Free Republic

Despite efforts by the United Nations to impose isolating sanctions on North Korea in response to the country's continued development of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, trade between Russia and North Korea soared more than 85 percent in the first four months of the year.

Last Thursday was the second anniversary of the killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani; while the date passed virtually unnoticed in the United States, it was a major event in the Islamic Republic of Iran, featuring numerous threats of revenge from enraged Iranian leaders. One of these stood out from the others: Soleimani’s successor as Quds Force commander declared that the revenge would come from inside the United States. Iran’s state-controlled Tasnim News Agency reported that Brigadier General Esmaeil Qaani was “delivering a speech to a ceremony in Mashhad” for the anniversary...

As the story of Russian bounties on U.S. troops gained traction in the press, Liz Cheney seized the opportunity to undermine her own partyU.S. intelligence agencies debunked on Thursday what was treated as blockbuster election-year reporting last summer of an anonymously sourced story in The New York Times claiming the Kremlin placed bounties on American troops in Afghanistan.President Donald Trump, went the tale, deliberately downplayed the aggression to appease Russia and accelerate the timeline to withdraw U.S. forces. Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, currently number three in House leadership, was a primary purveyor of the fake news.“The United States intelligence community...

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) is preparing legislation to expand production of semiconductors only weeks after his family members purchased stock in semiconductor tool manufacturers. Wyden and two other Democrat senators released a statement to announce they were working on legislation to “expand production of critical technologies like semiconductors, batteries and solar components” in the name of “economic recovery.” ‘By building on tools with records of success, we can also boost manufacturing in communities that have been left behind. We are working on new legislation that would expand production of critical technologies like semiconductors, batteries and solar components....

The wreckage of TWA Flight 800 is set to be destroyed — nearly 25 years after the doomed aircraft crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. For the last two decades, the reconstructed Boeing 747 has been housed in a Virginia hangar and used by the National Transportation Safety Board as a training tool for accident investigators. But the federal agency on Monday announced it planned to decommission and destroy the wreckage, as its lease on the 30,000-square-foot Ashburn warehouse is set to expire.

The Biden administration is expected to re-designate the Houthis as a specially designated global terrorist (SDGT) entity amid continued attacks by the Yemen-based militia, a source familiar told CNN Tuesday. The administration removed the Houthis’ SDGT designation and de-listed it as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) in February 2021, after it was designated by the Trump administration in its final weeks. At the time, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the decision to remove the group’s designations was driven by concerns that it could imperil the ability to deliver crucial assistance to the people of Yemen. He said it was...

Ruben A. Verastigui was arrested last night for allegedly soliciting, possessing, and distributing extremely violent child pornography depicting infants being raped by adult men, police say. Prior to his arrest, Verastigui worked for a Republican policy group, and prior to this, worked for establishment Republicans in the Senate. The last tweet he sent before being arrested lauded the 11 Republican Congressmen who joined with Democrats to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee posts. “Between March 2020 and February 2021, an investigation revealed the suspect distributed, received, and possessed images of child pornography,” the D.C. Metropolitan Police said in...

WASHINGTON — Stanford University law professor Pamela Karlan, best known for her 2019 testimony in favor of impeaching then-President Donald Trump, quietly left the Justice Department this month as a conservative group ratcheted up attacks on an “unethical” arrangement in which she continued to earn nearly $1 million a year from Stanford while working for the government. Karlan joined the department on Feb. 8, 2021, shortly after President Biden’s inauguration, and served about 17 months as principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights before she departed on July 1 with little fanfare. Karlan’s role was slated to last until...

A mere 16 days after Joe Biden assumed the presidency, top officials in his Justice Department raised suspicion among career IRS agents by demanding a briefing on the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, according to evidence turned over to Congress that raises new questions about Attorney General Merrick Garland's claims of an interference-free probe. The Feb. 5, 2021 meeting between U.S. Attorney David Weiss' office in Delaware and a some of Biden's new assistant attorneys general in DOJ's Washington headquarters was chronicled in email exchanges between federal prosecutors and IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler. Weiss was leading the...

A top Senate Republican revealed Monday that an FBI informant said the Ukrainian oligarch involved in an alleged “criminal bribery scheme” with Joe and Hunter Biden also claimed to have 17 recordings of his conversations with the president and his son. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) revealed on the Senate floor that a largely unredacted version of the bureau’s FD-1023 confidential human source form said that “the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them — 17 such recordings.” The Republican senator said, “These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort...

