Free Republic

George Aref Nader, who was a key witness in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, was arrested on child pornography charges Monday in New York, federal prosecutors announced Monday. Nader was arrested upon arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport for "transporting visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct." He previously pleaded guilty to the same charge in 1991, the Justice Department said. If convicted, he faces a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison and a maximum of 40 years.

AT A MINUTE before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.” The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their...

HILLARY'S SECRET WAR The real Ken Starr Posted: July 15, 20051:00 a.m. Eastern Editor's note: The following is an eye-opening look into New York Times best-selling author Richard Poe's revealing book, "Hillary's Secret War." Whereas Edward Klein's book on the New York senator reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal life, Poe's expose focuses on how Hillary Clinton and the left's "shadow government" have labored to put her and her far-left agenda in the White House by controlling the still-uncensored flow of real news to Americans – via the Internet.If that sounds too fantastic to be true, read on....

The Biden administration is taking seriously a string of recent threats and sanctions from Iran against Trump administration officials around the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 3, 2020 strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Iran’s actions may indicate Iran is plotting to assassinate the officials. On Saturday, Iran announced sanctions against 51 Americans, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley as well as several individuals who worked with the Trump administration, like former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and private military contractor Erik Prince. While sanctions typically yield economic punishment, current and former U.S. officials...

The FBI admitted this weekend to The New York Times that they had informants and operatives inside groups attending the January 6 rallies in Washington DC. The FBI finally admitted they infiltrated the Jan. 6 rallies with informants. In fact, one of the first “protesters” inside the US Capitol was an FBI informant. We all already knew this was happening as TGP reported back in June when we reported that the FBI was recruiting former service members to work for them infiltrating conservative groups attending the January 6 protests in Washington DC. And now the FBI is investigating the US...

Justice: Once again, Americans asked to put their lives on the line go on trial. Their crime was doing the very job we asked them to do in Iraq. Will they now be sacrificed for an ungrateful Iraq?On Tuesday, five members of a tactical support team of Blackwater Worldwide security guards in Iraq made their first appearance in U.S. District Court on charges ranging from voluntary manslaughter to the use of automatic weapons. The "crime" was protecting State Department personnel under fire in a war zone and firing back. On Sept. 16, 2007, 18 members of the "Raven 23" team...

The Justice Department intends to drop manslaughter and weapons charges against one of the Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting, prosecutors said in court documents Friday. The shooting in busy Nisoor Square left 17 Iraqis dead and inflamed anti-American sentiment abroad. It touched off a string of investigations that ultimately led the State Department to cancel the company's lucrative contract to guard diplomats in Iraq. Iraqis have said they're watching closely to see how the U.S. judicial system handles the five men accused of unleashing an unprovoked attack on civilians with machine guns and grenades....

Excerpt - Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case. ~ snip ~

On the second night of his visit to Kyiv, Erik Prince had a dinner date on his agenda. A few of his Ukrainian associates had arranged to meet the American billionaire at the Vodka Grill that evening, Feb. 23, 2020. The choice of venue seemed unusual. The Vodka Grill, a since-defunct nightclub next to a KFC franchise in a rough part of town, rarely saw patrons as powerful as Prince. As the party got seated inside a private karaoke room on the second floor, Igor Novikov, who was then a top adviser to Ukraine’s President, remembers feeling a little nervous....

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned Thursday night, blaming President Donald Trump for rhetoric that fueled the invasion of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump suppporters. DeVos is the second member of Trump’s cabinet to quit because of the riot Wednesday. Earlier Thursday, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said she would resign. Chao is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who refused to endorse Trump’s efforts to have Congress block the confirmation of Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential vote in the Electoral College. A number of other Trump administration officials have quit since Wednesday.

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the first-degree murder conviction of a former Blackwater security contractor, ordering a new trial for the man prosecutors say fired the first shots in the 2007 slayings of 14 Iraqi civilians at a crowded traffic circle in Baghdad.</p>

(Reuters) - A U.S. federal judge erred in dismissing all charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security guards accused of killing 14 Iraqi civilians in 2007, an appeals court ruled on Friday. The unanimous three-judge panel reinstated the charges and sent the case back to the judge for more proceedings, handing a victory to the U.S. Justice Department in a high-profile prosecution dating to 2008. The five guards were charged with 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempt to commit manslaughter and one weapons violation count over a Baghdad shooting that outraged Iraqis and strained ties between the two countries.

President Trump plans to assign a New York billionaire to lead a broad review of American intelligence agencies, according to administration officials, an effort that members of the intelligence community fear could curtail their independence and reduce the flow of information that contradicts the president’s worldview. The possible role for Stephen A. Feinberg, a co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, has met fierce resistance among intelligence officials already on edge because of the criticism the intelligence community has received from Mr. Trump during the campaign and since he became president. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump blamed leaks from the intelligence community for...

Right Side Broadcasting Network interviews and event speakers starts at 3 p.m. Trump is supposed to be on at about 7 p.m. Any FReepers at the rally should check in here!

Blackwater founder and former Navy SEAL Erik Prince told Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM that according to one of his “well-placed sources” in the New York Police Department, “The NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making” in the Anthony Weiner investigation, but received “huge pushback” from the Justice Department. Prince began by saying he had no problem believing reports that the FBI was highly confident multiple foreign agencies hacked Hillary Clinton’s private email server. “I mean, it’s not like the foreign intelligence agencies leave a thank-you note after they’ve hacked...

A National Rifle Association leader-turned-critic is meeting with New York investigators...and the NRA wants to be there. The powerful gun lobby asked a New York state judge Friday to let it in the meeting, saying it would be “severely prejudiced” if privileged information is divulged. NRA lawyers said they reviewed 899 pages of documents from North’s lawyers that were prepared for investigators and found several dozen examples of privileged information that had not been redacted. The NRA is facing several legal battles. The attorney general of Washington, D.C., has subpoenaed the group and its related charitable organization in a probe...

WASHINGTON — Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents. One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly...

A key witness in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election has been indicted with seven others on charges of conspiring to funnel more than $3 million in illegal foreign campaign contributions for that year’s elections, the Justice Department announced. George Nader, an adviser to the United Arab Emirates who acted as an intermediary for members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign seeking to forge contacts in the Middle East, was charged with conspiring to make conduit campaign contributions and related offenses in a 53-count indictment unsealed Tuesday in Washington, prosecutors said.

Robert Mueller says he was able to pinpoint security company executive Erik Prince’s precise location for several hours in January 2017 by matching his mobile phone signal to a cell site near Trump Tower in New York City. The special counsel’s report discloses the use of this investigative technique, by which police determine a suspect’s location via a cellphone’s GPS signal. The Prince narrative is one instance in unredacted sections of the report in which Mr. Mueller’s team explicitly discloses cellphone tracking. It raises the question of whether the FBI applied the process to other investigative subjects — a phone’s...

A Lebanese-American businessman and key “witness” in the special counsel’s investigation of Russian election interference was arrested and charged Monday with transporting a dozen images of child pornography and bestiality. George Nader, 60, was arrested Monday morning at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, according to federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia. Nader was involved in several key meetings at the center of the special counsel’s Trump/Russia investigation and his name shows up more than 100 times in the Mueller report. Throughout the investigation, Nader was represented by Kathryn Ruemmler, Obama’s long-term White House Counsel/fixer. The...