Free Republic

Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar and his wife were indicted Friday on charges of conspiracy and accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes from foreign entities, the Justice Department announced. Prosecutors allege Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, began accepting the roughly $600,000 in bribes beginning as early as December of 2014 from an oil and gas company owned by Azerbaijan's government as well as a bank headquartered in Mexico City. While Cuellar's wife allegedly propped up sham front companies on the promise of providing consulting services to the two companies in order to launder the payments, she "performed little to no...

Reid Hoffman previously gave nearly $700K to Biden's reelection effort ... The Democrat tech billionaire who helped rehab Jeffrey Epstein's image and visited his island has poured thousands in donations into several vulnerable Senate races across the country. ... News of the donations come after the Wall Street Journal reported in May that Hoffman visited Epstein’s private Caribbean island, called Little St. James, part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, ... Hoffman and the now-deceased convicted pedophile were planning to return to the island in November 2014, and then travel to Boston, the report said. It's unclear what the intent was...

WASHINGTON—Eleven pages of State Department documents released on Jan. 7 in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch show that Jonathan Winer, an assistant to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, used his private email address to convey information he received from former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to top U.S. diplomatic officials. “I will send them to her [his assistant, Nina Miller] from my non-State email account, not copying myself,” Winer said in response to a December 2014 email from Paul Jones, principal deputy assistant secretary for European Affairs. Jones wanted Winer to use the State...

Universal African People's Organization leader Zaki Baruti (left) and African People's Socialist Party leader Omali Yeshitela.Activists connected to the Leadership Coalition for Justice (formerly called the Justice for Mike Brown Leadership Coalition) and the African People’s Socialist Party announced Friday that they are convening a symbolic grand jury in January to decide for themselves whether former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson should be charged with a crime for killing Michael Brown. The group organizing the symbolic grand jury is called the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement, a group that seeks to liberate and empower people of African descent around the...

It's time to expose the Black Lives Matter [BLM] movement for what it is: a racist, violent hate group that promotes the execution of police officers. The evidence is in their rhetoric and written on their shirts. If you take a look at the Black Lives Matter Twitter feed, you'll find photos of activists wearing shirts that say, "Assata Taught Me."  Looks like it's going down in Cleveland. Follow @FEARLESSnFREE and @LotusLightSage for more details pic.twitter.com/wVe6oKF7jn— Black Lives Matter (@Blklivesmatter) August 27, 2015 They're referring to infamous cop killer Assata Shakur, otherwise known as Joanne Chesimard, who shot and killed a...

In an ironic twist of events, the Pound Cake speech in which Bill Cosby famously (or, perhaps, infamously) criticized the black family and black neighborhood for what he deemed unsavory behavior was used to open the comedian to public scrutiny surrounding sexual assault allegations against him.

A National Pulse review of White House Visitor Logs from November 2014 reveals a meeting in the White House Situation Room, chaired by then-Ebola Czar Ron Klain. The meeting appears to have been coordinated by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and included several high-level U.S. government agency heads. (snip) These details may go some way to helping uncover the truth behind the National Institute for Health (NIH) and its alleged funding of gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The information puts Klain and Obama at the head of the table for the decision to green-light what Fauci has been ferociously...

The Czech Republic said on Monday Russia’s eviction of 20 Czech embassy employees in response to Prague’s expulsion of 18 Russian staff was a stronger than expected reaction and the government would consider further steps. Prague expelled the Russian diplomats on Saturday, saying it suspected that Russian intelligence had been involved in explosions at an ammunition depot in October and December 2014. Moscow has denied any of its agents were involved in the blast, which killed two people, branding the Czech stance a provocation. The row is the biggest between Prague and Moscow since the end of Soviet domination of...

President Obama on Thursday signed an executive order officially creating a “Task Force on 21st Century Policing,” a high-level group that will report directly to the president with recommendations on how to strengthen ties between law enforcement and the communities they serve. Mr. Obama first announced the task earlier this month on the heels of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City, where the deaths of black men at the hands of police officers further fractured ties between police departments and citizens. The task force will be chaired by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and Laurie Robinson, a professor...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed US Secretary of State John Kerry’s upcoming talks in Rome on Sunday, during opening remarks for his weekly Cabinet meeting. “Tomorrow I will leave for Rome to meet with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and US Secretary of State John Kerry,” he said. “I will tell them that Israel, to a large degree, stands as a solitary island against the waves of Islamic extremism that are washing over the entire Middle East.” “Until now, we have successfully withstood and repelled these attacks and now we also stand against the possibility of a diplomatic assault, i.e....

