Free Republic

RussiaGate is now a complete dead letter — but ObamaGate is taking its place. Just how far did the then-president go to cripple his successor? It’s now clear the Obama-Comey FBI and Justice Department never had anything more substantial than the laughable fiction of the Steele dossier to justify the “counterintelligence” investigation of the Trump campaign. Yet incessant leaks from that supposedly confidential probe wound up consuming the Trump administration’s first months in office — followed by the Bob Mueller-led special counsel investigation that proved nearly the “total witch hunt” that President Trump dubbed it. Information released as the Justice...

An FBI agent's newly released testimony undercuts top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr's denial of a conflict of interest between his Trump-Russia efforts and his wife’s work for Fusion GPS, producer of the discredited Steele dossier. The agent, Michael Gaeta, told congressional probers that Ohr had pressed him to make sure the FBI was “doing something” with the dossier. According to Gaeta, Ohr pushed Steele's collection of memos alleging nefarious ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in part because Ohr’s wife Nellie worked for the same company that had hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele. Gaeta's testimony was released last...

When Attorney General William Barr stated "spying did occur" against the 2016 Trump campaign, most attention was focused on the FBI's surveillance of former junior foreign policy aide Carter Page. But the spying Barr was thinking of, and which he said may or may not have been legally authorized, is more likely to be that carried out by Stefan Halper, a former Republican operative and White House aide who became a foreign policy academic with close ties to both American and British intelligence. One could be forgiven for believing Halper was a creation of the spy novelist John Le Carré....

US Attorney General Bill Barr told Fox News host Laura Ingraham there was ‘no basis’ for the FBI’s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump. Recall, FBI counter-intel chief Peter Strzok opened a CI investigation into Trump’s campaign in July of 2016 dubbed ‘Crossfire Hurricane,’ based on bogus claims his camp was working with the Russians. Barr said what happened to Trump was one of the greatest travesties in American history. Even more alarming was the pattern of events after the campaign to sabotage Trump’s presidency. “I think what happened to him [Trump] was one of the greatest travesties in...

A board reviewing the status of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has decided against releasing a Saudi who U.S. authorities believe narrowly avoided becoming one of the hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. Lawyers for prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani asked the Periodic Review Board last month to send the prisoner to a rehabilitation center in Saudi Arabia for treatment of severe mental illness. The board, made up of representatives of six government agencies, turned down the request in a statement released Wednesday. …

[Subtitle: “I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests,” Browder writes.]The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways,...

Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen said that if Republican nominee Donald Trump becomes president and follows through on some of the things he’s said on the campaign trail, the U.S. could face a “civil military crisis, the like of which we’ve not seen in this country.” "When we swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, which is a document and a set of principles and it supports the rule of law, one of those is to ensure that we do not obey illegal orders," Allen told told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on "This Week."

Federal prosecutors in Washington are investigating a years-old leak of classified information about a Russian intelligence document, and they appear to be focusing on whether the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey illegally provided details to reporters, according to people familiar with the inquiry. The case is the second time the Justice Department has investigated leaks potentially involving Mr. Comey, a frequent target of President Trump, who has repeatedly called him a “leaker.” Mr. Trump recently suggested without evidence that Mr. Comey should be prosecuted for “unlawful conduct” and spend years in prison. The timing of the investigation could raise...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, December 3, 2019 California CEO and Seven Others Charged in Multi-Million Dollar Conduit Campaign Contribution Case Earlier today, an indictment was unsealed against the CEO of an online payment processing company, and seven others, charging them with conspiring to make and conceal conduit and excessive campaign contributions, and related offenses, during the U.S. presidential election in 2016 and thereafter.Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and Assistant Director in Charge Timothy R. Slater of the FBI’s Washington Field Office made the announcement.A federal...

A key witness in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election has been indicted with seven others on charges of conspiring to funnel more than $3 million in illegal foreign campaign contributions for that year’s elections, the Justice Department announced. George Nader, an adviser to the United Arab Emirates who acted as an intermediary for members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign seeking to forge contacts in the Middle East, was charged with conspiring to make conduit campaign contributions and related offenses in a 53-count indictment unsealed Tuesday in Washington, prosecutors said.

Last week I reported that Internet sleuths had winkled out the name of the spy/agent provocateur that Obama's intelligence officers had used on the Trump campaign. The New York Times and Washington Post, the Democrats' semi-official newspapers this week megaphoned the instigators, offering up their justifications without naming his name. Again, the name is Stefan Halper, who, as I wrote here last week, was paid a substantial sum by the Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment. If it was for this work – and it suspiciously looks like it because the payments were made in July and September of...

