Free Republic

I nominate Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey, as the most inconsistent, mysterious, and therefore most unpredictable major politician on the world stage. His victory in a referendum last Sunday formally bestows him with near-dictatorial powers that leave Turkey, the Middle East, and beyond in a greater state of uncertainty than ever.Here are some of the puzzles:Mystery #1: Holding the referendum. The Turkish electorate voted on April 16 in a remarkable national plebiscite that dealt not with the usual topic – floating a bond or recalling a politician – but with fundamental constitutional changes affecting the very nature of their...

Exporting companies are using Chinese ships, planes, and trucks to transport dead Americans across the world for research purposes, according to a Thursday report from Reuters. A Hong Kong flagged cargo ship departed South Carolina in July carrying 6,000 pounds of human remains valued at $67,204. The container’s temperature was set to 5 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent the parts from spoiling. Relatives of the dead, meanwhile, did not realize their loved ones’ remains were being dismembered and sent to Europe and elsewhere, the report notes. Body brokers like Oregon-based MedCure rely on lax regulations to export heads, shoulders, knees and...

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has lost a confidence vote in parliament, removing him from office over a political scandal that brought down his coalition government. The no-confidence motion on May 27 was backed by lawmakers from the Social Democrats and the far-right Freedom Party, which was in coalition with Kurz until the chancellor ended their alliance last week. The political crisis was triggered last week by a 2017 video purportedly showing his vice chancellor, Heinz-Christian Strache, offering contracts to a potential Russian benefactor in exchange for political donations. Strache, with the Freedom Party, announced his resignation from the government on...

As previously reported, The Washington Post’s so-called conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin quit the newspaper and joined forces with Deep State hack Norm Eisen to start a media venture called “The Contrarian.” Last month the insufferable duo painfully described how they will cover everything from law, to culture to cooking in their new venture. “We do politics, we’re going to do law. But we know that any successful pro-democracy movement also has to be very vocal about culture. We’ll have a humor column, we’ll even have a cooking column, but we’re going to sprinkle in a little bit of pro-democracy flavor!”...

Across Hungary, George Soros’s aged face dominates bus stops, pedestrian pathways, and major intersections with the cryptic message, “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh.” Last laugh? A tag line explained the allusion: “99% reject illegal immigration.” The anti-Soros ad campaign conflates the controversial financier’s investments in leftwing political causes, including open borders, with the European Union’s ongoing effort to force Hungary and other EU countries to accept an annual quota of illegal immigrants. To redistribute hundreds of thousands of people who arrived in Italy and Greece in 2015, the EU assigned each member state a compulsory number: 1,294 for...

We knew that Democrats and swampy Republicans would never just sit back and allow Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to be confirmed as Attorney General for Donald Trump's second administration without a knock-down, drag-out fight, and the shenanigans in the effort to derail the nomination are ramping up. The New York Times reported Tuesday morning that 24 files with "damaging testimony" about Gaetz were obtained by a "hacker," but that so far the hacker has not publicly released any of the information. An unidentified hacker has gained access to a computer file shared in a secure link among lawyers whose clients...

At long last there is a chance that some kind of investigation will be held into the crimes committed by high level Democrats not just in the run up to the election, but also spreading further back to the “Russian Uranium” scandal. Judiciary Committee Republicans voted 16 to 13 to start gathering documents with a view to assigning a second Special Counsel. The focus of the investigation is to be Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch and James Comey, and there are a lot of questions that need answering. As Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), said “We have a lot more than a...

It’s no secret that President Trump’s Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci do not much care for each other — and this was BEFORE the The New Yorker piece was published on Thursday. After the November election President Trump asked Anothony Scaramucci to join his Administration. Scaramucci sold his company, SkyBridge Capital, in anticipation of joining President Trump in the White House but Reince Priebus reportedly blocked him from being appointed to a top job within the administration. Late last week President Trump appointed Scaramucci Communications Director despite continued objections from Reince Priebus. Scaramucci was understandably...

Anthony Scaramucci’s wife demanded a divorce three weeks ago, while she was nine months pregnant, sources told The Post. Deidre Scaramucci, 38, fed up with her three-year marriage to the new White House communication director, filed divorce papers on July 6 in Nassau County Supreme Court. On Monday, while Anthony was in West Virginia with President Trump for the Boy Scouts Jamboree, Deidre gave birth to the couple’s baby boy James. As of Friday evening, a full four days after delivery, her 53-year-old husband had yet to meet his newborn son, though an associate close to Anthony said he visited...

