Free Republic

Since last summer, Bob Dudley, the CEO of the British oil giant BP, has been cautioning that he expects oil prices to stay “lower for longer.” Now he believes he’s determined how much longer those prices may decline, and when they may start rising again. “A low point could be in the first quarter [of 2016],” Dudley said in an interview broadcast Saturday by the BBC. “But 2016’s third and fourth quarters could witness a more natural balance between supply and demand, after which stock levels could start to wear off.”

A series of text messages released Wednesday reveal that former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok was in contact with reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post regarding stories they published about the FBI’s investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and President Trump’s campaign during the spring of 2017, according to a series of texts obtained by SaraACarter.com.The text messages suggest that Strzok, along with his paramour, former FBI Attorney Lisa Page, had been in contact with reporters from both newspapers. Strzok specifically mentioned two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer Michael Schmidt his text message to Page. Strzok...

President Obama on Thursday nominated a former CIA officer and longtime lawyer who examined missteps in U.S. intelligence to be the spy agency’s next inspector general, hoping to fill a position at the watchdog office that’s been vacant for more than a year. If confirmed by the Senate, Shirley Woodward would fill the role left empty since David Buckley stepped down from in January 2015, on the heels of a landmark determination that CIA officials had gained unauthorized access to Senate computer files. Lawmakers called the episode a potential violation of constitutional separation of powers, and the spat led to...

Pro-independence Texans weren’t the only ones energized by the vote by Brexit vote. The California secession movement has been riding a wave of interest since Thursday’s vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. The campaign has already gained a Brexit-inspired nickname: Calexit “We have a lot of people sending us messages and a lot of people want to find our online digital version of our independence referendum,” said Louis Marinelli, who heads the Yes California Independence Campaign. “We have a lot of people who have joined our Facebook page, a lot of people who are talking about...

CIA Involvement in the Creation of the Russia Hack and Seth Rich Cover-up is now the focus of Group requesting the truth behind Trump-Russia collusion sham. In June 2016, Ellen Nakashima, a Deep State favorite from the Washington Post, released a report that the Democrat National Committee (DNC) had been hacked by Russia. The firm that validated this was Crowdstrike and its President Shawn Henry confirmed the claims. In December 2016, Ms. Nakashima followed up her reporting with the outlandish claim that the CIA had determined that Russia hacked the DNC because Russia wanted Trump to win the election. Nakashima...

**SNIP** The dossier began as part of a conventional opposition research operation by a small Washington firm, Fusion GPS. During the early part of the campaign, Fusion was paid by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication funded by the billionaire Paul Singer, to scrutinize Mr. Trump, with the evident goal of uncovering dirt to help his Republican primary opponents. After Mr. Trump emerged as the likely nominee, Fusion kept working but turned to a new source of funding: the law firm representing the Clinton campaign, Perkins Coie. Noticing in May 2016 the Trump campaign’s unexpected affinity for Russia, Fusion...

Keith Ellison Supports BDS, Admires Louis Farrakhan. So Why Are Jewish Democrats Supporting Him for Chairman of the DNC? In late 1993 and early 1994, Keith Ellison and I were both deeply involved in politics and policy, he as a civil rights lawyer and radio talk-show host in Minnesota, and I as legal counsel to a United States senator. During that time, Louis Farrakhan’s national adviser, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, gave a speech at Kean College in New Jersey in which he attacked Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, and others in the most shocking and violent way. Here’s a sample of what Muhammad...

One of President Trump’s lawyers asked another one to lie about the extent of Mr. Trump’s business interests in Russia, according to Michael Cohen, one of the lawyers involved in the exchange. Cohen told Congress in testimony earlier this year that Jay Sekulow told him to say the president’s dealings on a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016, or before the GOP primary season kicked off. In fact, Mr. Trump’s team pursued the project through June of that year, according to investigators.

What scientists are calling a "game changer" for society has been discovered deep in Tanzania's Rift Valley: a massive helium gas field with enough of the precious commodity to fill more than 1.2 million MRI scanners, Phys.org reports. Besides the sheer amount of gas, the discovery is notable because it appears to be the first time that stores of helium have been purposely found (they're usually stumbled upon during oil and gas drilling). And the find, which will be presented Tuesday by Durham University PhD student Diveena Danabalan at a Japanese geochemistry conference, could help restock nearly depleted stockpiles. Researchers...

