Free Republic

While the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC). The focus on AntAC — whose youthful street activists famously wore “Ukraine F*&k Corruption” T-shirts — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly diverted. The prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing directly from the U.S. Embassy...

Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, admitted in his recently published book he met two times on the same day with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who led the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Simpson said he met Veselnitskaya those two times the same day as the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting, seeing her in New York before and in D.C. after Veselnitskaya’s Manhattan confab with the top brass of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Simpson also admitted that present at a dinner he had with Veselnitskaya the same day as the Trump Tower meeting was Russian-born Washington lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, who...

Nine days after registering his presidential exploratory committee last November, Rudolph Giuliani appeared in Singapore to help a Las Vegas developer make a pitch for a $3.5 billion casino resort. Though the bid ultimately failed, and there was nothing illegal about the involvement, it drew Giuliani into a complex partnership with the family of a controversial Hong Kong billionaire who has ties to the regime of North Korea's Kim Jong Il and has been linked to international organized crime by the U.S. government. ... Giuliani's public involvement in the gaming bid began at a September 2006 news conference in Singapore...

The Qatar government in the mid-1990s invited al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his family to live in Qatar, the 9/11 commission found. Mr. Mohammed was given a job at the Qatar Ministry of Electricity and Water. At the time, Mr. Mohammed was under indictment in the Southern District of New York for his role in a plot to blow up U.S.-bound jetliners. He was also wanted for questioning in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1996, FBI agents arrived in Qatar to arrest Mr. Mohammed. But the Qataris resisted handing him over, and Mr. Mohammed...

How much exactly would it cost to get Rudy Giuliani to holster his overdone 9/11 sanctimony? The government for the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar might have a good idea. Following earlier reports that Giuliani was still getting paid by the consulting firm he created, Mary Jacoby of the Wall Street Journal sheds light on some potentially problematic sources of Giuliani's private income. Chief among them is Qatar, the U.S. ally that paid Giuliani Partners for "security advice" regarding their petroleum facilities. The article uncovers a "potential political pitfall" for Giuliani's candidacy and image given Qatar's spotty record in...

A partnership Rudy Giuliani forged with a wealthy diamond-trading family from Israel helped his effort to expand his fledgling consulting business in Japan, and generated more than $600,000 in speaking fees for the Republican presidential candidate. The former New York mayor's previously undisclosed relationship with the Sage Capital Growth -- a medium-size private equity firm associated with the diamond-trading Steinmetz family of Israel -- shows how money came his way after he earned international acclaim leading the city through the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It offers a peek at Mr. Giuliani's closely held five-year-old consulting business, New York-based Giuliani...

A release last week of texts showed that Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose memos regarding the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia are referred to as the Steele dossier, reached out to Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, through a Russian-linked Washington, D.C., lobbyist named Adam Waldman. Among Waldman’s clients is Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a text dated March 16, 2017, Waldman texted Warner, “Chris Steele asked me to call you.” In 2009, Waldman filed papers with the Department of Justice...

Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm behind the infamous “pee dossier” on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, was first hired by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to obtain damaging information on Paul Manafort — weeks before the firm hired him to produce his now-discredited, conspiracy-weaving dossier. The explosive admission was made by Fusion GSP co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch in the pair’s recently-released book — Crime in Progress — and highlighted in a Monday report by American Greatness. “Weeks before Trump tapped Manafort to run his campaign, Christopher Steele had hired Fusion for help investigating Manafort,” write Fritsch and...

he renewed focus on the Steele dossier are cementing the case that the special counsel probe served as a taxpayer-funded political hit on President Trump. In April, when the special counsel’s report on Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election was released to the public, a glaring omission quickly made clear indicating Robert Mueller was either incompetent or a political hack. As I wrote at the time: “Not once in the 448-page tome does Mueller mention an investigation into whether Russia interfered with the U.S. presidential election by feeding dossier author Christopher Steele misinformation.” Today’s release of Glenn Simpson and...

Much has been said and written about Christopher Steele’s authorship of the notorious document that alleges Russia-Trump collusion. According to Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS (who plead the Fifth and only spoke through his lawyers), Steele was hired by them in June 2016 to gather information about “links between Russia and [then-presidential candidate] Donald Trump.” Similar areas of interest for the Atkinson family. /sarc

Another day, another Deep State participant outed. ICIG Michael Atkinson altered the whistleblower form to allow for second-hand information, which allowed suspected Schiff whistleblower Eric Ciaramella to present a bogus accusation on the President. Atkinson also oversaw the FBI lovers who altered the FISA warrant. This will soon be reported in the DOJ IG’s FISA Abuse report. Today we point out that Atkinson’s wife is connected to Fusion GPS. What a mess! Last weekend we learned from another leak to the Washington Post, that an individual in Obama’s FBI altered documents that provided support for a FISA Warrant obtained to...

