Free Republic

Many of the highest-ranking members of the Biden administration came from the same shadowy firm. It is a relatively new name among revolving-door power brokers in Washington D.C., which makes it all the more surprising. Founded in 2017, WestExec describes itself as a “diverse group of senior national security professionals with the most recent experience at the highest levels of the U.S. government. With deep knowledge and networks in the fields of defense, foreign policy, intelligence, cybersecurity, international economics, and strategic communications, our team has worked together around the White House Situation Room table, deliberating and deciding our nation’s foreign...

White House National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby explained that "the $6 billion given to Iran as part of a deal for a prisoner exchange was not ransom. We are just allowing Iran access to funds they couldn't access before. Furthermore, this money can only be used by them for specified discreet and targeted purposes. We are still holding Iran accountable for mistreating its own citizens, attacking shipping, supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and aiding and abetting terrorists." Former President Trump called this "a terrible deal. We gave them five very tough, smart terrorists that they desperately...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has already lost his invasion of Ukraine, which Blinken says he remains confident will come out victorious in the war. “And the reason that I remain very confident in Ukraine’s ultimate success, which is that they’re fighting for their country, for their future for their freedom, the Russians are not,” Blinken told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on “This Week.” “And keep in mind, Putin has already lost in what he was trying to achieve. He was trying to erase Ukraine from the map and its independence, subsume it into...

NEW DELHI/HANOI (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden visits Vietnam's capital city Sunday, where the two countries are expected to declare themselves strategic partners, as the United States seeks to push supply chains from China and both countries to try to counter Beijing's military and diplomatic influence in Asia. Biden will arrive at the Presidential Palace Sunday afternoon for a formal welcome from Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnam's most powerful leader, then journey to the Party headquarters where the two will meet and then give public remarks. The visit comes as trade and investment ties between the...

President Xi Jinping says he sees this initiative as "a fuller realization of the ideals of Japan's ill-fated 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.' Getting our continent out from under the boot heel of our white European overlords was the right objective, but its scope was too narrow and Japan was the wrong country to try to lead this development." "Prosperity shouldn't be just for Asians," Xi asserted. "It should be for everyone. Since a majority of the global population is Asian, it should be Asians who lead the world to a universal prosperity. China is the strongest Asian power and...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged $1 billion more for Ukraine while in Kyiv on Wednesday, saying the United States is “determined to continue to walk side-by-side” with the country in its ongoing war with Russia. “We are determined in the United States to continue to walk side-by-side with you,” Blinken told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a meeting on Monday. He added:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an unannounced visit to Kyiv on Wednesday morning and is expected to announce hundreds of millions of dollars of new spending in addition to the billions of extra dollars expected from Washington this week. The visit by Blinken comes just hours after the city experienced a Russian missile attack and is another physical expression of support for Ukraine from its Western backers which has seen dozens of world leaders travel by special train to the country from neighbouring Poland. As well as a wreath-laying and meeting senior ministers, Blinken is due to see...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday called for Russia to stop using food as a “weapon” in the war in Ukraine after Moscow suspended a deal to allow for the export of grain from the embattled country. Blinken told Good Morning America that the grain deal reached last year between Kyiv and Moscow allowed for the equivalent of 18 billion loaves of bread to get out to the world, but Russia “tore up that deal,” which many nations see as imperiling their food supply.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS” that Ukraine has retaken about 50% of the territory that Russia initially seized. Partial transcript as follows: ZAKARIA: Tell us what you can sense of what is going on in the counteroffensive that Ukraine is manage– attempting with Russia. The – so far, the reports seem to be it is very slow and very tough going.

