Free Republic

(Excerpts, suggest reading entire article) Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears is facing off against former Democrat Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger in Virginia’s closely watched 2025 gubernatorial race. While Spanberger appears to have the edge in the race so far, recent shocking revelations about the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative – “Russiagate” – could create some uncomfortable questions for Spanberger and perhaps give Sears an opportunity to portray her opponent as a dishonest, untrustworthy career bureaucrat. Before she was elected to Congress in 2018, Spanberger was a CIA operative. She has leaned heavily on that experience in her campaign, repeatedly describing...

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford (R-AR) have dropped a political nuke on Washington: Smoking-gun thumb drives containing unreviewed evidence in the Hillary Clinton email scandal have been sitting in an FBI office collecting dust for over SIX YEARS. The letter, addressed directly to FBI Director Kash Patel, demands that the unevaluated materials — which include sensitive intelligence, foreign communications, and damning evidence related to the Clinton Foundation and Barack Obama — be immediately reviewed and exposed to the American people. “Thumb drives containing unreviewed info on the Clinton...

The Steele Dossier continues to be gashed, as new documents reveal it was weaponized for a sinister plot reportedly hatched by Barack Obama. We knew the dossier was unverifiable when it was published in its entirety by Buzzfeed eons ago. It was later revealed to be a Clinton campaign-funded opposition research project. We know it was included in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, the report ordered by Obama, where it was forcibly included despite stringent objections from senior analysts, because it was of questionable value. Barack ordered the new ICA because the initial assessment was that Moscow’s reported election interference...

Several individuals connected to a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign plot to cast Donald Trump as a covert Kremlin collaborator are working in high-level jobs within the Biden administration—including at least two senior Biden appointees cited by Special Counsel John Durham in his “active (and) ongoing” criminal investigation of the scheme, according to recently filed court documents. Jake Sullivan, who now serves as Biden’s national security adviser, and Caroline Krass, a top lawyer at the Pentagon, were involved in efforts in 2016 and 2017 to advance the Clinton campaign’s false claims about Trump through the media and the federal government, documents...

Election 2018: As the midterms approach, former presidential contender and noted conservative commentator and businessman Herman Cain has stepped forward with a new plan to help save POTUS Donald Trump’s presidency along with the GOP congressional majority. “Last week we announced the formation of America Fighting Back PAC, with yours truly as chairman and primary spokesman,” he said on his website. “We felt it was necessary to take an initiative like this because the so-called ‘resistance’ to President Trump and his conservative policy agenda has become so unhinged and absurd,” he added.

The White House Office of the Press Secretary FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 29, 2019 PRESS BRIEFING BY SECRETARY OF STATE MIKE POMPEO AND SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MARK ESPER Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach, Florida 6:49 P.M. EST SECRETARY POMPEO: Good evening. Myself, with Secretary Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley, came here to Florida today to brief the President on the activities that have taken place in the Middle East over the course of the last 72 hours. I will leave to Secretary Esper to talk about the military activity, but I want to put it in the context...

Britain's largest misinformation monitor and "fact-checker" went into bankruptcy, according to a report in the Times of London last week. In the U.S., left-wing groups like NewsGuard and GDI have come under fierce criticism as de facto tools for censorship. Logically, founded in 2016 by Cambridge engineering graduate Lyric Jain, aimed to combat "harmful and manipulative content" following high-profile events like the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election. A pivotal misstep was its decision to work with India's Karnataka state government's fact-checking unit, a move criticized by the Editors Guild of India and others for potentially enabling state censorship...

Senegal has pulled the plug on Akon City, reclaiming almost all of the 55-hectare seaside concession after seven years of missed deadlines, fading crypto fortunes and a single half-finished welcome centre that now shares its lot with grazing goats. The $6 billion “real-life Wakanda” once promised luxury towers and flying-car parking is now the most expensive visitor kiosk on the continent. Ambitious Beginnings Announced with Marvel-level fanfare in 2018, Akon called it a “real-life Wakanda” inspired by Black Panther -the plan promised soaring hotels, a 5,000-bed hospital and streets that ran on renewable energy and Akoin. The project aimed to...

So long as the world is entertaining worst-case scenarios, the media does Americans no favors in omitting that Iran-Hezbollah has for years prepared to strike in their own hometowns. Weirdly absent from much of the professional speculation about where and how Iran will exact its promised “severe revenge” for the U.S. drone strike killing of Quds Force Gen. Qassem Suleimani is mention of the dead man’s highly suggestive hint. During a time of intense saber rattling between Iran and President Donald Trump in July 2018, Suleimani gave a speech during which he called out the American president: “Mr. Gambler, Trump!...