It’s a little like the proverbial child killing its parents and throwing itself on the mercy of the court because he's now an orphan, but, with the wheels of Barr-Durham-Horowitz justice inexorably turning on them, there are Fusion GPS founders, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, on a media book tour claiming they are the victims of right-wing vengeance for their role in orchestrating a criminal fraud upon the FISA court and a coup against a sitting president of the United States. Holy Michael Avenatti!

FULL TITLE: Fusion GPS founders 'horrified' Steele Dossier was published but say 'if you...tell fake stuff about us, we’re going to fire back'. The “Steele dossier” at the heart of the investigation into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia was never supposed to be seen by the public, according to those who commissioned it, who told ABC News they were “horrified” when it was published in full. “This is just not what we do,” said Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, while reflecting on the publication of the memos that made up the dossier. Simpson and Fusion GPS co-founder Peter...

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein reunited with a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer who worked with Fusion GPS and dossier author Christopher Steele to continue investigating the now-debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theory after President Donald Trump took office. **SNIP** Fusion GPS had hired Steele a year earlier on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC to investigate Trump’s possible links to Russia. Democrats paid Fusion GPS more than $1 million for that project. Fusion, which is based in Washington, D.C., paid Steele $170,000. A Washington-based attorney with links to Steele told the Daily Caller News Foundation in 2018 that Jones told him...

During her testimony, former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill revealed that she had a three-year working relationship with Christopher Steele, the former British spy contracted by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS to produce the infamous Steele Dossier, but doubted the accuracy of his dossier, according to a transcript published Friday. “He was my counterpart when I was the director, the national intelligence officer,” Hill told Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio). “When I had to do liaison meetings with the U.K., he was the person I had to meet with.” Hill said she worked directly with Steele from 2006 to 2009....

A Naples man is accused of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after an incident Friday outside a bank, where he told deputies he was half orangutan and needed to call the “Fusion Center” to ask about his monkey blood. Collier County sheriff’s deputies arrested 51-year-old Mark Loescher, of the 1100 block of Reserve Way Boulevard, outside the Wells Fargo Bank at 5094 Airport-Pulling Road N. A woman there said a man in a green car pulled out a gun after she told him his vehicle was smoking. Deputies said they responded to the bank shortly before 5 p.m. to...

With media reporting that U.S. Attorney John Durham has expanded the timeline and scope of his investigation into U.S. government and intelligence community activity during the 2016 election, there’s an interesting quote from NBC: …”Justice Department officials have said that Durham has found something significant, and that critics should be careful.”… The expanded investigative timeline is now into May 2017 when Mueller was appointed special counsel, and would mean all of the preceding (and surrounding) activity leading up to Mueller would be reviewed. With that carefully in mind…. During the 2016 effort to weaponize the institutions of government against the...

Book includes how Steele was commissioned to write dossier Robert Reich: Trump is an international mobster The former journalists Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch are to publish a book on Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia, including an account of how they commissioned the British ex-spy Christopher Steele to write his dossier on the future president. Crime in Progress: The Secret History of the Trump-Russia Investigation will be published in December by Penguin Random House in the US and UK. Simpson and Fritsch founded the Washington intelligence firm Fusion GPS. In summer 2015, it began investigating Trump and Moscow. It hired...

Apart from the sheer mass of the Clintons’ earnings, perhaps the most intriguing revelation contained in the release of the Clinton tax data last week was that Bill Clinton received a whopping $15 million advance in 2001 for what would become his autobiography, My Life. As even the New York Times noticed, this was significantly “larger than previously thought” — or, more exactly, than previously reported. For example, an August 7, 2001 article in the Times puts the figure vaguely at “over $10 million.” A Wall Street Journal report from the following day cites a more concrete figure of “close...

The co-founders of political research firm Fusion GPS plan to release a book next month on the "never-before-told inside story" about President Trump's relationship with Russia. The book, entitled "Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump," will tell the story of how Fusion GPS helped put together the infamous "Steele dossier," The Associated Press reported on Monday. Co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch's book, which is due out Nov. 26, is being called an " 'All the President's Men' for the Trump era" by publisher Penguin Random House. "After four years on...