The email account of the U.S. ambassador to China was hacked by Chinese hackers on a mission to attack several American and global targets in recent weeks, including another account at the State Department, according to reports.China-based hackers breached the email account of US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns as part of a recent targeted intelligence-gathering campaign, three US officials familiar with the matter told CNN.The hackers also accessed the email account of Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia, who recently traveled with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China, the people said.The State Department did...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that President Joe Biden’s decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine was needed because the nation would have been “defenseless” without it. Mitchell said, “You have talked about NATO’s unity. There is disagreement over the cluster munitions, clearly. More than 100 nations have banned them. We knew that this counteroffensive was coming. By many reports, it’s bogged down, it’s difficult, the Russians are dug in. So why didn’t we earlier supply enough conventional munitions so that they would have enough ammunition without resorting to these deadly weapons?”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will meet later this week with her Chinese counterparts to talk about major financial issues, making her the second top White House official to travel to the US’ great rival in a matter of weeks. Yellen’s Thursday-Sunday visit is meant to address “areas of concern” in the relationship between the world’s two largest economies as part of President Biden’s government-wide effort to re-engage with China and its president, Xi Jinping, the Treasury Department announced over the weekend. The visit of Yellen, 76, will hopefully “deepen and increase the frequency of communication between our countries moving forward...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken stood by President Biden’s off-the-cuff jab calling Chinese leader Xi Jinping a dictator. “The president speaks clearly, he speaks candidly. I’ve worked with him for more than 20 years and he speaks for all of us,” Blinken told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Biden roiled Beijing last week — roughly two days after Blinken’s state visit — by dubbing Xi a dictator during remarks Tuesday at a campaign fundraiser in California.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the armed rebellion led by the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin shows “cracks emerge” in Russian leadership. Blinken said, “We don’t have full information obviously and it is too soon to tell exactly where this is going to go. I suspect that this is a moving picture and we haven’t seen the last act yet. But we could say this, first of all, what we’ve seen is extraordinary. I think you’ve seen cracks emerge that weren’t there before. First, in having Prigozhin raise...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing is a ripple on the tide of President Joe Biden’s decisions not to promote dialogue or expert understanding. It has not interrupted the slide toward war. Under Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and, partly, Donald Trump, the two countries had institutionalized large-scale communications, especially through the strategic economic dialogue (Bush), strategic and economic dialogue (Obama), and comprehensive economic dialogue (Trump). Dozens of senior officials regularly met. Those dialogues could not resolve the great issues like Taiwan or intellectual property, but officials came to understand each other and render differences manageable. When...

President Joe Biden wanted to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the days after the U.S. military shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina — even saying publicly that he expected to do so — but his top national security advisers talked him out of it, according to two senior administration officials and one former senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions. Biden believed his relationship with Xi could help tamp down the newly escalated tensions with Beijing if he had the opportunity to speak directly and smooth things over, the officials said. But...

"..producing these precursors in China and then, in some cases, inadvertently sending it to the wrong people in Mexico or other places.."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the White House claim to be pleased by his trip to Beijing: President Xi Jinping actually met with him and agreed to continue talking. Thing is, it seems China will only deign to keep talking as long as Washington keeps appeasing it with actual concessions. Blinken didn’t even get his central ask, restoring military-to-military communication channels that Beijing cut last year but the Bidenites paint as the best way to avoid stumbling into a war. (Indeed, the Chinese Communists still won’t even meet with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.) Crucially, Washington had to bribe Beijing...

LOS ANGELES, CA—JUNE 19, 2023—Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. responded today to remarks by Secretary of State Antony Blinken last Friday in a speech in Finland, in which Blinken dismissed calls for a ceasefire in the conflict and called for further transfers of high-tech weaponry and aircraft to Ukraine. In response, Mr. Kennedy said: “Blinken’s speech highlights once again that the Biden Administration has no intention of ending this conflict peacefully. The plan, which members of the administration including Blinken have explicitly admitted on numerous occasions, is to use Ukraine to achieve the larger geopolitical goal of weakening...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview with NBC News on Monday that the U.S. has moved past its spy balloon dustup with China from earlier in 2023. Blinken told NBC’s Janis Mackey Frayer in Beijing “that chapter should be closed,” referring to the deterioration of relations that occurred after a Chinese spy balloon was caught flying across the United States in February. Blinken’s trip to China to meet with top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials had originally been scheduled around the same time the balloon was discovered, but was rescheduled as a result.