the agency’s director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, called “the reference laboratory to the world” — had multiple accidents that could have, in theory, killed not just laboratory...

**SNIP** Obama breaks three decades of silence with call to Iranian president Obama began by congratulating Rouhani on his June election. He referred to the long mistrust between the two sides but said he believed the talks were already making progress. Obama Calls to Congratulate Putin As the New York Times reported earlier in the week, there are serious charges that Putin rigged the election: “A day after claiming an overwhelming victory in Russia’s presidential election, Vladimir V. Putin on Monday faced a range of challenges to his legitimacy, including charges of fraud from international observers and a defiant opposition...

US, Russia held secret Ukraine meeting on Finnish island: Helsinki AFP | Aug 27, 2014, 03.20 AM IST HELSINKI: The United States and Russia met on a small Finnish island in June for confidential talks on the Ukraine crisis, the Nordic nation's foreign ministry said on Tuesday. The ministry said the meeting was held on the island of Boistoe off the southern coast of Finland, but did not divulge who participated or at what level, and also did not disclose what was discussed. "The foreign ministry confirms that the meeting was organised and the ministry helped at the request of...

"Our message absolutely is don't send your children unaccompanied, on trains or through a bunch of smugglers," Obama told ABC News on Thursday. "We don't even know how many of these kids don't make it, and may have been waylaid into sex trafficking or killed because they fell off a train." "Do not send your children to the borders," Obama said. "If they do make it, they'll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it."

A watchdog group on Monday sued the U.S. government, accusing the Obama White House of interfering in and thwarting the release of public documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the group Cause of Action (CoA) names 12 federal agencies that delayed the release of documents so officials could consult with White House under a new process established in spring 2009. The process, which gave White House officials review authority over documents that federal agencies wanted to release that mentioned the White House or presidential aides,...

(CNSNews.com) - Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Wednesday called out the IRS on holding back information regarding lost emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner, telling the IRS Commissioner John Koskinen at a House Subcommittee for Economic Growth, Job Creation, and Regulatory Affairs on Capitol Hill, “You guys were never going to tell us until we caught you.” At the hearing titled, “An Update on the IRS Response to its Targeting Scandal,” Jordan explained the timeline of events in the ongoing IRS investigation, citing how Koskinen knew about the missing emails in April yet waited until June 13, 2014 to...

EXCLUSIVE: Tech company which maintained Hillary's secret server was sued for 'illegally accessing' database and 'stealing White House military advisers' phone numbers' The Internet company used by Hillary Clinton to maintain her private server was sued for stealing dozens of phone lines including some which were used by the White House. Platte River Networks is said to have illegally accessed the master database for all US phone numbers. It also seized 390 lines in a move that created chaos across the US government. Among the phone numbers which the company took - which all suddenly stopped working - were lines...

"These five guys are not a threat to the United States," says Clinton. "They are a threat to the safety and security of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's up to those two countries to make the decision once and for all that these are threats to them. So I think we may be kind of missing the bigger picture here. We want to get an American home, whether they fell off the ship because they were drunk or they were pushed or they jumped, we try to rescue everybody." Last week President Obama traded the Taliban 5, who were being...

Immunity agreements offered to two of Hillary Clinton's top aides prevented the FBI from looking into the circumstances surrounding the use of BleachBit, a digital deletion tool, to destroy the former secretary of state's emails. In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch Wednesday, four Republican committee chairmen demanded to know why Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two witnesses who also served as Clinton's personal attorneys, were granted such expansive protections despite the FBI's awareness that they had participated in potentially illegal activities. For example, the FBI agreed to limit its search to emails written after June 1, 2014, but...

WASHINGTON — An American kidnapped two years ago in Yemen while helping coordinate aid for Unicef and the Red Cross also had a second, secret role: He was shipping materials for elite military commandos under a clandestine contract his employer had with the Pentagon. The arrangement with Special Operations forces has never been made public. {snip} Mr. Darden’s work offers a rare look into the shadowy world of military contractors that operate in lawless war zones like Yemen, Somalia and Libya. But arrangements like the one Transoceanic had with Special Operations forces can cast suspicion over aid workers, potentially putting...

Islamist groups seized the headquarters of the Libyan army's special forces in Libya's second city Benghazi after days of fighting, as a huge blaze raged at a fuel depot near the capital's airport. An Islamist and jihadist alliance announced the capture Tuesday of the main military base in the eastern city in a statement which was confirmed by an army official. He said jihadists of Ansar al-Sharia, blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by Washington, were among the groups. Intense fighting in Benghazi for the past week has claimed about 60 lives since Saturday, medical officials in the city said. "Special...