Free Republic

Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. While smaller in scale than other aspects of Spygate, the Yotaphone hoax represents an equally serious scandal because it involved both the mining of proprietary information and sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the apparent surveillance of Trump’s physical movements. When Special Counsel John Durham charged former...

A bigger scandal than Nellie Ohr’s crimes is how the FBI handled them. Instead of referring her for prosecution, they buried the evidence. Nellie Ohr isn’t a new name in the Russiagate saga, but newly released documents from Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office shatter the fiction that she was just a low-level researcher and reveal her as a key conduit between Clinton operatives, the DOJ, and the FBI. The documents also pull back the curtain on a darker truth: an internal black hole FBI system designed not just to restrict access to sensitive Russiagate documents, but to bury them so completely...

CHRISTOPHER Sign's apparent suicide was linked to the "Clinton crime syndicate" by Rep Lauren Boebert after the author who wrote a Bill exposé died. Police confirmed that they believe Sign, a local TV news anchor and former University of Alabama football player, died by suicide on Saturday. Sign, 45, broke a story about Bill Clinton meeting then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2016 while she was probing the private email server of the former president's wife. He later went on to pen a book about the secret meeting in 2019, Secret on the Tarmac. Boebert, a Colorado representative who has been...

The Trump administration is placing more restrictions on Russia's oil, gas and banking sectors by further restricting Russian access to U.S. payment systems, according to four people familiar with the plans. The Treasury Department on Wednesday let lapse a 60-day exemption put in place by the Biden administration in January that allowed specific energy transactions involving sanctioned Russian banks to continue. By letting the waiver lapse, the banks may no longer access U.S. payment systems to conduct major energy transactions. The Russian financial institutions that had been exempt from sanctions included Vnesheconombank, Bank Financial Corporation Otkritie, Sovcombank, Sberbank, VTB Bank,...

What’s left of the desiccated corpse of USAID has been absorbed into the State Department, with most of its workers laid off and its overseas missions shut down. The veneer of aid work has been obliterated, thanks to the work of President Donald J. Trump and DOGE, which uncovered a litany of wasteful spending. It was a primary driver of favors and pork for the political class. The gravy train derailed, and the vehicle for moving slush funds was deactivated. That’s why the Left freaked out about the end of USAID. The agency also played a part in the impeachment...

The curious case of Ray Epps stands as the most conspicuous and damning thorn in the side of the Regime’s official narrative of the January 6 Fedsurrection. It is fair to say if it hadn’t been for the intrepid reporting of Tucker Carlson and Revolver News (if the reader will permit a bit of self-contragulation) the burning questions surrounding Epps’ involvement in January 6 would not have received the national attention that they deserve. According to the transcript of the January 6th Committee’s interrogation of Epps, Epps himself singles out Revolver News along with representatives Massie, Gaetz, and others as...

Matt Taibbi, who authored the first release of the infamous “Twitter Files,” is back for round two. Or at least he’s back to provide a supplement to round one while round two is still being worked on. According to Taibbi, James Baker, who was general counsel for Twitter and a former top-level FBI official, inserted himself into the disclosure in an attempt to “vet” the files that were ultimately released. Elon Musk was not notified of Baker playing middle-man. As RedState reported, Baker was fired on Tuesday, and with Taibbi’s latest thread, we now know why. I normally try to...

After leaving the FBI, Twitter seemed eager to hire Baker as deputy general counsel. Ironically, Baker soon became involved in another alleged back channel with a presidential campaign. This time it was Twitter that maintained the non-public channels with the Biden campaign (and later the White House). Baker soon weighed in with the same signature bias that characterized the Russian investigations. As thousands of Twitter documents are released on the company’s infamous censorship program, much has been confirmed about the use of back channels by Biden and Democratic officials to silence critics on the social media platform. However, one familiar...

<p>David Kramer, a former State Department official and former director at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, filed a motion in federal court in Florida asking a judge for a protective order to block the public release of his deposition.</p>

A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks. The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Barack Obama and Trump. Now...

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...

ake Sullivan, already in the hot seat as President Joe Biden’s national security adviser amid the Afghanistan fallout, could find himself under further scrutiny for his 2016 role in promoting a Trump-Russia collusion claim at the heart of a possible indictment by special counsel John Durham. Durham is reportedly seeking a grand jury indictment against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at Perkins Coie, a Democratic-allied law firm linked to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier. According to the New York Times, the charge is said to be related to an alleged false statement to the FBI about a client's identity...