The wife of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman has been arrested at Washington DC's Dulles Airport and charged with drug trafficking, with an informant accusing her of masterminding a $3 million plan to break him out of Mexico's jails. Emma Coronel Aispuro, a 31-year-old former beauty queen with both U.S. and Mexican citizenship, was detained on Monday in the first major cartel detention of Joe Biden's administration. She will appear in court on Tuesday before Judge Harvey G. Michael, charged with participating in a conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana for importation into the U.S.

Journalist Paul Sperry is not going quietly into the night — as we reported, he’s been calling out the effort by Rep. Adam Schiff’s office to silence him, to get him suspended from Twitter as well as to shut down his reporting about things that Schiff didn’t want to be exposed. In articles for RealClearInvestigations, I outed his anonymous “whistleblower” from the first impeachment of President Trump. It was Eric Ciaramella, a Democrat who had worked in the Trump White House as an Obama holdover. I also exposed Ciaramella’s prior relationship with one of Schiff’s top staffers on the impeachment...

Why the subterfuge? What might those texts reveal? Before and during Donald Trump’s time in the White House, powerful federal agencies aligned to sabotage his candidacy and then his presidency. Once-trusted entities such as the FBI, the intelligence community, and even parts of the U.S. military have burned their credibility by abandoning their missions to instead try to end Trump’s political career. Does this include the Secret Service? Unfortunately, the scandal over deleted texts related to January 6 demands the question. Last month, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that houses the Secret Service, officially...

Video has emerged of President Joe Biden's nominee to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova, saying she wants oil and gas companies to go 'bankrupt.' 'We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change, right?' the Soviet-born Omarova said in a clip that was shared online by the conservative-leaning American Accountability Foundation. She made the comments in February when appearing at the Jain Family Institute's Social Wealth Seminar, where she was making the case for a National Investment Authority, which would pull resources from the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve...

When Texas intervened to protect vulnerable children against transgender child mutilation, Google was one of the companies to sign a letter warning that preventing child abuse was "against the values of our companies." A recent lawsuit provides a small insight into just what the Big Tech giant’s “values” might be. Recently a former Google employer filed a lawsuit accusing the company of discrimination. “I was fired from my team there in February of 2021 because I raised alarm about a cult within Google, a group called the Fellowship of Friends. The group is well-documented: There are allegations of child abuse,...

The media is now using a report from a Defense contractor to establish the notion that there was no election fraud in the 2020 election. Here’s why they are wrong.A report is being passed around by Big Media that claims due to a study that there was no election fraud in the 2020 election.The Washington Times reported on it:A research nonprofit says it did an extensive examination of 2020 voting data in eight swing states and concluded “evidence of fraud or compromise was not found.”The highly technical 43-page study was produced by The MITRE Corp. and its National Election Security...

The D.C. National Guard’s commanding general was directed twice by Pentagon leadership to send in troops as violence engulfed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to a newly released investigation that appears to undercut the now-retired general’s claim that he would have responded to the riot more quickly if Trump administration officials had allowed. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy first notified Maj. Gen. William Walker by phone at 4:35 p.m. that Walker was authorized to send troops to Capitol Hill, and then called the general again “to reissue the deployment order” about 30 minutes after McCarthy “originally conveyed it,” an...

In the months before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an oligarch with Russian ties allegedly paid for locals to paint swastikas around Kharkiv, sources say. The effort, according to the sources, was part of a false flag operation to exaggerate Ukraine’s Nazi presence at a time when Putin was using it as a pretext for war. The alleged plot, according to multiple sources, involved Pavel Fuks, a real estate, banking, and oil magnate who, the sources claim, was co-opted by Russian security forces to participate. Through intermediaries, Fuks allegedly offered between $500 and $1,500 for street level criminals to vandalize...

Gordon Chang, expert on China and author of THE GREAT U.S. - CHINA TECH WAR, appeared on TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT Monday to speak further on the likelihood that Dong Jingwei, the 57-year-old head of counterintelligence for the Chinese Ministry of State Security, had flown from Hong Kong to California on February 10 and defected to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, bringing with him a treasure trove of secret information. Chang reiterated that he thinks the story is true. China is denying that this happened, of course, and both BEIJING DAILY and the Hong Kong publication SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST have...

We now know the name of the Chinese defector who has been working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for a few months and what his position within the Chinese military and government was, among other details.Matthew Brazil and Jeff Stein at Spy Talk reported on the “rumor,” and gave the name and background of the rumored defector:Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei (董经纬) defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.Dong is, or was, a longtime official...