Free Republic

Cybersecurity experts who held lucrative Pentagon and homeland security contracts and high-level security clearances are under investigation for potentially abusing their government privileges to aid a 2016 Clinton campaign plot to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia and trigger an FBI investigation of him and his campaign, according to several sources familiar with the work of Special Counsel John Durham. Durham is investigating whether they were involved in a scheme to misuse sensitive, nonpublic Internet data, which they had access to through their government contracts, to dredge up derogatory information on Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016...

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who has played a leading role in investigating the Trump-Ukraine scandal, is facing questions about his own connection to a Soviet-born businessman who has raised money for his campaign and whose company has received lucrative defense contracts from Ukraine's government. That man is Igor Pasternak, the founder and CEO of Worldwide Aeros Corp., which makes blimps for military and commercial customers. His business has also been involved in weapons manufacturing, working with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to produce a modified version of the M4 and M16 rifles, according to reports. ...

Congress' choice: award a military contract to a Kansas company, or to a government-run Brazilian outfit.The debt deal that President Obama signed on August 2 has sparked an important conversation about aggressive spending cuts in order to avoid a financial crisis. As part of that debt deal, Congress has formed the super committee to make recommendations to cut spending. The Department of Defense will surely have many decisions ahead of them as they are faced with the likely reality that defense programs may be subject to significant cuts from the committee. Recognizing the need for light air support, the Department...

The way we distribute our defense contracts needs serious overhaul, something a Washington Post article highlighted yesterday. I’ve written about this before and this particular instance focuses on John Murtha D-Pa and how he directed millions of dollars to companies for the development of military technology. The problems arose when: “A handful of defense firms were paid for work that was never done or not called for in the contracts. Some of the companies involved, based in Wyoming, Florida and Murtha’s district in Pennsylvania, had hidden owners, prosecutors allege; one was secretly owned by the Air Force official who helped...

WASHINGTON, July 2 — Exasperated by his party's failure to cut government spending, Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, is seeking cyberhelp. Mr. Coburn wants to create a public database, searchable over the Internet, that would list most government contracts and grants — exposing hundreds of billions in annual spending to instant desktop view. Type in "Halliburton," the military contractor, or "Sierra Club," the environmental group, for example, and a search engine would show all the federal money they receive. A search for the terms "Alaska" and "bridges" would expose a certain $315 million span to Gravina Island (population 50)...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Rep. Randy ''Duke'' Cunningham, R-Calif., told the House on Monday that he's been served with a document subpoena in Imperial County, Calif., and plans to comply with it. His announcement was read on the House floor by a congressional clerk as the House convened for the week. Cunningham spokesman Mark Olson said the subpoena, issued by Imperial County Superior Court, concerned constituent casework, but he declined to give further details. He said it was unrelated to a real estate transaction by Cunningham that federal authorities in California are investigating. A federal grand jury has reportedly convened in...

A rendering of a DD(X) destroyer. The Navy's new destroyer, the DD(X), is becoming so expensive that it may end up destroying itself. The Navy once wanted 24 of them. Now it thinks it can afford 5 - if that. The price of the Navy's new ships, driven upward by old-school politics and the rusty machinery of American shipbuilding, may scuttle the Pentagon's plans for a 21st-century armada of high-technology aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines. Shipbuilding costs "have spiraled out of control," the Navy's top admiral, Vern Clark, told Congress last week, rising so high that "we can't build...

El Segundo - Oct 22, 2003 Raytheon Company has been awarded a $37.4 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to define, analyze, design and demonstrate a Space-Based Radar (SBR) pre-prototype payload consisting of an electronic scanned array and an on-board processing component. The Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif., is the contracting agency. The developmental payload will be designed to meet the tactical/national user near real-time data needs for ground moving target indication (GMTI), synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and digital terrain elevation data. "By combining SAR, GMTI, and digital terrain elevation data, Space-Based Radar will be...

Watchdog Furious Over Government Contracts for “Suspended” MCI (Washington, D.C.)  Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today chastised federal agencies for granting waivers allowing MCI, formerly WorldCom, to continue to receive federal contracts, despite the fact the company was suspended by the General Services Administration (GSA) in July for lacking “the necessary internal controls and business ethics.” “This is the wrong message to send to corporate America,” CAGW President Tom Schatz said. “A company that committed the largest fraud in history ends up being punished on paper and not in reality. This contradictory action does not even amount to a...

<p>NEW ORLEANS -- Spooks, suits, generals and geeks gathered here this week to discuss a common goal: an all-seeing, omnipresent set of eyes in the sky to keep an unblinking view of the entire world at once.</p> <p>Representatives from the military, spy agencies and the defense industry met to find ways to put a new generation of spy satellites in orbit to aid in war, homeland security and spy craft. But talking about Big Brother vision in a hotel ballroom is proving to be a whole lot easier than executing it in orbit. Several of the satellite systems are wrapped in controversy, cost overruns or long delays.</p>

<p>WASHINGTON — While American troops work to stabilize troubled parts of the world and supporters at home wear the red, white and blue, U.S. lawmakers are trying to make sure the federal government buys more goods with the "Made in the USA" label.</p>