I know the origin of the Russian Collusion story from its inception in July 2015 (it did not start in July 2016: that is a cover-up), and I know something highly significant regarding the corruption of a (former) senior federal official. I know this because of some fishy interactions I had with the FBI from July 2015 until Spring of 2017, including some extremely fishy requests and reactions from them. I did not come forward until two months ago because, once the Russian story emerged as a national political story in late 2017, I began expecting investigators would come tap...

In February 2017, the Washington Post’s Miller had the lead byline on a story based on leaks of Trump’s conversations with Australia’s prime minister and Mexico’s president. Six months later, the Post published the entire transcripts of both conversations in another Miller story. It was through such national security correspondents that anti-Trump sources -- intelligence officials -- pushed leaks of classified information and other tidbits intended to damage Trump into the media. There it merged with other anti-Trump currents in nearly every corner of the press, where it blossomed into Russiagate. After a nearly two-year investigation, the special counsel found...

Fox News news analyst Ellen Ratner relayed information from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to Texas businessman Ed Butowsky regarding Seth Rich’s role in transferring emails to Wikileaks, according to an amended lawsuit that I filed this morning on behalf of Mr. Butowsky. Although Ms. Ratner appears on Fox News, she is by no means a Republican or a conservative, and her role in the Seth Rich saga (like that of journalist Sy Hersh) obliterates the Democratic narrative that right-wing zealots fabricated the story about Mr. Rich leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Rich, a DNC employee, was murdered...

First came the text messages between FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, which gave us a painful glimpse at potential political bias inside America’s most famous crime-fighting bureau. Now, a series of “Hi Honey” emails from Nellie Ohr to her high-ranking federal prosecutor-husband and his colleagues raise the prospect that Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research was being funneled into the Justice Department during the 2016 election through a back-door marital channel. It's a tale that raises questions of both conflict of interest and possible false testimony. Ohr has admitted to Congress that, during the 2016 presidential election, she worked for...

“The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice has provided oversight and recommendations for improvement of police services in a number of cities with consent decrees. This is one of the most effective ways to reduce discrimination in law enforcement and it needs to be beefed up and increased to cover as many of the 18,000-plus local law enforcement jurisdictions.” That was United Nations Rapporteur Maina Kai on July 27, a representative of the U.N. Human Rights Council, who on the tail-end of touring the U.S., endorsed a little-known and yet highly controversial practice by the Justice Department to...

The FBI released 34 pages of notes, known as “302s,” of its 2016 and 2017 interviews with Bruce Ohr, the DOJ official who met with the British dossier author Christopher Steele and opposition research firm Fusion GPS’s Glen Simpson. Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, when they were hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Convention. The FBI was sued by the watchdog group Judicial Watch to comply with their requests for access to the notes via Freedom of Information Act. Read the documents below:

[FULL TITLE] Halper student who invited Carter Page to Cambridge in 2016 introduced Mitt On Sunday morning, 28 July 2019, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) spoke with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News and emphasized a name to her: Steven Schrage, an American with a background in politics and government who organized the conference at Cambridge University in 2016 at which Carter Page met Stefan Halper. Nunes raised the name with Robert Mueller during Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. Nunes said that Steven Schrage (pronounced shrah-gee, with a hard “g”), had actually invited Page to attend the conference. Its dates...

Prominent Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson said Wednesday he is attending a meeting with President Obama designed to help mend frayed ties between law enforcement and the communities they serve. “We are at the @WhiteHouse right now for a 3-hour convening w/ President Obama re: the recent events in #BatonRouge & across the country,” Mckesson tweeted Wednesday. Mckesson wrote he will be joined by fellow activist Brittany Packnett and Minneapolis-based Black Lives Matter leader Mica Grimm. The president is sitting down with nearly three-dozen law enforcement officials, civil rights leaders, educators and local politicians at the White House in...

Judicial Watch today released two sets of heavily redacted State Department documents, 38 pages and 48 pages, showing classified information was researched and disseminated to multiple U.S. Senators by the Obama administration immediately prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The documents reveal that among those receiving the classified documents were Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Sen. Robert Corker (R-TN). Judicial Watch obtained the documents through a June 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the State Department after it failed to respond to a February 2018 request seeking records of the Obama State Department’s...