Lawyers for Cardinal George Pell are working to keep the 77-year-old Australian prelate out of jail pending an appeal of his convictions of sexually abusing minors. The highest ranking churchman to be charged with sexual offenses, Pell was convicted in December 2018, but details of his trial were under a publication ban until Tuesday. It has now been revealed that Pell was convicted of one charge of sexually penetrating a child under 16 and four counts of committing an indecent act on a child under 16, the BBC reported. Judge Peter Kidd lifted the ban after prosecutors dropped a second...

Hunter Biden used Joe Biden's appearance at a Sandy Hook memorial service to arrange a meeting between his dad and his Chinese business partners, new texts reveal. The messages come from a fresh tranche of documents released by Congress on Wednesday, given to them by IRS agents who investigated the First Son. On December 12, 2017 Hunter wrote on the Chinese messaging app WeChat to Liu Yadong, a top executive at Chinese oil giant CEFC, to arrange a meeting with his father. 'Can you meet this evening early,' Hunter wrote. 'My father will be in New York also and he...

McMaster had purged Derek Harvey, one of the NSC's best people on the Middle East, for trying to fire Obama holdovers. "In the late 1980s, Harvey traveled throughout Iraq by taxicab—500 miles, village to village—interviewing locals, sleeping on mud floors with a shower curtain for a door. He [was] full of questions, intensely curious and entirely nonthreatening. After the 1991 Gulf War, when the CIA was predicting the inevitable fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Harvey, then a major, insisted that Hussein would survive because members of the Sunni community knew their fortunes were tied to his. He was right....

The Justice Department will no longer seek the death penalty for two alleged MS-13 gang members accused of brutally killing several teenagers in Long Island, New York. In a letter to a federal judge, Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said Attorney General Merrick Garland directed prosecutors to withdraw notices of intention to seek the death penalty against brothers, Alexi Saenz and Jairo Saenz. "We write on behalf of the Government in the above-captioned matter, to provide an update to the Court with respect to the status of the death penalty deauthorization requests of...

Hunter Biden had sent that WhatsApp message on July 30, 2017, to Raymond Zhao, an associate of CEFC, the Chinese energy giant Hunter and James Biden began courting in 2016, while Joe Biden was vice president. After Joe Biden left office at the end of the Obama administration, according to one of Hunter Biden’s business partners, the Chinese communist-connected CEFC sent them a $3 million wire in March of 2017 as a “thank you” for the Bidens’ assistance in furthering their business interests. But CEFC had committed to investing another $10 million, which an email recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned...

A top official of the National Security Council was fired last month after arguing in a memo that President Trump is under sustained attack from subversive forces both within and outside the government who are deploying Maoist tactics to defeat President Trump’s nationalist agenda. His dismissal marks the latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him, and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking. Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who served in...

THE ALAVI FOUNDATION REGULARLY SENT FIVE-FIGURE DONATIONS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION. An Iranian foundation recently convicted as a front organization for the theocratic regime in Tehran donated five-figure sums to the infamous Clinton Foundation. Last week, a New York grand jury ruled that the government can seize a building majority-owned by the Alavi Foundation, agreeing with prosecutors that it is a front group for the mullahs in Tehran. The foundation used the Manhattan skyscraper to garner hundreds of millions in revenue so it could supply cash for its “charitable” endeavors inside the United States. The Alavi Foundation rarely donated to...

Andrew Weissmann, who served as one of Robert Mueller’s top deputies on the Russia probe, offered a Ukrainian oligarch a sweetheart deal in 2017 in exchange for information on President Donald Trump, according to a new report. In July 2017, Weissmann, who has been labeled Mueller’s “pit bull” because of his aggressive prosecutorial style, met with attorneys representing Dmitry Firtash, an energy magnate who was indicted on bribery charges in 2014, reports The Hill. The story cites sources familiar with Weissmann’s offer and defense memos written in meetings with the prosecutor. One of the defense memos said that Weissmann claimed...

An official who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation wrote in a recently released email that he or she was in possession of an iPhone belonging to Lisa Page three days after the former FBI lawyer’s last day on the job and at a time when the device was thought to have been lost. The special counsel’s office (SCO) and the Justice Department previously claimed to have no documents to show who handled Page’s iPhone after she turned it in on July 14, 2017, or who improperly wiped it two weeks later, before it could be checked for...

A former State Department official destroyed reports he received from former British spy Christopher Steele, according to a Senate report released on Tuesday. Jonathan Winer, who was Steele’s point of contact at the State Department, said that Steele asked him to destroy the records in January 2017, the same month that the Trump dossier became public. The Senate report also says that Winer initially denied that he arranged a meeting in October 2016 for Steele at the State Department. Winer corrected his statement in a follow-up interview after he was shown State Department visitor logs. A former State Department official...