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge Wednesday threatened to throw out the guilty plea of a veteran U.S. narcotics agent who conspired with a Colombian cartel money launderer — an unexpected twist that could derail one of the most egregious misconduct cases in the history of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. U.S. District Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell was expected to sentence the disgraced agent, Jose I. Irizarry, but refused to do so over what she called a “totally unacceptable” legal dispute. “I have never seen anything like this,” Honeywell said, postponing the sentencing indefinitely. “I’m not even sure at...

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis urged President Trump to get congressional approval before the United States launched airstrikes against Syria last week, but was overruled by Mr. Trump, who wanted a rapid and dramatic response, military and administration officials said. Mr. Trump, the officials said, wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets with action, but was warned that an overly aggressive response risked igniting a wider war with Russia. Friday night’s limited strikes on three targets, which lasted under two minutes, were the compromise.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel has evidence that Iranian officials were "brazenly lying" when they said Iran wasn't pursuing nuclear weapons and that the Islamic republic is keeping an "atomic archive" at a secret compound. "Tonight I'm here to tell you one thing: Iran lied -- big time," Netanyahu said.

Anti-Israel protester Mahmoud Khalil lamented leaving behind some “incredible men” on Friday as he left a Louisiana detention facility, which he hopes becomes a museum to what he described as “America’s racist policies.” “I leave some incredible men behind me, over 1,000 people behind me, in a place where they shouldn’t have been in the first place,” Khalil told reporters after walking out of the La Salle Detention Facility in Jena, La. “I hope the next time that I will be in Jena is to actually visit this as a museum on America’s racist policies against immigrants,” the former Columbia...

The U.S Department of Energy has disclosed it shipped a large amount of weapon-grade plutonium to Nevada without the state’s knowledge. used to be test site still has craters Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons In November, Nevada filed a request in a Reno federal court for an injunction to block a shipment of plutonium from South Carolina to the Nevada National Security Site, which is often referred to by its former name, the Nevada Test Site. Turns out, the shipment had already happened.

A federal court is keeping documents justifying an FBI raid on a reportedly recognized whistleblower secret. Attorneys and whistleblower advocates say the court should disclose whether prosecutors told the judge that Dennis Cain was a whistleblower. A federal court refused to unseal government documents that permitted the FBI to raid the home of a reportedly recognized whistleblower who, according to his lawyer, delivered documents pertaining to the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One to a presidentially appointed watchdog. The U.S. District Court of Maryland’s Chief Magistrate Judge Beth P. Gesner, a Clinton appointee, also sealed her justification for keeping the documents...

The FBI raided the home of a whistleblower who was in possession of documents regarding the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One, according to the whistleblower’s lawyer, Michael Socarras. The whistleblower, Dennis Nathan Cain, had turned the documents over to the Department of Justice’s inspector general and both the House and Senate Intelligence committees, according to the lawyer. The FBI rummaged through Cain’s home for six hours, even after the whistleblower handed over the documents, according to Socarras.

Ho-hum, another day in Tehran, another incident of careless explosive-tank handling. Or so the Iranians want everyone to think, for now. Officials claim that “careless handling” of oxygen tanks triggered an explosion south of Tehran that killed two people in Baghershahr late yesterday. “Human error,” the Iranian regime called it: Two men have been killed in yet another Iran explosion, as officials blamed ‘human error’ for the blast.The explosion rocked the Sepahan Boresh factory in the city of Baqershahr, south of Tehran, in the early hours of Tuesday morning, according to state media.It was caused by ‘workers being negligent...

Archaeologists have cracked the code of 255 mysterious symbols carved into a rock in Canada more than 200 years ago. The writing was discovered in 2018 after a fallen tree revealed the square-shaped inscription near the town of Wawa, located about 155 miles from the nearest US border crossing in Michigan. Ryan Primrose, an archaeologist from the Ontario Center for Archaeological Education, has now revealed that the symbols form the Lord’s Prayer — a well-known Christian prayer — written in Swedish. He identified the characters as Nordic runes, part of an old alphabet once used in Sweden and other parts...

Saudi Arabia has executed a prominent Saudi journalist who was arrested seven years ago and convicted on terrorism and treason chargesA prominent Saudi journalist who was arrested in 2018 and convicted on terrorism and treason charges has been executed, the kingdom said. Activist groups maintain that the charges against him were trumped up. Turki Al-Jasser, who was in his late 40s, was put to death on Saturday, according to the official Saudi Press Agency, after the death penalty was upheld by the nation’s top court. Authorities had raided Al-Jasser's home in 2018, arresting him and seizing his computer and...

EXCLUSIVE — Under Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the state of Minnesota awarded over $2 million to an Islamic group that fundraises for a charity linked to an al Qaeda affiliate, according to funding records reviewed by the Washington Examiner. The Islamic Association of North America, the recipient of the state grants from 2019 to 2024, is fundraising after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year for Rahma Worldwide, a Michigan-based charity that says it is shipping humanitarian aid to Gaza, according to flyers. In a since-deleted Facebook post in October 2023, Rahma Worldwide President Shadi Zaza revealed his charity...