Evidence suggests our intelligence agencies launched the Russia-collusion hoax months before the Clinton campaign joined in full force.Tuesday’s explosive news — that long before the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community had asked foreign intel agencies to surveil 26 people connected to Donald Trump — raises the question of whether our intelligence community colluded with the Clinton campaign in these efforts. After all, it was then-Biden campaign adviser and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who “set in motion the events that led to” 51 former intel officials issuing the public statement that falsely framed...

What did Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Loretta Lynch, and James Comey know about Russia-collusion — and when did they know it? John Durham dropped a bombshell in his testimony today at House Oversight, which will go on for at least a couple of hours or more, but this part wasn’t the bombshell. In his special-counsel report, Durham had already revealed that CIA Director John Brennan briefed these four in August 2016 that Hillary Clinton planned to paint Donald Trump as linked to Russian intelligence, presumably to shift attention away from her own e-mail scandal.That briefing resulted in a “referral memorandum,”...

Our federal government paid for Russian disinformation to frame the president of the United States for colluding with Russia. ============================================================ The FBI put a contributor to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Donald Trump smear dossier on FBI payroll as a confidential human source after investigating Igor Danchenko for allegedly spying for the Russian government, revealed Special Counsel John Durham in a court filing unsealed by a Virginia federal court yesterday. The filing contains this bombshell and seven other significant details about the Democrat-led plot to use U.S. intelligence agencies to deny Americans the results of their choice for president in 2016....

The Alabama TV reporter whose biggest scoop was the widely questioned 2016 airport-tarmac meeting between former President Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch was found dead at the weekend. The Saturday morning death of Christopher Sign, 45, is being investigated as a suicide, Hoover police Lt. Keith Czeskleba told Alabama news outlets. Birmingham TV station WBMA, where Mr. Sign had worked as a news anchor since 2017, confirmed the death without specifying the cause. “Our deepest sympathy is shared with Christopher’s loving family and close friends. We have lost a revered colleague whose indelible imprint will serve forever as...

CTH always falls back upon timelines to see the larger motives, intents and operational objectives of participants.  No matter which entrance hole you follow down into the labyrinth – eventually you end up finding yourself in the same chamber, the treasury. Every motive seems to consistently boil down to money. Ideology without financing is as useful as a pancake to paddle a canoe. As such – extrapolating from, and adding to, a Breitbart Time Line: 1. June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is...

Today in the Michael Sussmann trial, we received additional information regarding the FBI leadership’s involvement in the opening – and execution – of the Alfa Bank/Trump investigation. This included FBI Headquarters not approving an FBI agent’s repeated requests to interview the sources of the Alfa Bank “materials.” But first we’ll start with the examination of Trisha Anderson. Anderson is currently the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. Back in 2016, she was an FBI deputy general counsel and reported directly to then-FBI general counsel James Baker. The purpose of her testimony was to prove-up her notes...

The “Clinton Body Count” is an urban legend where people claim that the Clintons have their enemies or associates who “know too much” murdered, but they make it look like a suicide. The term comes from a rather long list of friends, enemies, and associates of the Clintons who have been found dead from “apparent suicide.” If you go on Twitter the hashtag #ClintonBodyCount is very active and filled with all sorts of juicy tidbits and theories. While the #ClintonBodyCount is mostly a funny joke, like with all “jokes” there’s truth in it…why do so many of Clintons “associates” die?...

This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting. ...snip In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups...

It is impossible to evaluate events in Russia today without understanding the mysterious series of bombings in 1999 that killed 300 civilians and created the conditions for Vladimir Putin to become Russia’s dictator for life. The bombings changed the course of Russia’s post-Soviet history. They were blamed on the Chechens. In the wake of initial success, Russia launched a new invasion of Chechnya. Putin, who had just been appointed prime minister, was put in charge of the invasion and his popularity soared. Six months later, he was elected president. On July 14, 2016, I filed a request for documents on...

Last week saw the corrupt media spinning explosive revelations from Special Counsel John Durham’s office as a big ol’ nothingburger. Yet, as I explained on Friday, none of the narratives pushed by the Durham deniers countered the evidence in court filings showing that “enemies of Donald Trump surveilled the internet traffic at Trump Tower, at his New York City apartment building, and later at the executive office of the president of the United States, then fed disinformation about that traffic to intelligence agencies hoping to frame Trump as a Russia-connected stooge.” Although The New York Times, CNN, and other legacy...

Former FBI General Counsel James Baker will likely be called to testify in the case against former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann, who is charged with lying to advance the bureau’s Trump-Russia collusion probe.... ...Andrew deFilippis, an assistant counsel for Special Counsel John Durham, said during a virtual status conference Tuesday that they are planning to call Mr. Baker as a witness during the trial which could begin next spring, The Washington Examiner reported....