Free Republic

“Spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Attorney General William Barr told a Senate committee on Wednesday morning. Barr’s comments came in the context of potential Justice Department reviews of the Trump-Russia investigation and how it began in 2016. While it is important that the top law enforcement in the United States publicly acknowledged that the Obama administration and its intelligence agencies surveilled its domestic political opponents during the heat of a presidential election, it is what he said next that was most startling: that the CIA and other federal agencies in addition to the FBI may have...

[Big Snip] Democrats push back on Barr's allegation of "spying" Some Democrats criticized Barr's assertion that there was "spying" on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. "Mr. Barr knows how counter-intel investigations work. He knows there was ample evidence of Russian attempts to infiltrate the Trump campaign and that the FBI took lawful action to stop it. Giving a wink and a nod to this long-debunked "spying" conspiracy theory is irresponsible," Senate Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Mark Warner wrote on Twitter. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said that Barr's words were motivated by political bias. "This type of...

I am more and more coming around to the opinion of David Goldman and Michael Ledeen. The Russia hoax was aimed at Michael Flynn and his role as a Trump advisor. It was all about General Flynn. I think it began on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when Flynn changed the way we did intelligence against the likes of Zarqawi, bin Laden, the Taliban, and their allies. General Flynn saw that our battlefield intelligence was too slow. We collected information from the Middle East and sent it back to Washington, where men with stars on their shoulders and others...

[snip] But(as John discussed last night), there was one moment where something unexpected happened. Following a question from Congressman Robert Aderholt (R-Alabama), Barr calmly announced that he would be looking into the origins of the Russia investigation and (whether the entire premise of it was legitimate or not.) This seems to go deeper than a simple clean-up operation following a long investigation and it’s taking the story in a direction the Democrats definitely don’t want to go. He plans on expanding upon the previous work done by IG Horowitz. (From John Solomon writing at The Hill)Barr made clear Tuesday that...

The collusion lie will go down in history as one of the strangest distortions of reality to dominate the American political scene. For more than two years, the national establishment and news media were fixated on a “truth” that turned out to be false. In some ways, this national psychosis is reminiscent of the popular madness that would run through medieval societies from time to time. Think of the flagellants going from city to city beating themselves to exorcise their sins. Think of the madness that surrounded Friar Girolamo Savonarola when he ruled Florence from 1494 to 1498. In our...

Why did anonymous members of the intelligence community and top Obama administration officials like James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan so aggressively push the Russia collusion narrative for over two years in the midst of ongoing investigations? Who does that? Why have these Obama alumni been so conspicuously loud in their protestations against the president?

The end of the Special Counsel’s investigation into the non-existent conspiracy between President Donald Trump and the Russians has created an army of “Mueller Truthers,” demanding additional investigations. But Republicans are also demanding to know more, specifically how the FBI came to look into collusion, and what that tells us about the tension between America’s political and intelligence worlds. In Rudy Giuliani’s words “Why did this ever start in the first place?” The primordial ooze for all things Russia began in spring 2016 when the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, through a company called Fusion GPS, hired former MI6...

Robert Mueller’s investigation lasted nearly two years, but it will take far longer than that to restore faith in America’s justice system after this blatant attempt to turn the FBI and Department of Justice into political weapons.Attorney General William Barr summarized the core findings of the Mueller probe in a letter to Congress on Sunday, revealing that the FBI found no collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government."[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities," the Special Counsel concluded, as quoted by Barr....

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said Monday that he will probe alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) at the start of the Russia investigation, while calling on Attorney General Bill Barr to appoint a new special counsel to investigate the “other side of the story.”

