Free Republic

The CIA stopped federal investigators from interviewing a key witness in their tax fraud investigation into President Biden’s son Hunter Biden.That’s the claim of a whistleblower who has provided the bombshell allegation to House lawmakers investigating the president’s involvement in his son’s business schemes.(snip)Two Justice Department officials assigned to the investigation were summoned to the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters ahead of their interview of Mr. Morris.“At that meeting, it was communicated that Mr. Morris could not be a witness during the investigation,” House lawmakers said in a letter sent Wednesday to CIA Director William J. Burns.The top Republicans on the...

Donald Trump was ordered to pay six-figure legal costs to ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele's company after suing over allegations which claimed he took part in 'sex parties' and gave bribes to Russian officials. The former US president brought legal action against Orbis Business Intelligence, a consultancy founded by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. Mr Steele, who previously ran the Secret Intelligence Service's Russia desk, was the author of the so-called Steele dossier, which included denied allegations that Mr Trump had been 'compromised' by the Russian security service, the FSB. At a hearing in London last year, the High Court was...

An NBC News review of available 2024 crime data from the cities targeted by Texas’ “Operation Lone Star,” which buses or flies migrants from the border to major cities in the interior — shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants. Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles. Crime has risen in Washington, D.C., but local officials do not attribute the spike to migrants.

When U.S. news outlets' lucrative peddling of Chinese propaganda was exposed in 2019 and 2020, it was a scandal. Human rights groups condemned the practice, and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal swore off Chinese Communist Party money. In the years since, however, a number of major U.S. newspapers and magazines have kept at it—accepting hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party in exchange for publishing content by China Daily, a state-owned English-language paper. China Daily's Foreign Agents Registration Act filings show that between October 2020 and October 2023, the CCP mouthpiece paid...

The CIA ‘illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies to target Trump advisors long before the summer of 2016.’ The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set off the Russian collusion hoax in 2016 when U.S. intelligence officials recruited foreign governments to spy on Democrats’ American political opponents. On Tuesday, Substack publications Public and Racket revealed new details about the origins of the Spygate hoax the U.S. federal government perpetrated on the Donald Trump presidential campaign. “Multiple credible sources tell Public and Racket that the United States Intelligence Community (IC), including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies to target Trump...

The Associated Press’s latest foreign donor wants to transform journalists into "community activists on climate change." The AP doesn’t seem interested in publicizing that. It’s the latest left-wing charity to fund the Associated Press, which says it is read by four billion people each day. Philanthropies that support packing the Supreme Court, defunding the police, and other left-wing initiatives have contributed millions of dollars to the AP in recent years, the Free Beacon reported. While the AP says it maintains editorial independence from its deep-pocketed donors, its climate reporting reflects many of the KR Foundation’s core beliefs. A recent AP...

Finding Bin Laden meant getting a source inside Al Qaeda at a level high enough to know his physical location. It took almost a decade for the CIA, with all its resources, to acquire such a source, even though this was probably the CIA’s single highest priority.More recently, in 2020, we found ourselves amidst a worldwide pandemic that originated in China. Despite attempts to characterize this as a natural outbreak of a disease found in bats, it has become abundantly clear that COVID-19 was the product of gain-of-function research in a bio lab in Wuhan, China. It has also become...

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” former Defense Secretary and former CIA Director Leon Panetta responded to questions on whether he regrets signing a letter that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation knowing what he knows now by stating, “I think that disinformation is involved here. I think Russian disinformation is part of what we’re seeing everywhere.” And “I don’t have any regrets about not trusting the Russians.” Host Bret Baier asked, [relevant exchange begins around 4:10] “I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about that letter you signed on to from former intelligence...

The Central Intelligence Agency offered to pay off analysts in order to bury their findings that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, new whistleblower testimony to Congress alleges. A senior-level CIA officer told House committee leaders that his agency tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans, according to a letter sent Tuesday to CIA Director William Burns. Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman...

WASHINGTON, July 21 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday said he had asked CIA Director William Burns to become a member of his cabinet, elevating one of his closest advisers on national security and foreign policy. . .... He "has made a significant contribution to national security decision-making, especially with regard to Russia and China" Glaser said.

