Free Republic

Going further than the Treasury Department's tacit support for debanking alleged "hate groups" after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, a State Department component that "strengthen[s] resilient democratic societies" developed a more sweeping plan for financially choking off disfavored narratives a month later. The U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a "Disinformation Primer" that appears to have been started in "late 2020," judging by a reference to the most up-to-date "social media initiatives" by Facebook and Twitter "to address disinformation and misinformation."It was still being written at least 10 days into the Biden administration, referring twice to the Jan. 31,...

BREAKING: Train carrying oil tankers collides with an 18-wheeler in central Texas, sparking a massive explosion - but the driver and conductor both survive without major injuries The crash occurred at around 6.45am Tuesday outside Cameron, Texas The train was carrying oil tankers that exploded on impact with the semi-truck The explosion sparked a massive fire that was still burning hours later Both the train conductor and the truck driver survived without major injuries By Megan Sheets For Dailymail.com Published: 10:50 EST, 23 February 2021 | Updated: 11:10 EST, 23 February 2021

DC Judge Beryl Howell loves to shoot off her mouth when it comes to the president and his supporters. Now she's playing the victim as Trump DOJ uses her own words, and actions, against her. As the manhunt for American citizens who participated in the events of January 6 accelerated in early 2021, the Biden Department of Justice took an unprecedented approach in the handling of political protesters: demand pretrial detention even for those charged with nonviolent offenses such as obstruction and conspiracy. A special prison for J6ers had been opened in the nation’s capital a few days after Jan...

In Feb 2021, then DC chief judge Beryl Howell created a special framework for judges to use in determining pre trial detention for J6ers—meaning keep them behind bars awaiting trial.. What became known as the “Chrestman factors” turned due process and standard bail rules on their head. Even nonviolent J6ers charged with conspiracy or obstruction with no criminal record could be held in a federal prison—often hauled cross country to the DC gulag—because as part of the “mob that attacked the Capitol,” they represented a danger to their community. A J6er’s release was not considered on a case by case...

Federal authorities won't explain why three men who participated in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, have mysteriously disappeared from the FBI's Capitol Violence Most Wanted list. One unidentified man wore an earpiece during the riot and was filmed carrying what appeared to be a concealed handgun on his left hip. The man was pictured on the FBI's most wanted list for over five months until he was removed without explanation on the same day the New York Times reported an FBI informant was at the Capitol on Jan. 6. A second unidentified man was filmed beating police officers...

A hacker recently tried to poison a Florida city’s water supply, police announced Monday. Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said someone remotely accessed a computer system that controls the City of Oldsmar’s water treatment facility on Friday. The unidentified person increased the amount of sodium hydroxide being distributed into the city’s drinking water to a “dangerous” level, Gualtieri said at a press conference. The chemical, also known as lye, is used in small amounts to control the water’s acidity — but can be deadly if ingested in large quantities. A worker at the plant immediately noticed the change and reversed...

Authorities say a hacker gained access to a Florida city’s water treatment plant in an unsuccessful attempt to fill the water supply with a potentially harmful chemicalA hacker remotely gained access to a Florida city’s water treatment plant in an unsuccessful attempt to fill the water supply with a potentially harmful chemical, authorities said. An unknown suspect breached a computer system for the city of Oldsmar's water treatment plant on Friday and briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said during a news conference Monday....

Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday the DOJ was launching a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s mishandling of top secret classified documents as Vice President of the United States. This comes after a second batch of classified documents was found in his Delaware garage next to his Corvette. Garland nominated Robert Hur to investigate Joe Biden’s criminal activity. Unlike the US president, the vice president does not have the right to take and store classified government documents. Robert Hur was a US Attorney for the District of Maryland from April 2018 to February 2021. Hur was a...

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...