Russia has called on the United States to punish those responsible for the use of “inquisition-style” interrogation methods in the “global war on terror”, as revealed in the US Senate report on torture this week. Konstantin Dolgov, the human rights ombudsman of Russia’s foreign ministry, said the results of the “shocking” report were “the latest confirmation of gross, systemic human rights violations by the American authorities”. .... The Senate report showed that “prisoners in secret torture chambers were subjected to inhuman, humiliating treatment” including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and threats against suspects’ families in order to “beat confessions out of often...

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch announced Monday it uncovered 422 pages of FBI documents showing evidence of “cover up” discussion related to Hillary Clinton’s private email server with Platte River Networks. The newly uncovered documents also show Charles McCullough, the Intel Community Inspector General forwarding “concerns” about classified information found on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails. Judicial Watch also obtained Hillary Clinton’s 2009 classified information Non-Disclosure Agreement bearing her signature. Via Judicial Watch: FBI notes of an interview with an unidentified Platte River Networks official in February 2016 (almost a year after the Clinton email network was first revealed)...

Senate Democrats and President Obama have moved up to a whole new level of desperate. On Tuesday, Democrats in the Senate, who will lose control of the chamber in just three weeks, released a report focused on interrogation techniques — during the administration of George W. Bush. Yes, Mr. Obama is all about transparency, as long as it’s not about his administration. Despite warnings from top Obama officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, that release of the once-classified report would endanger Americans abroad, the president demanded that the United States explain its actions to — terrorists. In some ways,...

Only eight days prior to the horrendous slaughter of children and school staff in Pakistan, Barack Obama released Pakistani Taliban leader, the second in command of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This is the exact group claiming responsibility for today’s massacre in Peshawar, leaving 141 dead.

A.G. Schneiderman Announces Agreement with the Boy Scouts Of America to Allow Openly Gay Leaders Agreement Ensures That The Boy Scouts Provide Equal Opportunity For Gay Employees NationwideSchneiderman: Today’s Announcement Is A Watershed Moment For The Boy Scouts Of America NEW YORK – Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today announced a settlement with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to end its policy of excluding openly gay adults from serving as leaders in the organization. As part of the settlement, the BSA has agreed to eliminate the standard nationally, develop guidelines for implementing its new leadership standard, and ensure compliance...

Last month, Senator Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the executive summary of their final report investigating the CIA's controversial detention and interrogation program. As part of their study, the Democrats compiled twenty case studies, which were intended to address claims made by the CIA regarding the efficacy of its interrogations. One of those case studies focused on the identification and arrest of Ali Saleh Kahlah al Marri, who was freed from a US prison just days ago. Al Marri served as a "sleeper" operative for al Qaeda inside the US in 2001....

Remember the outrage when CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked to newspaperman Robert Novak? Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson, accused the Bush White House of doing it in retaliation, because her husband was a critic of its war policy. Wilson said it would be “fun to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.” Only one problem: Rove didn’t do it. The State Department’s Richard Armitage did. Now the worm has turned. Last week, Glenn Greenwald, the man who helped Edward Snowden get stolen American secrets published, wrote an article naming the woman — a...

The height of the Ebola outbreak in Africa, Europe, and the United States also coincided with a period in which the Obama administration came under the heaviest scrutiny over its response to that health crisis. Amid criticism, President Barack Obama rejected calls from lawmakers to impose some travel restrictions on the areas affected by Ebola, but he did say his administration was open to appointing one figure to oversee his government’s response to the crisis. Days later, Obama appointed Ron Klain, a long-time Democratic political operative and veteran of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns, to serve as...

Buried in the 189 pages of heavily redacted FBI witness interviews from the Hillary Clinton email investigation are details of yet another mystery -- about two missing “bankers boxes” filled with the former secretary of state’s emails. The interviews released earlier this month, known as 302s, also reveal the serious allegation that senior State Department official Patrick Kennedy applied pressure to subordinates to change the classified email codes so they would be shielded from Congress and the public. The details about the boxes are contained in five pages of the FBI file – with a staggering 111 redactions – that...

Who were those guys on Morning Joe today—two Feinstein staffers? Nope, they were Mark Halperin and Jeremy Peters, making like Dem aides in defending the report on the CIA that Dem Senator Diane Feinstein released yesterday. Halperin, head of Bloomberg Politics, had the chutzpah to claim that the report was not "political." Peters of the New York Times then chimed in to claim that in releasing the report the Senate conducted itself in a "sober" way. View the video here.