There needs to be just a bit of reading between the lines here but make no mistake, what James Clapper is doing here is sending out a warning flare that if he’s going down there will be a lot of others he intends to take with him—including a certain former President of the United States. (Really pay attention to how much he emphasizes Obama’s personal involvement in the process from beginning to end.) This is a Deep State operative clearly rattled by what may soon be coming his way…

No reader of my previous comments on the subject would expect surprise from me about the verdict of the Mueller report. No one nominated by a major political party to the presidency of the United States would have dreamed of cooperating with any foreign power to influence a U.S. presidential election. edit With a pause to avoid illegal indiscretions, the attorney general has promised to comply with the wishes of Congress and the President to make the report public. Allegations of spuriously invoked secrecy won’t fly. Collusion and obstruction are dead, bad, pigeons. The president and his family have endured...

Former CIA Director John Brennan is not a fan of President Trump. Just glance at his Twitter page. Trump is "treasonous" and "not fit," according to the former intelligence official. Your cabal of unprincipled, unethical, dishonest, and sycophantic cronies is being methodically brought to justice. We all know where this trail leads. If your utter incompetence is not enough to run you out of office, your increasingly obvious political corruption surely will. https://t.co/S6DMeGICXZ — John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) January 26, 2019 It's highly unusual for a CIA director to be so vocally opposed to a sitting president, yet Brennan has...

The end of the Mueller investigation does not end the various congressional investigations into President Trump. Far from it. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told "Fox News Sunday" that his committee has a "broader mandate" than Special Counsel Robert Mueller did: "So we have to look into abuses of power, we have to look into obstructions of justice. And that we will do, and we'll see where it goes -- we'll see where the facts take us."

(Washington, DC) — Judicial Watch today announced it received 756 pages of newly uncovered emails that were among the materials former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to delete or destroy, several of which were classified and were transmitted over her unsecure, non-“state.gov” email system. Hillary Clinton repeatedly stated that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails. In response to a court order in another Judicial Watch case, she declared under penalty of perjury in 2015 that she had “directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com...

Attorney General William Barr has reported to Congress that special counsel Robert Mueller has cleared President Trump and his campaign team of claims of conspiring with Russia during the 2016 election. This is more than an exoneration. It’s a searing indictment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as a reminder of the need to know the story behind the bureau’s corrosive investigation.

(snip) Well. What is not said here (i.e., Mueller Report and Barr Summary)? There is no word about the role of then-President Obama and/or anyone in the Obama administration when it comes to the question of directing this entire effort to sabotage first the Trump campaign and then, when that failed, the Trump presidency itself. Who, exactly, did Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, and the entire list of Justice Department, CIA, and FBI officials work for, anyway? They worked for President Barack Obama. As did his first Secretary of State and presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton. As has...

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein rejected allegations made by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to CBS News that he and other officials discussed removing the president via the 25th amendment after he fired James Comey, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) statement. “As to the specific portions of this interview provided to the Department of Justice by 60 Minutes in advance, the Deputy Attorney General again rejects Mr. McCabe’s recitation of events as inaccurate and factually incorrect,” the statement said. There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a...

Responding to Michelle Obama memoir, in which she writes that she'll "never forgive" Donald Trump for his birther comments, Pres. Trump says he'll never forgive Barack Obama "for what he did to our United States military by not funding it properly." http://abcn.ws/2QvZ1qx

A suspicious package was sent to Eric Holder but it had the wrong address and was returned to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s office in Florida because that was the return label on the package, according to two law enforcement sources. The same return address was used for the Clinton and Obama suspicious packages. Separately, the George Soros packages is believed to have been placed in the mailbox, not mailed, according to a separate law enforcement source. Earlier today: A law enforcement source and a federal source briefed on the investigation into the Soros package said it had the return address...

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently asserted that Voter ID laws are “designed” to “intimidate” and “scare people away from the [political] process.” Lynch's perspective—which represents that of the Democratic Party as a whole—s founded on the premise that the incidence of voter fraud is extremely rare, and that initiatives like Voter ID requirements, which have been put in place in 34 states, are unnecessary and constitute a form of vote suppression. A related argument holds that some demographic subgroups of the U.S. population—particularly nonwhite and low-income people—are considerably less likely to hold government-issued forms of identification than are their...