Special Counsel John Durham’s prosecution of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who served as Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source, will soon heat up—maybe as early as next week, if prosecutors are wise and return to the grand jury to obtain the documents the Hillary Clinton campaign wrongfully withheld based on attorney-client privilege. Those documents will likely reveal Fusion GPS peddled Danchenko’s lies directly to reporters. The jury’s acquittal of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann after less than a day of deliberations represented a setback to Durham’s three-year investigation of the Russia collusion hoax. Americans nonetheless learned much from the prosecution,...

The trial of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann is coming to an end [ZH: has now ended with Sussman’s acquittal] but rather than provide definitive answers to the origins of the Russiagate hoax, the trial has thrown up many new mysteries and unanswered questions.Special Counsel John Durham arrives at federal court in Washington on May 16, 2022. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)Durham’s overarching trial narrative was that the FBI was duped by Sussmann when he presented them with data purportedly tying Trump to the Kremlin via the Russian Alfa Bank. It may have been Durham’s only viable strategy given the fact he...

Former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook dropped a bombshell in court on Friday – testifying that Hillary Clinton approved the dissemination of allegations that then-candidate Donald Trump had a covert communications channel with a Russian bank, despite campaign officials not being “totally confident” in the rumor, according to Fox News. Mook, who was called to the stand by the defense team for former Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, was asked under cross-examination about the campaign’s understanding of the allegations against Trump, and whether the campaign planned to release it to the media. He told prosecutor Andrew DeFillippis that he was first...

WASHINGTON—Testimony that suggested the Donald Trump-Russia claims given to the FBI by a Hillary Clinton lawyer may have been fabricated will be struck from the record, along with mention of the email that triggered the testimony, a judge has ruled. On Tuesday, FBI agent Curtis Heide was presented with an email sent by Rodney Joffe to researchers with the Georgia Institute of Technology dated Sept. 14, 2016. Joffe discussed one of the white papers Michael Sussmann, a lawyer representing both Joffe and the Clinton campaign, later handed over to the FBI alleging a secret link between Trump and a Russian...

Tech executive Rodney Joffe fed the Alfa Bank hoax to the FBI via two distinct routes, testimony from yesterday’s proceedings in the Michael Sussmann criminal case indicates. This apparent circular reporting further cements Special Counsel John Durham’s Section 1001 false statement case against Sussmann by highlighting the significance of Sussmann’s alleged lie to former FBI General Counsel James Baker. Sussmann, who is in the middle of week two of his trial in a D.C. federal court, was charged last fall in a one-count indictment with lying to Baker when he provided Baker two flash drives and several “white papers” purporting...

WASHINGTON - The attorney who sparked an FBI investigation into since-debunked claims of a secret back channel between Donald Trump and a Russian bank billed Hillary Clinton’s campaign on the day he met with an FBI official. Attorney Michael Sussman’s expense reports were admitted into evidence in court Tuesday before the prosecution rested its case against the lawyer, who’s on trial for lying to the FBI during the meeting. Sussman had turned over “white papers” and other data on rumors of the since debunked tie between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank in 2016 while not revealing he was working...

Today we saw some important testimony in the Michael Sussmann case. First, Rodney Joffe, an FBI confidential human source, went around his FBI handler to relay dubious Alfa Bank information to a friend at the FBI. Second, there were indications that Joffe previously worked on Russia cyber security matters. This leads us to ask whether Joffe was in some way involved in the Trump/Russia investigation. More on that below. The testimony of retired FBI Agent Tom Grasso. Grasso, a witness for Sussmann, was a Special Agent with the FBI whose “primary responsibility involved investigating cyber crimes.” He was part of...

Today in the Michael Sussmann trial, we received additional information regarding the FBI leadership’s involvement in the opening – and execution – of the Alfa Bank/Trump investigation. This included FBI Headquarters not approving an FBI agent’s repeated requests to interview the sources of the Alfa Bank “materials.” But first we’ll start with the examination of Trisha Anderson. Anderson is currently the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. Back in 2016, she was an FBI deputy general counsel and reported directly to then-FBI general counsel James Baker. The purpose of her testimony was to prove-up her notes...