<p>WikiLeaks says Samsung smart TVs were hacked to enable spying on consumers.</p><p>In a trove of documents released Tuesday, WikiLeaks included code that it says shows the CIA worked with U.K. intelligence officials to turn microphones in TVs into listening devices.</p>

Nested within intelligence agencies, they have fed a series of criminal leaks to a press corps that functions like an anti-Trump dirty tricks operation. Donald Trump has publicly speculated that former CIA director John Brennan is one of the criminal leakers. In January, he tweeted out, “Was this the leaker of Fake News?” Trump has now charged the Justice Department with investigating “low-life leakers” in the government. Former CIA analyst Tony Shaffer also suspects Brennan as one of the leakers. He said on Fox Business Network that the leaks which forced Michael Flynn out can be laid “squarely at the...

Bob Woodward backed Donald Trump in his ongoing feud against the U.S. intelligence community during a panel discussion on “Fox News Sunday.” “In Trump’s mind, he knows the old adage, ‘once a C.I.A. man, always a C.I.A. man,’ and no one came out and said those people shouldn’t be saying those things,” the Washington Post’s famed editor explained. “So act two is the briefing when this dossier is put out.” “I’ve lived in this world for 45 years where you get things and people make allegations,” he continued. “That is a garbage document.” “It never should have been presented as...

Former CIA directory (and part of the Benghazi cover-up) went to work for Ben Rhodes’ brother at CBS. David RHodes is the brother of ‘big Ben’ and president of CBS News. Need any other reasons why CBS has ignored the latest e-mail released about the Benghazi cover-up? Surely there isn’t a conflict of interest there right? Need another reason why Sharyl Attkinson left CBS?Michael Morell, who retired as deputy director of the CIA last summer, has joined CBS News as an intelligence, national security and counterterrorism contributor, the network announced this week. Morell has held various senior leadership positions during...

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials say the CIA has been delivering light machine guns and other small arms to Syrian rebels for several weeks, following President Barack Obama’s decision to arm the rebels. The agency has also arranged for the Syrian opposition to receive anti-tank weaponry like rocket-propelled grenades through a third party, presumably one of the Gulf countries that has been arming the rebels, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official and two former intelligence officials. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the classified program publicly.

The CIA has begun delivering weapons to rebels in Syria, ending months of delay in lethal aid that had been promised by the Obama administration, according to U.S. officials and Syrian figures. The shipments began streaming into the country over the past two weeks, along with separate deliveries by the State Department of vehicles and other gear — a flow of material that marks a major escalation of the U.S. role in Syria’s civil war. The arms shipments, which are limited to light weapons and other munitions that can be tracked, began arriving in Syria at a moment of heightened...

Suddenly it is imperative that Congress investigate details surrounding the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens. I've never felt that way before. But Jake Tapper's scoop changed my mind. To be clear, it isn't at all certain that the CIA was secretly funneling Libyan weapons to Syria, long before Congress "lifted its hurdles" on arming Syrian rebels. But if CNN's report is correct, the CIA is at minimum trying to hide something huge from Congress, something that CIA agents might otherwise want to reveal -- itself a reason for Congress to press hard for information. And if speculation about moving...

Illicit sales of uranium from Niger were being negotiated with five states including Iraq at least three years before the US-led invasion, senior European intelligence officials have told the Financial Times. Intelligence officers learned between 1999 and 2001 that uranium smugglers planned to sell illicitly mined Nigerien uranium ore, or refined ore called yellow cake, to Iran, Libya, China, North Korea and Iraq. These claims support the assertion made in the British government dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme in September 2002 that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from an African country, confirmed later as Niger. George...

The central figure in the CIA leak scandal, Valerie Plame, is now shopping a book proposal, The New York Times reports Thursday. Naturally, this comes by way of a leak--but this time not from Robert Novak or Scooter Libby. It comes from what he Times calls "two people familiar with the project." It adds: "Both people were granted anonymity because their publishing companies have signed nondisclosure agreements about the content of the proposal." No details were available about the content. Her husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote a book himself, published last year. Plame, who was outed as a CIA operative by...

....among the thousands of CIA employees is an influential number of Praetorians whose political corruption threatens the whole agency. As the Wall Street Journal said of the CIA in an editorial last Wednesday, "The serious and disturbing question is whether the rot is so deep that it is unfixable, and we ought to start all over and create a new intelligence agency." ........ Now, there is an alliance between the CIA praetorians and the media that works to hamper the President's policies. It doesn't scruple at leaking top-secret information to upset policies with which it disagrees. And it does so...